Philipp Ceesay secures habilitation at Bucerius Law School

Philipp Ceesay, senior research fellow at the Institute, satisfied the final requirements of the habilitation process at Bucerius Law School on 7 July 2025. His professorial teaching qualification covers the fields of civil law, corporate law, civil procedure, and comparative law.

In his habilitation thesis, Ceesay examines the erosion and resilience of testamentary formalities in historical-comparative perspective. The work explores how form and formalism in the law of wills have developed since the enactment of modern legislation on wills in Germany, England, and the U.S. The analysis proceeds from the understanding that testamentary formalities and probate procedure are, by nature, interconnected regulatory issues. Specifically, the functioning of testamentary formalities becomes fully apparent only when also viewed from the perspective of how the validity of a will is assessed in court after the testator’s passing. Ceesay’s comparative analysis also sheds light on how the discourse on will formalities and formalism has qualitatively changed. Ultimately, these insights do not solely help us to better understand the resilience of testamentary formalities and formalism in German law; they also constitute the basis for exploring the future direction of the law of wills in our current digital age.

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Philipp Ceesay, LL.M. (Harvard) studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where he earned his doctoral degree in 2014. His dissertation, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, was awarded the dissertation prizes of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Thuringian Working Group on Corporate Law. From 2016 to 2017 he was a research assistant at the Institute, and after earning his masters degree in the USA, he became a research fellow in the working group of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Reinhard Zimmermann. During this time Ceesay taught at Bucerius Law School, and in the 2021/2022 winter semester he instructed the corporate law specialization course at the University of Jena. Presently, he is acting professor of private law at Leuphana University Lüneburg.