Current News

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. more

Ivan Sukhorukov is conducting comparative legal research in both a European and a global context. He is currently a PhD candidate at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania and at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc in France, and he has already obtained a double Master of Laws degree from both universities. He obtained his Bachelor of Law from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. From 1 July to 30 September 2026, he will be conducting research at the Institute as a Konrad Zweigert Fellow. more

The controversy surrounding surrogate motherhood has continued unabated and is now rippling through the scientific community as well. In this interview, Institute director Anne Röthel offers some guide posts to understanding the questions that German family law is faced with because of it in an international context. She also discusses the challenge for lawmakers and the potential role of legal scholarship. more

Organized annually by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in partnership with the Institute for Mittelstand and Family Firms at the HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration, the “Hamburg Conference: Law and Management of Family Firms” has since 2017 created an annual forum for international exchange in the fields of law and business management. A recently published conference volume is devoted to the topic of listed family businesses. more

Wilson Lui studied law in Hong Kong and Cambridge and linguistics at Oxford before becoming a doctoral candidate at Melbourne Law School. He has taught courses in Hong Kong and Melbourne, and is also a research fellow at the Centre for Private Law at the University of Hong Kong. In the context of an exchange program between Melbourne Law School and Max Planck Law, he conducted research on state immunity at the Institute in April and May 2026. more

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of reports in the business press about foreign corporations deploying AIs in leadership roles. In his dissertation, Karl Döding, senior research fellow at the Institute, explores whether the use of an AI on a corporate board would require changes to German corporate law, and if so, what those changes would have to be. more

The 60th issue of the Journal of Japanese Law / Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht (ZJapanR/J.Japan.L.), a publication of the Institute in cooperation with the German-Japanese Association of Jurists (DJJV), is dedicated to Jan Grotheer on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Grotheer co-founded the DJJV and was its long-time president. He is now the association’s honorary president. more