Max Planck Lecture Series: Prof. Peter Mankowski gave a lecture on “International Procedural Law: Between Private International Law and Procedural Law”
On the 23th of September, the Max Planck Institute of Luxembourg had the honor to receive Professor Peter Mankowski from Hamburg University. Professor Mankowski’s expertise in international procedural law and private international law is well established: among other things, he has co-authored a leading book collection on “European Commentaries on Private International Law,” which provides a detailed analysis of the most important European private international law instruments. Moreover, Professor Mankowski is the author of an impressive number of publications, mainly on topics of private international law and international procedural law, as well as economic law, consumer law, comparative law, legal culture, law and economics, and the law of unfair commercial practices. Last but not least, Professor Mankowski is also the Director of the Seminar on Foreign and Private International Law at the University of Hamburg.
In a concise but thorough lecture, Professor Mankowski addressed the question of the role that international procedural law plays in relation to private international law and procedural law. Starting this exercise by an attempt to delineate these concepts, Professor Mankowski described how these fields are defined from a comparative law perspective, explained what their interconnections are and identified their respective place in codifications. His presentation triggered many interesting questions: why is it the distinction between international procedural law and other related disciplines important? How do international procedural law and transnational procedural law compare? Professor Mankowski also highlighted the trend towards the increasing importance of international procedural law to the detriment of private international law and illustrated his point of view with distinct examples. Finally, he mentioned the existence of two different schools of thoughts underpinning the international procedural law discipline, influencing in turn the distinct academic path leading to its study: the first one consists of national procedural law scholars, while the second one includes private international law academics. In this context, Professor Mankowski posed an interesting rhetorical question: is an “internationalist” a good “proceduralist”? Later on, during the Q&A session, the participants had the occasion to look deeper into the topic, asking, inter alia, about the different approaches used by academics to teach international procedural law and underlining the distinct structures that textbooks adopt in order to present this field of law.
