The MPI Luxembourg is a leading research hub where the fundamental questions of procedural law are raised and discussed. This status is particularly so thanks to its overarching projects, such as the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (mpeipro.com), which maps international adjudication at large and continuously incorporates entries and new topics. The online Encyclopedia already consists of roughly 400 entries as of the end of 2021, with approximately 700 authors involved in the project. Publication is planned to continue at the steady pace of 150 additional articles per year to be completed by 2024. The other flagship project is ‘Comparative Procedural Law and Justice’ (CPLJ). CPLJ is envisaged as a comprehensive epistemic assessment of comparative civil procedural law and civil dispute resolution schemes in the contemporary world. It shall pave the way for epistemic research in the field for the years to come. Currently, more than 100 scholars from all over the world, together with a research team of the Institute, are exploring the present state of affairs and the future challenges facing this core research field. CPLJ will result in a multi-volume Compendium, which will be available online in 2025. The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) supports this project with a very generous grant.

The MPI Luxembourg aims to identify key trends and pressing questions arising in procedural law, so that these issues may be tackled from diverse perspectives and research methodologies. One such topic is the emergence of digital justice, touching upon themes such as online dispute resolution, the procedural dimensions of the interrelation between dispute resolution and information technology, and the procedural law and human rights aspects of artificial intelligence in dispute resolution and decision-making. A project which adopts this approach is a series of conferences on the impacts of digitalisation and automation on adjudication. The first conference on Open Justice was held in February 2018 and the proceedings were published in 2019. The second conference on Digital Justice - which was postponed due to Covid19 - will take place in 2022, and a third addressing Cyber Justice is planned for 2023.

The Institute’s research is not limited to procedural law as such. Instead, procedure is contextualised within the concerned fields of law. Thus the work of the Institute reflects the fact that disputes are seldom about procedure as such, but touch upon substantive issues, with procedural law contributing to shaping the outcome. The project ‘Representing the Absent’ tackles intergenerational justice in relation to past generations (procedural aspects of reparation), as well as future generations (procedural aspects of prevention), illustrating the fruitful contribution to be made to research by pluri-disciplinary (philosophy, sociology, law, political science, ethnology) comparative research approaches.

The constitution of the two Max Planck Fellowships – one focussing on the regime of administrative pecuniary and non-pecuniary sanctions in financial markets’ law and the other investigating the transitional justice and the alternative methods of dispute resolution – has further broadened the scope of research of the Institute.