Current News

Anne Röthel, Director of the Institute, has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Deutscher Juristentag e. V. (Association of German Jurists). She thus joins the governing body of the organization responsible for Europe’s largest professional conference on legal policy. more

Ever since its founding as part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Institute has employed dedicated experts in the legal systems of certain countries. One of the first fellows to occupy one of these so-called “country desks” at the Institute was Karl Bünger, who joined the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Foreign and International Private Law in 1934 to study the civil and commercial law of China. Thus began Bünger’s pioneering career as a scholar and teacher of Chinese law. more

Tom Hick, former senior research fellow at the Institute, has been appointed assistant professor at IE Law School, where he will teach both comparative property law and introductory private law. IE Law School in Madrid is a part of IE University. Founded as a private university in 2006, it ranks among the world’s leading law schools. more

Ivan Sukhorukov is conducting comparative legal research in both a European and a global context. He is currently a PhD candidate at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania and at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc in France, and he has already obtained a double Master of Laws degree from both universities. He obtained his Bachelor of Law from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. From 1 July to 30 September 2026, he will be conducting research at the Institute as a Konrad Zweigert Fellow. more

The controversy surrounding surrogate motherhood has continued unabated and is now rippling through the scientific community as well. In this interview, Institute director Anne Röthel offers some guide posts to understanding the questions that German family law is faced with because of it in an international context. She also discusses the challenge for lawmakers and the potential role of legal scholarship. more

Organized annually by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in partnership with the Institute for Mittelstand and Family Firms at the HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration, the “Hamburg Conference: Law and Management of Family Firms” has since 2017 created an annual forum for international exchange in the fields of law and business management. A recently published conference volume is devoted to the topic of listed family businesses. more

Wilson Lui studied law in Hong Kong and Cambridge and linguistics at Oxford before becoming a doctoral candidate at Melbourne Law School. He has taught courses in Hong Kong and Melbourne, and is also a research fellow at the Centre for Private Law at the University of Hong Kong. In the context of an exchange program between Melbourne Law School and Max Planck Law, he conducted research on state immunity at the Institute in April and May 2026. more