Dr. Felix Steffek honoured with Max Hachenburg Memorial Prize
21.06.2008
Dr. Felix Steffek, Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, has received the award for his dissertation "Gläubigerschutz in der Kapitalgesellschaft - Krise und Insolvenz im englischen und deutschen Kapitalgesellschafts- und Insolvenzrecht" (Creditor Protection and the Corporation - Financial Crisis and Insolvency under English and German Company and Corporate Insolvency Law). The dissertation examines those questions facing courts, legislators, practitioners and scholars in connection with the recent use of English companies in Germany and the migration of German companies to England for restructuring purposes. Felix Steffek analyses English Company Law and Corporate Insolvency Law in the context of creditor protection and offers a functional comparison with German law. The work covers tests of insolvency, insolvency proceedings, directors' duties and liabilities, disqualification, company investigations, shareholder liability and avoidance of transactions. By systematically referring to statistical and empirical research, the honoured author shows that legal systems compared take different approaches in solving the tension between entrepreneurial freedom and creditor protection both from a technical and functional point of view.The law faculty of the University of Heidelberg has since 1996 hosted a biennial lecture series in memory of Dr. Dr. h.c. Max Hachenburg, legal scholar and attorney. In the context of this event an award bearing his name is conferred upon exceptional doctoral dissertations in the field of commercial and economic law prepared at one of the five law faculties in Baden-Württemberg.
As scholar and practitioner, Max Hachenburg greatly influenced corporate law in the final years of imperial Germany and during the Weimar Republic. His career and accomplishments exemplify the unity of scholarship and practice.