Tom Hick appointed assistant professor at IE Law School
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.
Dr Tom Hick attended university in Brussel and Leuven, completing coursework in French, English, and Dutch. He subsequently obtained his PhD from KU Leuven with a doctoral project titled A European Structure for ‘No-Contract Law’ in the 21st Century. In his thesis, he examines how Belgian, German, French, Dutch, and Italian law deal with the failure of contract negotiations. Building on this, he asks to what extent unequal power relations are taken into account in such situations. Given the absence of a corresponding legal rule, he proposes an obligation to conclude a contract in cases where contract negotiations or conclusions have failed due to an imbalance of power.
During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Private Governance (CePri) at the University of Copenhagen, at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, and at the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) in Rome. He was a member of the Ius Commune Research School, a member of the Grotius-Pothier research group in comparative law, and one of the founders of Blog Privaatrecht (privaatrecht.com). He is currently a member of the European Law Institute and the Society of European Contract Law.
From May 2024 to September 2026, he was a research fellow at the Institute, where he comparatively studied national and European contract law as well as theoretical issues in relation to social justice, sustainability, and power structures as arising both within and as a consequence of private law. In the summer of 2025 he served as a visiting professor at the Universidad Central de Chile, and in the spring of 2026 he was a visiting scholar at Kyoto University.
Image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law