Sabine Müller-Mall: »Künftige Freiheit und die Gegenwart des Verbots«

“Future Freedom and the Presence of Prohibition” with Lothar Müller.

Struggles over the climate also play out along the lines of rights and prohibitions, specifically in relation to the temporal dimensions of freedom. The prohibition is politically stylized as the antagonist of present freedom, while the preservation of future freedom is understood as a legal imperative. The Federal Constitutional Court extends freedom temporally, into the future and back into the present. In doing so, it balances the possibilities of future exercise of freedom against present freedoms. When—as in the case of the climate—the future becomes finite, temporal aspects of the relationship between law and politics come to the fore.

How can legal forms incorporate future freedom? How can we situate questions of freedom in relation to temporal dimensions? And why do such questions arise precisely in the context of concrete prohibitions in the present?

SABINE MÜLLER-MALL: Legal philosopher; Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Center for Critical Computational Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include legal philosophy, constitutional theory, and constitutional law. She is currently conducting research in particular on legal normativity, the theory of judgment, and the relationship between law and aesthetics, as well as on fundamental legal and political questions arising from the use of computer-based technologies. In 2020, the volume “Freedom and Calculation: The Politics of Algorithms” was published by Reclam. Her most recent book, in which she examines the influence of court rulings on constitutional developments, was published in 2023 under the title “Constitutional Rulings: A Theory of Law.”

Overview of the lecture series

“Thou Shalt, Thou Shalt Not. Prohibitions and Commandments Between Religion, Law, and Politics”

Prohibitions and commandments are at the heart of religious and ethical conduct, stabilizing social orders, protecting against violence, and limiting the abuse of power. Rights, including fundamental rights, are secured through prohibitions. At the same time, prohibitions themselves are an expression of political, economic, and social power relations. Prohibiting others—or even oneself—from doing something means restricting freedom of action and self-realization. The fact that this repressive function of prohibitions and taboos has an inherent culture-forming dimension accounts for the unease that Sigmund Freud already attributed to culture at the beginning of the 20th century. The productive power of prohibitions can also be traced etymologically: as far back as Old Low German, the verb “to prohibit” [mnd. vorbēden] was closely related to the command, in the sense of an emphatic directive for action.

In the summer semester of 2026, the Mosse Lectures aim to shed light on the ambivalences of prohibitions from a historical and systematic perspective and to examine their relevance to contemporary social debates. For while criticism of prohibitions has seemed ubiquitous in many social spheres for some time now, and “breaking taboos” carries positive connotations for good reasons, prohibitions are experiencing a renaissance where they become instruments of crisis management. For instance, in the global discussions surrounding the necessity and legitimacy of a social media ban for children and adolescents. Or in current climate policy, which, under the banner of safeguarding intertemporal freedom, faces the task of readjusting the relationship between intergenerational justice and “prohibition culture” and discussing a current imperative for bans. Debates surrounding cancel culture, fake news, and digital personality rights also revolve around possibilities for prohibitive restrictions.

The Mosse Lectures bring together perspectives from philosophy, cultural studies, ethnology, and law to examine the conditions under which bans appear legitimate, their cultural prerequisites and political functions, and, not least, the power that is constituted in the act of banning.

Further events in this series:

– Adrian Daub: “‘Still,’ ‘No Longer,’ ‘Finally Again’: Collective Perception of Time and Discourses on Prohibition” | Thu, June 4, 2026

– Heike Behrend: “The Horrors of Wanting to Know: The Prohibition of Questions and the Questionability of Questions in Ethnographic Fieldwork” | Thu, June 11, 2026

– Jule Govrin: “Forbidden Bodies? Democratic Care and Bodily Self-Determination in Times of Authoritarian Austerity” | Thu, July 2, 2026