Ralf Christian Michaels

• Master of Laws
• Managing Director at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law

Der Berliner Senat lässt sich nicht beirren vom Scheitern der Antisemitismusklausel des Berliner Kultursenators Chialo für die Förderung von Kunst. Nun erwägt er, sein Zuwendungsrecht insgesamt so zu ändern, dass die Vergabe von Zuwendungen an bestimmte Auflagen und Auswahlkriterien geknüpft wird. Das Ziel, mit staatlichen Geldern nicht Antisemitis...

Diese Beurteilung wurde am 5. Dezember 2023 an die Fraktionsvorsitzenden, an die Mitglieder der Ausschüsse Inneres und Recht sowie an die Ausschussbüros der anderen beteiligten Ausschüsse des Bundestags versandt. Nachdem in der Presse über dieses Papier berichtet wurde, haben wir uns entschieden, sie zu veröffentlichen.

Is Choice of Law Biased? How Would we Know?

Fekete, Balázs: Paradigms in Modern European Comparative Law. A History. Oxford et al. 2021

El derecho comparado es una práctica común en los Estados latinoamericanos contemporáneos. Las cortes, los congresos, las administraciones, las firmas de abogados y los profesores de derecho de la región constantemente hacen derecho comparado. Este hacer se concreta de manera típica en alguna forma de trasplante jurídico. Las sentencias, las partes...

This thematic issue seeks to critically examine contemporary debates around the “rights of nature” from a legal perspective and from the viewpoint of the arts. The selection of texts, images, and works of art that coexist in this thematic issue aims to highlight and juxtapose different perspectives and contexts regarding this topic. In this sense,...

The suggestion that the new private law theory would have to stand the test of acceptance by the global legal community raises a question. Who is that “global legal community?” And does it go beyond Europe? Close reading demonstrates that the non-European world is present and hidden at the same time. It is present because much of the material prese...

There have been an increasing need for greater integration of many Asian economies, either within the confines of ASEAN or on a more geo-economically strategic scale including major Asian jurisdictions like China, Japan, and Korea. A number of key personalities within the regional legal fraternity have advanced views that such integration ought to...

Dekoloniale Rechtsvergleichung: Ein konzeptioneller Anfang.

Peter Mankowski *11.10.1966 †10.2.2022

Law is usually understood as an orderly, coherent system, but this volume shows that it is often better understood as an entangled web. Bringing together eminent contributors from law, political science, sociology, anthropology, history and political theory, it also suggests that entanglement has been characteristic of law for much of its history....

This Cambridge Companion explores the main senses of the term 'international arbitration'; including the arbitration of private commercial disputes, disputes between a State and a foreign investor, disputes between States and also between a State and its parts. It treats these various forms as being inter-related, if not always conceptually, then a...

Addressing some of the most perilous, controversial issues in international law and governance, this volume brings together legal scholars from diverse geographic, personal and scholarly perspectives. They reflect on the pervasive feeling of crisis in the world today and share their views on the possibilities and limits of the international legal a...

This book is a groundbreaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of re...

Countries vary greatly in the extent to which they make use of the UPICC for this purpose. Some countries refer to the UPICC a lot, others very rarely. The United States is in the latter category. The UPICC play a very subordinate role in its law. The number of court opinions referring to them is minuscule, even though both the UCC and the Contract...

Felz, Daniel: Das Alien Tort Statute. Rechtsprechung, dogmatische Entwicklung und deutsche Interessen. (Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2015/16.) - Berlin: Duncker +amp; Humblot 2017. 657 S. (Schriften zum Internationalen Recht. 219.) - Meyer, Inga: Der

Der Code des Kapitals und seiner Portabilität

This chapter studies Section 405 of the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law. According to Section 405, “courts in the United States may interpret federal statutory provisions to include other limitations on their applicability.” This rather vague and noncommittal phrase is found in a provision entitled “Reasonableness in Interpretation.” Th...

The Many Lives of Transnational Law - edited by Peer Zumbansen April 2020

The world is a mess. Populism, xenophobia, and islamophobia; misogyny and racism; the closing of borders against the neediest—the existential crisis of modernity calls for a firm response from ethics. Why, instead of engaging with these problems through traditional ethics, worry about private international law, that most technical of technical fiel...

The world is a mess. Populism, xenophobia, and islamophobia; misogyny and racism; the closing of borders against the neediest—the existential crisis of modernity calls for a firm response from ethics. Why, instead of engaging with these problems through traditional ethics, worry about private international law, that most technical of technical fiel...

When France and Belgium banned face veils in 2010 and 2011, they were the first European countries to do so in a comprehensive matter. Now Austria has its own ban, Denmark is on track to have one too, and several other countries are toying with the idea. Such bans are often considered incompatible with the rights of veil wearers (especially Muslim...

Is there an Asian identity of Asian law, comparable to European identity and therefore similarly useful as a justification for unification projects? If so, what does it look like? And if so, does this make Asia more like Europe, or less so? Or is this question itself already a mere European projection? This chapter tries to address such questions....

This article discusses the international and comparative aspects of the new Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws. The article makes two main arguments. First, it argues that there are legal and practical differences between international conflict-of-laws problems and domestic conflict-of-laws problems, and that the new Restatement should address b...

The British leave vote in the referendum on EU membership has important implications for how we think about law . The vote must be viewed as a manifestation of a globalized nationalism that we find in many EU member states and many other countries. As such, it is also a challenge of the idea of transnational law, forcefully introduced in Jessup’s b...

Law is plural. In all but the simplest situations multiple laws overlap—national laws, subnational laws, supranational laws, non-national laws. Our jurisprudential accounts of law have mostly not taken this in. When we speak of law, we use the singular. The plurality of laws is, at best an afterthought. This is a mistake. Plurality is built into th...

Some sixteen years ago, on the occasion one of many symposia on the possibility of a new Restatement on Conflict of Laws to replace the much-derided Second Restatement, Mathias Reimann suggested that a new Restatement should focus on the requirements of what he called “the international age.” Conflict of laws is increasingly international, he point...

Carl Georg von Wächter (1797-1880) was once considered 'one of the greatest German jurists of all times’, but was all but forgotten in the 20th century, despite an excellent dissertation on his work in private international law by Nikolaus Sandmann. In private international law, he is known mainly for his critique of earlier theories, in particular...

Joseph Story (1779-1845) was one of the greatest and most influential American lawyers of all time. Both as a Supreme Court Justice and as a professor at Harvard Law School, his work and thought were, and still are, of great importance. Today’s private international law would look different without him, both in the United States and in the rest of...

Introduction Is this law? “This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child...

Comparative law will not die in the 21st century, but nor can it remain unchanged. Comparative law as we have it today still retains its roots in 1900: it is focused on states, on positive law, and on a scientific approach. Comparative law in the age of transnationalism will have to transnationalize: it must move beyond the state, it must move beyo...

After twenty years of existence, it becomes apparent that the role actually played by the Unidroit Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) is quite different from the one originally intended. This article first presents nine surprising findings concerning the actual use of the PICC, as it can be assessed on the basis of published op...

Article 3 of the Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Contracts is the first quasi-legislative text on choice of law to allow explicitly for the choice of non-state law also before state courts. This paper, forthcoming in a Festschrift, puts the provision into a broader context, discusses their drafting history and particular issues i...

In this era of globalisation, different legal systems and structures no longer operate within their own jurisdictions. The effects of decisions, policies and political developments are having an increasingly wide-reaching impact. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the sphere of European Union law. This collection of essays contributes to the...

International Commercial Arbitration should be just about money. But its scholarship is full of invocations of dreams, visions, faith, utopia. These are not merely ornamental. Rather, they invite us to read the scholarship as utopian literature. Doing so yields unexpected insights into the state of globalised law, and the precarious place of arbitr...

The chapter provides an introduction into law and globalization for sociolegal studies. Instead of treating globalization as an external factor that impacts the law, globalization and law are here viewed as intertwined. I suggest that three types of globalization should be distinguished — globalization as empirical phenomenon, globalization as theo...

A completely denationalised law is of course a utopia. But it is a utopia not just in the broad sense of being unrealistic, at least for the present, and perhaps also for the future. No, it is a utopia in the very literal sense of the word. Recall what utopia means in Greek: no place. Delocalised arbitration, non-state law, is, quite literally, no-...

Law reformers like the World Bank sometimes suggest that optimal legal rules and institutions can be recognized and then be recommended for law reform in every country in the world. Comparative lawyers have long been skeptical of such views. They point out that both laws and social problems are context-specific. What works in one context may fail i...

The recent popularity of legal pluralism has now reached the area of European private law. In this paper Michaels scrutinizes the concepts of legal pluralism used by three of its most prominent proponents: Pierre Legrand, Jan Smits, and Thomas Wilhelmsson. He does not offer fully-fledged criticism of their theories (each of which are among the most...

French academics reacted to announcements about a possible future European civil code ten years ago in the way in which Americans reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 1940: first with shock, then with rearmament, finally with attempted counterattacks. Military metaphors abound. Yet the defense of the French Code Civil against a European c...

French academics reacted to announcements about a possible future European civil code ten years ago in the way in which Americans reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 1940: first with shock, then with rearmament, finally with attempted counterattacks. Military metaphors abound. Yet the defense of the French Code Civil against a European c...

This short reaction piece to an article by Emily Kadens asks why a long-refuted story of an alleged uniform medieval lex mercatoria is still being maintained. The answer is that the story serves not as an actual history but instead as a foundation myth. Attempts to falsify the myth with historical data are therefore futile: the myth derives its val...

Abstract not available

The decentralisation of competition law enforcement and the stimulation of private damages actions in the European Union go hand in hand with the increasingly international character of antitrust proceedings. As a consequence, there is an ever-growing need for clear and workable rules to co-ordinate cross-border actions, whether they are of a judic...

This essay was written for a forthcoming book on international antitrust litigation in Europe. It provides a comparative perspective on the U.S. approach to the jurisdictional and choice-of-law issues raised in international antitrust litigation. The chapter examines personal jurisdiction over foreign defendants involved in anticompetitive conduct,...

1. The private lawyer’s role is inseparably connected with the paradigms and doctrines of private law. This is so because the role played by private lawyers constitutes a large part of their understanding of the discipline. At the same time, the shared understanding of the discipline has necessary consequences for the roles played by lawyers in it....

This article, written on request for the centennial issue of Ius Commune Europaeum, connects the economic literature on legal origins (La Porta et al) and the World Bank's Doing Business reports with discussions in comparative law about the functional method. It finds that a number of parallels and similarities exist, and that much of the criticism...

This article comments on Thomas Schultz’s argument that, if we want to think of international arbitration as a separate legal order, then we should submit it to some of the usual criteria used to assess the normative quality of a normative system, in particular Lon Fuller’s take of the rule of law. This reply explores additional reflections on what...

The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment o...

Introduction The Empagran decision concerned a global price-fixing agreement between mostly European producers of certain vitamin products, resulting in some $7 billion in overcharge. Once the cartel was discovered, several types of law enforcement took place. One was public enforcement: the U.S. Department of Justice, the European Commission, and...

Debates over Europen private law frequently concern matters of ideology – how social or how liberal should it be – or of form – code versus common law – or of level of regulation – European level versus member state level. Underlying all these debates is a deeper one that is insufficiently recognized, that about the rationality of European private...

Written for an encyclopedia on European private law, this briefarticle first addresses the term restatements and then compares theU.S. Restatement of the law as prototype with different Europeanrestatements of the law in the area of private law.

We face an increasing number of problems that are essentially global in nature because they affect the world in its entirety: global cartels, climate change, crimes against humanity; to name a few. These problems require world courts, yet world courts in the institutional sense are largely lacking. Hence, domestic courts must function, effectively,...

Written for an encyclopedia on European private law, this briefarticle addresses term, purposes, methods and development ofcomparative law. Special attention is given to the role of comparativelaw in European private law studies, European law-making and Europeanadjudication.

Written for an encyclopedia on European private law, this briefarticle addresses the term legal culture, the relation between law andculture, the relevance of legal culture, legal culture in the nationaland European context, and criticism of the concept.

In this Essay, I offer three theses, all of which are critical. First, non‑state governance is conceptually unattractive; it is a concept that makes little sense. Second, non‑state governance is empirically unattractive; meaningful non‑state governance rarely exists. Third, meaningful non‑state governance is normatively unattractive; we would rarel...

In its Empagran decision in 2004, the US Supreme Court decided that purchasers on foreign markets could not invoke US antitrust law even against a global cartel that affects also the United States. The article, forthcoming in a volume dedicated to the history on international law in the US Supreme Court, presents three radically different readings...

Scholars in the US have become uninterested in conflict of laws, at least in the core issues that spurred the conflict of laws revolution, especially questions of method and areas of tort and contract law. Proposals for a new (third) Restatement have not yet led very far. By contrast, new interest comes from the fringes: special political questions...

Response to Julie de Coninck, The Functional Method of Comparative Law: Quo Vadis?, 74 Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht 318–350 (2010) in which De Coninck criticizes existing functionalist comparative law for what she perceives as lack of interest in empirical foundations.

One of the most pressing topics in current international law is fragmentation. Traditionally, most constructive attempts to deal with fragmentation have been based on analogies what one of us, in an earlier book, called "conflicts of norms" - those rules in domestic law that deal with conflicts of norms within one legal system. In this article, we...

1. The most talked-about purpose of the UNIDROIT Principles of International and Commercial Contracts (PICC) is their applicability as the law chosen by the parties. However, focusing on this purpose in isolation is erroneous. The PICC are not a good candidate for a chosen law – they are conceived not as a result of the exercise of freedom of contr...

The legal origins thesis -- the thesis that legal origin impacts economic growth and the common law is better for economic growth than the civil law -- has created hundreds of papers and citation numbers unheard of among comparative lawyers. The Doing Business reports -- cross-country comparisons including rankings on the attractiveness of differen...

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal g...

This introduction to our co-edited special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems addresses how interdisciplinary studies might contribute to the revitalization of the field of Conflict of Laws. The introduction surveys existing approaches to interdisciplinarity in conflict of laws - drawn primarily from economics, political science, anthropology a...

The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic lega...

Abstract not available

CICLOPs, the Center for International & Comparative Law Occasional Papers, could not be launched with a better issue than one dedicated to Duke Law's named lecture series in the field, the Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law. Herbert Bernstein was Duke's much-beloved professor of comparative law. The lecture series, esta...

In the spring of 2009, the Duke Law Center for International & Comparative Law launched an occasional paper series - CICLOPs. Prof. Michaels' foreword to the inaugural issue describes the project and the articles included in this issue that comprise the first six lectures in The Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law.

Professor Michael's chapter provides commentary on Preamble I of the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. Areas covered include purposes, legal nature and scope of the PICC; applicability by courts; use of the PICC for the purpose of interpretation and supplementation and as a model.