The people, issues and stories behind our research

His name comes up several times a day at the Institute. Named after him are The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law, which he founded; our largest auditorium, Ernst Rabel Hall; and the biennial Ernst Rabel Lecture series and associated festivities in his honour. In 1926, Ernst Rabel became the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law. Now called the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, the Institute is celebrating its centennial this year. Rabel was forced to resign in 1937 and soon emigrated to the United States, but he returned to Germany a few years after the war. Most of what we know about his life is from his output as a legal scholar.
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Turkey has a long history of various kinds of relationships with Europe, many of which go back to the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor state of Turkey. Today, Turkey is one of the European Union’s largest trading partners. It is also an EU candidate country. Turkish law is one of the most important foreign legal systems with which lawyers in Germany and across the EU regularly deal. However, as Biset Sena Güneş, head of the Centre of Expertise on Turkey at the Institute, points out, “The relevance of German and EU law in Turkey is equally significant.” Güneş’s research focuses on private international law, international civil procedural law, family and succession law, and international trade law in Turkey, Germany, and the EU, viewed from a comparative law perspective. more

Dr Anna-Maria Karl, LLM, studied law at LMU Munich and the University of Geneva and was a researcher at the Institute before she earned her doctoral degree at the University of Hamburg. She then earned an LLM at the University of Michigan Law School and completed several executive training programs, including at the University of Southern California and INSEAD. She has held various leadership positions in the automotive industry. Today she heads the HR Executives Practice Group at Kienbaum Consultants International. more

Why should children be returned to a war-torn country when they could stay somewhere safe? This is the question Iryna Dikovska poses in her recent article “Removal and Retention of Children in Times of War: The Hague Child Abduction Convention and the Case of Ukraine” in the Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law (RabelsZ). more

The stuff of corporate scandals – fraud, insolvency, and stock-market crashes – does not immediately smack of progress. But accounting scandals, financial implosions, and business malfeasance have actually been essential determinants of securities and capital market regulation from the very beginning, to the point that this entire body of law is said to comprise the history of attempts – often in response to public pressure following a major scandal – to institute reforms. A series of studies initiated by Institute director Holger Fleischer reckons with the legal fallout from the world’s great corporate scandals. more