Prof. Dr. Knut Benjamin Pißler, M.A. (Sinologie)
Head of the Centre of Expertise on China and Korea
Sabbatical until September 2025
Main Fields of Research
Comparative law, Chinese and Korean civil and commercial law, especially securities regulations, contract law, condominium law and non-profit organizations law
Vita
Knut Benjamin Pißler has headed the China Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Private Law since 2002. He is also Professor of Chinese Law at the University of Göttingen, where he was appointed in 2017, and he has lectured at the University of Cologne since 2011.
Pißler completed degrees in law at the University of Würzburg and in law and sinology at the University of Hamburg. After passing the first state law examination in Hamburg in 1996, he received a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship for language studies and research at the University of Nanjing. Pißler passed the second state law examination in Hamburg in 2000. He then conducted doctoral research at the Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Nanjing until 2002 with support from a DAAD PhD scholarship.
In 2013 Pißler completed his post-doctoral thesis at the law faculty of the University of Göttingen. He was Visiting Professor of Sinology at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2014/2015 and Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York in October 2015 . In November 2017 he was a visiting lecturer on civil procedure law at the University of Nanjing.
Pißler is Vice President of the German-Chinese Jurists’ Association (DCJV), the co-editor of the “Schriften zum chinesischen Recht” series on Chinese law, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs and the Editorial Boards of the China-EU Law Journal and the German Journal of Chinese Law (Zeitschrift für Chinesisches Recht). He is also a founding member of the European China Law Studies Association (ECLS).