“Writing a Dissertation” - Guest Post by Professor Christoph G. Paulus

It is an honour for me to welcome Professor Christoph G. Paulus, Professor of Law at the Humboldt University of Berlin, to my blog.

Christoph G. Paulus, now Emeritus Professor, has been a full professor of law at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 1994, holding a chair for civil law, civil procedure law, insolvency law and Roman law. Before that, he was teaching, inter alia, at the universities of Heidelberg and of Saarland. He studied law at the University of Munich and earned his LL.M. at the University of California, Berkeley.

As an expert primarily in insolvency law, Christoph has worked several times as a consultant for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Moreover, from 2006 through 2011, he worked as an adviser for the German delegation on the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law insolvency law sessions. He served as Dean of the Law Faculty of  Humboldt University between 2008-2010, and as Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Restructuring between 2009-2016. He has lectured worldwide and held guest professorships at various universities, inter alia at Brooklyn Law School in New York and Bocconi University in Milan. In addition, he is a member of various international institutions such as the American College of Bankruptcy and the International Insolvency Institute (of which he was a vice-president until summer 2017).

In his post below, Professor Paulus shares some excellent advice on how to write a dissertation, as well as on how to choose a dissertation topic. His advice equally applies to postgraduate dissertations and doctoral theses. I am sure you will enjoy reading it!

Writing a Dissertation 

Try to find your own topic (rather than receiving one from the supervisor) since it is your “baby” with which you will be dealing for quite a long time of thinking and writing. In the inevitable times of despair in the course of this process it gives you some comfort that it was you who selected the topic.

Then, try to convince your supervisor that dissertations are the place to be daring and to develop new ideas. That’s not always an easy task as many supervisors want to see in dissertations a confirmation of their pre-figurated opinions. However, stand firm and tell the supervisor that a dissertation is not a commentary for practical purposes or a case annotation for the benefit of practitioners. Dissertations are the literary genus which should be kept open for experimenting new ways and paths. 

Don’t start writing before you have understood every single issue so that you can explain it in plain words to your - non-lawyer - friend (for instance, a music historian or a sales person). Only when this person convincingly confirms that (s)he has understood what you mean you can be sure to have understood it yourself.

Law exists in and through language. Therefore, keep the language as a holy thing while writing. Every single word has a specific meaning and its positioning within a sentence shifts the meaning of that sentence. Write in a way that the reader can breathe with.

Even though it is painful. But once you have written the text, put is aside for a week or so and then re-read it. You will be surprised.