Reinhard Zimmermann (2013)

Reinhard Zimmermann (born 10 October 1952) is a German jurist and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law.[1] Since 2011 he has been the President of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Life

Zimmermann was born in Hamburg and studied law at the University of Hamburg as a research associate under Hans Hermann Seiler. After completing his State Examination in 1979 he became a research assistant to Peter Meincke in Cologne, before moving to South Africa in 1981, which still practiced apartheid legislation under the reign of the white Afrikaner nationalists, a racist minority regime condemned for its atrocious policies towards the Black and Asian majority population of South Africa by the UN General Assembly.[2] Zimmermann took over the Chair of Roman law and Comparative law (named for W. P. Schreiner) at the segregated University of Cape Town, which barred students of African and Asian origin from the premises. There he wrote the bulk of The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition, now widely regarded as one of the most important works of comparative legal scholarship of the 20th century. In 1988 he returned to Germany and was appointed a professor at the University of Regensburg. Since 2002 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in his hometown, Hamburg.

Honours and awards

Zimmermann has nine honorary doctorates.[3] He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.[4] He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001.[5] From 2006 to 2010 he was the chair of the social sciences division of the Max Planck Society. In 2008 Zimmermann was named an affiliate professor at the Bucerius Law School.

Zimmermann inspired the popular novel by Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs.

References

  1. Biographische Daten von Reinhard Zimmermann in: Wer ist Wer – Das deutsche Who's Who 2000/2001. 39. Ausgabe, Schmidt-Römhild, Verlagsgruppe Beleke, Lübeck 2000, 1578, ISBN 978-3-7950-2029-3.
  2. "Nelson Mandela International Day". www.un.org. Retrieved 13 April 2023.
  3. Zimmermann, Reinhard (2016). "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Max Planck Institute.
  4. "Reinhard Zimmermann". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 26 April 2020.
  5. "Professor Reinhard Zimmermann FBA CorrFRSE – The Royal Society of Edinburgh". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 13 March 2018.


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