Julia Kraft

Dr. Julia Kraft studied law at the University of Passau, the Université de Genève (Switzerland) and the LMU Munich. Furthermore, she completed the LL.M. programme of the KU Leuven (Belgium). In 2005, she obtained her doctorate with a work on European company law at the University of Bayreuth. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Before her scientific activity, she acted as a civil court judge and a public prosecutor (Department for Economic Crime and Fight Against Corruption) and as a specialist advisor in the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (Department for European Company Law, Group and Conversion Law), Berlin.

Poverty in Private Law

Law is an important instrument of poverty policy, the policy field which covers both the protection against and the overcoming of poverty. This does not only apply to social law, but also to private law. The aim of poverty prevention has already become the motor of legislative initiatives under private law. In addition, legal policy has identified people at risk of poverty as a “special consumer group” with need for support. The project takes this development as a starting point to enquire about the legal position of people in need in the area of private law. This legal position is to be analysed and evaluated by means of a welfare economic approach for the definition of the individual well-being. In this process, the guiding principle will be the fact that the well-being of a person cannot be defined with a mere view to his/her income and assets, as these values are not desirable for their own sake.