Anne Röthel named Honorary Professor by the University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh has named Institute director Anne Röthel as an Honorary Professor. With this award, the leading British university recognizes her outstanding achievements as a scholar and also her work promoting research collaboration between the Edinburgh Law School and the Institute.
Röthel observed the beginning of her Honorary Professorship with an invitation to the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law, where she delivered the prestigeous W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture on 5 November 2026. The topic: “Adoption and the Power of Law: Lessons from a Comparative Study”. She opened by giving an overview of various legal concepts that underpin adoption in different legal traditions and outlining the major developments, dominant narratives, and current debates in legal scholarship about adoption. Based on that comparative foundation, she showed how adoption reflects different values in different legal systems, depending on the legal, social, and cultural context as well as on the practicalities of adoption.
The Edinburgh Law School is steeped in tradition and has long been connected with the Institute through a variety of research activities. The W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law commemorates the Glaswegian legal scholar William Adam Wilson, who taught at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 until 1994.
Professor Anne Röthel studied law and political science at the University of Cologne and the Universiteé de Clermont-Ferrand. She was awarded her Habilitation by the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2003. From 2004 to 2023, she held the Chair of Civil Law, European Law, and Private International Law at Bucerius Law School. She has been a Guest Professor at the Université Paris Panthéon-Assas annually since 2010 and has conducted research in Oxford and Kyoto. She became a director at the Institute in 2024. Among her scholarly responsibilities, she is co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht (FamRZ) and a member of the German Section of the International Commission of Jurists, the Working Group for Legal Studies and Contemporary History at the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz, and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. She is also a trustee of the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung. She has been the spokesperson for the legal scholars’ network Max Planck Law since October 2025. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Association of German Juristis in September 2026.
Image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law / Patrice Lange