The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in Global Perspective honours “exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year”.

Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín holds a Law degree from the Universidad de los Andes —Uniandes (Bogotá, Colombia) and a MA and PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute. During his master’s, he was awarded the Fondation Hans Wilsdorf scholarship and the 2020 Mariano Garcia Rubio Prize for best MA Mémoire (2018-2020). 

His doctoral dissertation was supervised by Andrea Bianchi and Carolyn Biltoft and was defended in 2024 before a committee including Fuad Zarbiyev as second reader & Samuel Moyn (Yale University) as external member. He is now a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow at New York University. 

According to ASLH, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919–1998),” constitutes a seminal contribution to both the history of international law and global legal history. By tracing what he designates as the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s move to institutions in the short twentieth century (1919–1998), Quiroga-Villamarín reconstructs the formation of international parliaments from interwar Geneva to the conclusion of the Cold War. Attending to architectural and material templates originating in Europe and their subsequent translations across continents, the dissertation spatializes history and historicizes space, shifting the perspective from figurative “architectures” to tangible built environments. The conceptual framework proves particularly innovative, foregrounding how architecture simultaneously mirrored and enabled aspirations of global order. Drawing on extensive archival research in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it situates its argument within a rigorous methodological apparatus and advances its findings in elegant and compelling prose.”