Vita

Burkhard Hess, born in Worms (Germany) in 1961, 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 from 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 currently holds Honorary Professorships at the Universities of Luxembourg and Heidelberg. Amongst others, he was a Guest Professor in Taipei, Georgetown, Paris (Sorbonne University) and Beijing as well as a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Transnational Law at New York University. In 2017, he taught a special course at The Hague Academy of International Law. Furthermore, 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. For instance, he was member of an Expert Group on Modernisation of Judicial Cooperation in Civil and Commercial Matters, which evaluated the European Insolvency Regulation and the Brussels I Regulation. He has also contributed to the drafting of the proposal for the Regulation establishing a European Account Preservation Order. He is the author of various books on German and European civil procedural law (e.g. Europäisches Zivilprozessrecht, 2nd ed. 2021) as well as co-editor of IPRax and the Journal of International Procedural Law.

Inter alia, Professor Hess is Chair of the German Association of International Procedural Law, Vice-President Europe of the International Association of Procedural Law and Chair of the ILA Committee on the Protection of Privacy in Private International and Procedural Law. In 2017, he became Foreign Correspondent Academician of the Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna and, in 2019, Associate of the Institut de Droit international.

He was the recipient of two doctorates honoris causa awarded by, respectively, the University of Ghent, in March 2015, and the University of Thessaloniki, in May 2016.