José María Cervelló Business Law Prize awarded to Antonia Sommerfeld and Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm
Senior research fellow at the Institute Antonia Sommerfeld and former visiting fellow at the Institute Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm have won the annual prize, a joint award of IE Law School and the international law firm Ontier. The award recognizes them for their paper “Circular Fashion and Legal Design: Weaving Circular Economy Threads into International Contracts”.
This year marks the eighteenth annual award of the José María Cervelló Business Law Prize dedicated to promoting legal study and research. The IE Law School in Madrid, one of the world’s leading law schools, is part of IE University, a private university founded in 2006; the commercial law firm Ontier, with headquarters in London, has branch offices in the US, Europe, and Latin America.
For this year’s competition, the sponsors called for work on challenges and issues in sustainability in fashion law within the international legal sphere. Ruiz Abou-Nigm and Sommerfeld analysed the circular economy in international supply chains, investigating the role of private international law to show why a holistic, circular notion of the law of contracts is required in the supply chain in order to create the necessary legal framework for the transition to a circular economy. Their winning paper demonstrates the potential of shifting the focus toward circularity and explores how national and regional legislators can craft regulations to promote it. The authors also point to the potential dangers of continuous adherence to linear economic notions in the fashion sector.
Dr Antonia Sommerfeld is a senior research fellow at the Institute and lecturer at the University of Hamburg. Part of her research focuses on aspects of sustainability in the circular economy in international commercial law. She studied law at the University of Hamburg and at the Université Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence. Her dissertation at the University of Hamburg, AGB-Reform und Rechtsflucht. Bedeutung der Rechtsflucht für die AGB-Reformdebatte im unternehmerischen Rechtsverkehr [Reform of the Law on Standard Form Contracts and Legal Flight. The Significance of Legal Flight for the German Reform Debate in Commercial Contracts], won the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung’s Werner von Melle Prize in 2021 as well as sponsorship from the Esche Schümann Commichau Foundation. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge and has lectured at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.
Professor Dr Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm is Chair of Private International Law at the University of Edinburgh. She is an expert in British, European, and Latin American private international law. Her research focuses primarily on the interaction between private international law and sustainable development, and international commercial dispute resolution including arbitration and mediation. Ruiz Abou-Nigm is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, President of the American Association of Private International Law (ASADIP), and a member of the Scientific Council of the European Association of Private International Law (EAPIL). She was a visiting fellow at the Institute from September 2021 until March 2022.
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