Professor Ralf Michaels, LLM (Cantab.), Dr. iur. (Passau)

Profile

Prof. Michaels is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Global Law Professor at Queen Mary, and Professor of Law at Hamburg University. At Queen Mary, he is a member of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and teaches both in the undergraduate program (Global Legal Reasoning) and in the graduate program (Comparative Law Methodology). Previously, he was the Arthur Larson Professor of Law at Duke University, where he served on the law faculty for seventeen years. Michaels, who holds degress from the Universities of Passan and Cambridge, has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Panthéon/Assas (Paris II), Princeton, Pennsylvania, Toronto, Tel Aviv, and the London School of Economics, and a senior fellow at Harvard and Princeton, as well as the American Academy in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Private Law. Michaels is a Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, a member of the American Law Institute and the Comparative Law Associations of the United States, Germany, and France, amongst others.

Undergraduate Teaching

Global Legal Reasoning

Postgraduate Teaching

SOLM186 Comparative Law Methodology

Research

• A Concept of Laws: This research project aims at the formulation of a proper new understanding of global law which is one and many at the same time. Law is defined not by some objective criteria but instead is based on the recognition by other laws. This requires the conceptualization of so-called rules of external recognition as tertiary rules.
• Foundations of Private International Law: In this research project, private international law is expanded towards a general theory of private international law. One subproject, with Prof. Ruiz Abou-Nigh (Edinburgh), tries to determine, based on interviews with scholars around the world, whether there are any common structures in the field, and tries to lay those out. Two other projects look at interdisciplinarity: an essay collection on philosophical foundations of private international law (with Michael Green and Roxana Banu) and a cross-teaching project on feminism and private international law (with Ivana Isailovic). Further projects look at the use of private international law outside of state private laws – nonstate laws (based on lectures given at the Hague Academy in 2015) and regulatory laws, as well as the relevance of private international law for the UN Sustainability Goals 2030 (with Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm and Hans van Loon).
• Decolonial Comparative Law: Contemporary comparative law is characterize by its origins in Western modernity. As a consequence, it has difficulties conceptualizing and accounting for non-Western laws. One part of the project, called postsecular comparative law, aims at developing an adequate method of comparative law for religious laws. Another part, developed jointly with Lena Salaymeh (Hamburg) uses decolonial theory to develop a new epistemology of comparative law. In addition, the project should lead to two textbooks: one that surveys and systematizes existing comparative law methods, another that presents a forwardlooking method that is decolonial in nature.

Publications

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• Private International Law and the Question of Universal Values, in The Continuing Relevance of Private International Law and Its Challenges (Franco Ferrari & Diego P. Fernández Arroyo eds., forthcoming).
• Global Legal Pluralism and Conflict of Laws, in Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism (Paul Schiff Berman ed., Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
• Private International Law as an Ethic of Responsivity, in Diversity and Integration in Private International Law (Maria Blanca Noodt Taquela & Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm eds, Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
• The Functional Method of Comparative Law, in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law 345-389 (Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann eds., 2d ed. 2019)
• Banning Burkas—A View from Postsecular Comparative Law, 28 Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 213-245 (2018).
• Law and Recognition—Towards a Relational Concept of Law, in In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence 90-115 (Nicole Roughan & Andrew Halpin eds., Cambridge University Press, 2017)
• Preamble I: 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, in Commentary on the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (2010) 31-109 (Stefan Vogenauer ed., Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed, 2015)
• Roles and Role Perceptions in International Commercial Arbitration, in International Arbitration and Global Governance—Contending Theories and Evidence 47-73 (Walter Mattli & Thomas Dietz eds., Oxford University Press, 2014, paperback 2017).
• On Liberalism and Legal Pluralism, in Transnational Law—Rethinking Law and Legal Thinking 122-142 (Maduro, Tuori, Sankari eds, Cambridge University Press, 2014, paperback 2016)
• Globalisation and Law: Law Beyond the State, in Law and Social Theory 287-303 (Reza Banakar & Max Travers eds, Hart, 2^nd ed, 2013)
• Dreaming Law without a State – Scholarship on Autonomous International Arbitration as Utopian Literature, 1 London Review of International Law 35-62 (2013) (inaugural issue)
• From Multiculturalism to Technique: Feminism, Culture, and the Conflict of Laws Style (with Karen Knop and Annelise Riles), 64 Stanford Law Review 589-656 (2012)
• Of Islands and the Ocean: The Two Rationalities of European Private Law, in Foundations of European Private Law 139-158 (Roger Brownsword, Leone Niglia & Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz eds., Hart 2011)
• Conflict of Norms or Conflict of Laws?:Different Techniques in the Fragmentation of Public International Law (with Joost Pauwelyn), in Multi-Sourced Equivalent Norms in International Law 19-44 (Tomer Broude & Yuval Shany eds., Hart, 2011) 
• Global Legal Pluralism, 5 Annual Review of Law and the Social Sciences 243-262 (2009)
• Comparative Law by Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, Doing Business Reports, and the Silence of Traditional Comparative Law, 57 American Journal of Comparative Law 765-795 (2009)
• Economics of Law as Choice of Law, 71 Law and Contemporary Problems 73-104 (Summer 2008)
• The New European Choice-of-Law Revolution, 82 Tulane Law Review 1607-1644 (2008)
• Globalizing Savigny? The State in Savigny’s Private International Law and the Challenge from Europeanization and Globalization, in Aktuelle Fragen politischer und rechtlicher Steuerung im Kontext der Globalisierung 119-144 (Michael Stolleis & Wolfgang Streeck eds, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007)
• Private Law Beyond the State. Europeanization, Globalization, Privatization (with Nils Jansen), 54 American Journal of Comparative Law 845-892 (2006)
• Two Paradigms of Jurisdiction, 27 Michigan Journal of International Law 1003-1069 (2006)
• EU Law as Private International Law? Reconceptualising the Country-of-Origin Principle as Vested Rights Theory, 2 Journal of Private International Law 195-242 (2006)

Work in Progress

• Reasonableness in Extraterritorial Application of Federal Law (with Hannah Buxbaum)
• Nonstate Law in Private International Law (Hague Lectures)
• Transnational Law and Comparative Law
• From State to Contract – Microcredit as Privatized Law Reform (with Corinne Blalock)
• Decolonial Comparative Law (with Lena Salaymeh)
• Postsecular Comparative Law
• PILL-Private International Law for Laymen (with Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm)
• Is Private International Law International? (with Verónica Ruiz Abou-Nigm)
• Transnational Ordre Public
• Arbitration as Non-State Law
• Equality and Private International Law

Supervision

Global Legal Theory, Private International Law, Comparative Law