Academic Translation
I have translated articles and commentaries in many academic specialties, including constitutional law, comparative law, law and economics, sociology, history, economics, criminology, and anthropology.
I have also translated three books from German into English, with two more on the way. You can find links to them and brief descriptions below.
Comparative Law
The standard work in German on comparative law, which had a worldwide impact even in the original language.
“The book does not read like a translation, but rather as if it had been written by a comparative law specialist whose mother tongue is English. The reason for this is the
commendable translation work of Andrew Hammel, who was for some time an assistant professor of ‘common law’ at the University of Düsseldorf. Hammel is an American lawyer and specialist translator. He translated this monumental work — in collaboration with Kischel — in such a way that it reads like an English original.”
— Jochen Zehthöfer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 September 2019
German Constitutional Law: Introduction, Cases, and Principles
This book represents an innovation in German legal scholarship. Standard “commentaries” on German constitutional law focus heavily on abstract doctrine. Prof. Dr. Voßkuhle, former President of the German Federal Constitutional Court, and Prof. Dr. Bumke, Professor at Bucerius Law School, take a different approach. Drawing on the example of American and British “casebooks”, they provide students with long excerpts from individual cases and from scholarly literature, enabling students to grasp how individual cases fit into the Court’s overall doctrinal approach. This has made their Casebook enormously popular with German law students. The familiar format will also allow English-language readers to study with the Court’s jurisprudence in a familiar format.
The Law of Development Cooperation
Development interventions are agreed by states and international organisations which administer public development funds of huge proportions. They have done so with debatable success, but, unlike the good governance of recipients, the rules applying to donors have hitherto received little scrutiny. This analysis of the normative structures and conceptual riddles of development co-operation argues that development co-operation is increasingly structured by legal rules and is therefore no longer merely a matter of politics, economics or ethics. By focusing on the rules of development co-operation, it puts forward a new perspective on the institutional law dealing with the process, instruments and organisation of this co-operation. Placing the law in its theoretical and political context, it provides the first comparative study on the laws of foreign aid as a central field of global public policy and asks how accountability, autonomy and human rights can be preserved while combating poverty.
Hans Kelsen: Biography of a Jurist
Hans Kelsen, creator of the ‘Pure Theory of Law’, is the foremost Austrian legal theorist of the twentieth century and the father of Austria’s constitution. This biography, by the Director of the Hans Kelsen Institute, will become the standard work when it is published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Otmar Binder translated the book; I acted as editor and consultant
Emergency Constitutional Law
One of the most fundamental questions facing legal theorists is how a liberal constitutional order should handle emergencies. Humboldt University Professor Anna-Bettina Kaiser explores the issue from an historical and philosophical perspective, showing how this question has engaged some of humanity’s most agile minds. She also explores the myriad ways in which courts and parliaments have tried to address the issue — and have often failed spectacularly. My translation will be published in late 2024.