Nina Dethloff is a Fellow of the Kolleg from April 2026 to March 2027.
Nina Dethloff is Chair of Civil Law, Private International Law, Comparative Law and European Private Law and Director of the Institute for German, European and International Family Law at the University of Bonn. She is a member of the New York Bar and has served as Ad-hoc-judge at the European Court of Human Rights. Throughout her academic life, her focus as a legal scholar has been on comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives of the law, in particular in family law. Nina Dethloff has been Director of the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘Law as Culture’ in Bonn. Currently she is Vice President and member of the Executive Council of the International Society of Family Law (ISFL) as well as member of the Expert Group of the Commission on European Family Law (CEFL) and of the Coordinating Group of the Family Law in Europe: Academic Network (FL-EUR). She has been elected to the Executive Board of the Association of German Jurists as well as to the German Science and Humanities Council. She has also served as a member of the Expert Commission for the 9th Family Report of the German Federal Government and was a member of the Board of the German Private Law Scholars, of the Council of the German Society of International Law as well as a member of the Children’s Rights Committee of the German Family Lawyers’ Association. She has also been elected a member of the American Law Institute and of the Academia Europaea where she has served as chair of the Law Section.
New Parenthood in Law – Same-sex parents, trans parents, and multiple parents in Europe and the US
The growing diversity of family forms is challenging the law throughout Europe and beyond to develop new concepts of parenthood. Traditionally, gender, sexuality, and reproduction have determined the concepts of family and parenthood in law. Nowadays, however, children are increasingly being born outside traditional family structures, such as by same-sex couples through sperm and egg donations or surrogacy. In some cases planned before conception, children grow up with only one parent or with more than two parents in rainbow or polyamorous families. Trans men give birth and trans women conceive children; non-binary people become parents. The aim of my project is to examine the law of new parenthood from a transatlantic comparative perspective. It focuses on same-sex, transgender, and multi-parent families. Non-traditional family forms have until recently gained legal recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. However, there are significant differences in the scope and nature of this recognition. Comparing the underlying principles and trajectories of development in Europe and the US allows us to comprehensively rethink parenthood in law, to include non-traditional family forms in a systematic way, and thus to achieve equal recognition for all—especially for children.
Monographs, books and edited volumes
N. Dethloff und K. Kaesling (eds.), Between Sexuality, Gender and Reproduction: On the Pluralisation of Family Forms, Intersentia, Cambridge 2023
N. Dethloff, Familienrecht [Family Law], 33rd ed., C.H.Beck, Munich 2022
N. Dethloff, Abstammung und Verantwortung: Elternschaft bei assistierter Reproduktion als Aufgabe der Rechtspolitik [Parentage and responsibility: parenthood in assisted reproduction as a task for legal policy], De Gruyter, Berlin 2017
Contributions to edited volumes
N. Dethloff, B. Novak and F. Leven, ‘The Way Ahead: Parent-Child Relationships, New Forms of Adult Relationships and Protection from Domestic Violence’, in: K. Boele-Woelki and M. Jänterä-Jareborg (eds.), What Family Law for Europe?, Intersentia, Cambridge 2025, pp. 81–98
N. Dethloff, K. Kaesling and C. Tiefenbach, ‘Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and Parentage: Family Law Lagging Behind’, in: M. Brinig (ed.), International Survey of Family Law 2020, Intersentia, Cambridge 2021, pp. 135–147
N. Dethloff, ‘Leihmutterschaft in rechtsvergleichender Perspektive [Surrogacy from a comparative law perspective]’, in: B. Ditzen and M.-P. Weller (eds.), Regulierung der Leihmutterschaft: Aktuelle Entwicklungen und interdisziplinäre Herausforderungen [Regulation of surrogacy: Current developments and interdisciplinary challenges], Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2018, pp. 55–67