Richard Buxbaum delivers 11th Ernst Rabel Lecture
18.11.2008
On 24 Nov. 2008, the internationally renowned German-American jurist Professor Richard Buxbaum (University of California at Berkeley) will deliver the 11th Ernst Rabel Lecture at the Max Planck Institute for Private Law. His address will compare corporate law and stock market law in Europe and the USA and will ask: "What would the Delaware of the European Community look like? - Comparative Aspects of Regulatory Competition in Company and Capital Market Law".The Ernst Rabel Lecture is an academic highpoint at the Max Planck Institute for Private Law. Occuring in alternating years, the lecture series honours the memory of the Institute's founder and first director, Ernst Rabel, one of the most internationally significant German legal scholars of the 20th century and the father of comparative law in Germany.
Richard Buxbaum was born to Jewish family in Germany which was later forced to emigrate to the USA in 1938. He is a professor at the University of California (Berkeley) and was for many years the dean of international and area studies. As early as 1964, he was granted lifetime tenure as a professor at Berkeley. He specialises in international economic law as well as corporate law. Richard Buxbaum was the long-time editor-in-chief of "The American Journal of Comparative Law". He is a recipient of the German Federal Cross of Merit (Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz).
The Ernst Rabel Lectures consider current and foundational topics which lie in areas of research comprising the work of Rabel and the Institute. The Institute's presentation of the ongoing lecture series is made possible through a foundation led by Frederick Karl Rabel (Bethesda, Maryland), son of Ernst Rabel, as well as the support of the Institute's alumni association, "Friends of the Hamburg Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law e.V.".
About Ernst Rabel
Ernst Rabel was born in 1874 in Vienna. He was a student of Ludwig Mitteis, under whom he completed both his doctorate and post-doctoral work (Habilitation). Rabel taught at the Universitites of Leipzig, Basel, Kiel, Göttingen, Munich und Berlin. With his monograph „Das Recht des Warenkaufs“ (The Law of the Sale of Goods), Rabel established himself as one of the pioneers in international comparative law. In 1926 he founded the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht in Berlin, now the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and he served as its first director. In 1937 Rabel was forced to resign his post as Institute director and subsequently emigrated to the USA in 1939. Ernst Rabel died in 1955 in Zurich.
About the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law is dedicated to performing foundational research in the areas of comparative, European and international private law, commercial law, business law and procedural law. It accomplishes its mission by methodically analyzing foreign legal systems and by comparing them both with German law and with each other. An important goal of the research performed at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg is to explore the possibilities of legal harmonization within Europe and worldwide. In view of increasing globalization this is a task of great academic and practical significance. At present, 146 individuals are employed at the Hamburg MPI.