Nationality
Germany
Year of election
2019
Year of titular member
2023

Function(s)

Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law

Area(s) of Expertise

  • Private International Law
  • International Litigation and Arbitration
  • Comparative Law

Biography

Burkhard Hess became founding and executive director of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law in September 2012. He studied law at the Universities of Würzburg, Lausanne and Munich and graduated in Munich in 1990. After being granted Venia Legendi in civil law, civil procedure, private international law, European law and public international law in 1996, he held chairs at the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg. He was a Guest Professor in Taipei, Georgetown, Paris (Sorbonne) and Beijing, and a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Transnational Law at the New York University. He served as a part-time judge at the Court of Appeal of Karlsruhe. Professor Hess often acts as an expert and advisor to the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and national governments. He has evaluated the European Insolvency Regulation and the Brussels I Regulation. He has also contributed to the drafting of the proposal for the Regulation on the European Attachment of Bank Accounts. He is the author of various books on German and European civil procedural law as well as co-editor of IPRax and of Kolner Kommentar zum Kapitalanleger­- Musterverfahrensgesetz. He is Chairman of the ILA Committee on the Protection of Privacy in Private International and Procedural Law. In March 2015, the University of Ghent awarded Professor Hess a doctor honoris causa; in May 2016, the University of Thessaloniki.

Selected publications

  • Luxembourg Report on European Procedural Law, 2 Volumes (2019), together with Stephanie Law and Pietro Ortolani
  • Le droit international privé européen en temps de crise (2019), in: Travaux du Comité Français de Droit International Privé, Années 2016-2018
  • Open Justice – The Role of Courts in a Democratic Society (2019), together with Ana Koprivica Harvey
  • The Private-Public Divide in International Dispute Resolution , in: Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of lnternational Law (2018), Volume 388
  • EU-Zivilprozessrecht (Kommentar), together with Peter Schlosser, 4th ed. 2015
  • Study on the Application of the Insolvency Regulation in the 27 EU-Member States, together with Paul Oberhammer and Thomas Pfeiffer, 2014
  • Europäisches Zivilprozessrecht (2010)
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