Apostolos Anthimos
Treasurer; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
Apostolos is an attorney at law in Greece. He holds a PhD in International Civil Litigation and earned Masters of Laws from the Universities of Hanover and Thessaloniki. He authored monographs, articles and book chapters on European private international law. He teaches Civil Procedure, ADR, and the Law of Succession at the European University of Cyprus. He has been a member of the EU expert group on the Modernization of Judicial Cooperation in Civil and Commercial Matters. He is an editor of Conflictoflaws.net and runs his own blog, International Civil Litigation in Greece, featuring reports on Greek case law.
Gilles Cuniberti
President; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
Gilles is Professor of Comparative and Private International Law at the University of Luxembourg. He has been a member of several expert groups set up by the European Commission to propose new regulations of EU private international law, including on the European Account Preservation Order and on the Third Party Effects of Assignments of Claims. He was educated at Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Oxford and Yale.
Pedro de Miguel Asensio
Member of the Scientific Council
Pedro is Professor of Private International Law at the Complutense University of Madrid and Director of its postgraduate programme on IT Law. He is author of several works in the field of private international law, including the book Conflict of Laws and the Internet (Edward Elgar, 2nd ed., 2024), and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Private International Law (4 vols, 2017). He is a consultant at Allen & Overy (Madrid) and regularly serves as legal expert for international organisations and European institutions.
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Agnieszka Frąckowiak-Adamska
Vice-President; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
Agnieszka is a professor at the Department of International and European Lawat the University of Wrocław. Author of numerous publications in leading Polish and European legal journals on European Judicial Area (civil and criminal), EU Citizenship, Internal Market and the role of national judges in the application of EU law. Member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on the revision of the Brussels IIa (2201/2003) Regulation. Leader of Polish scientific teams in three research projects co-financed by the European Commission (DG Justice): EUPILLAR, TRANSFER OF PRISONERSand IC2BE and a national expert in AMICABLE and FACILEX projects.
Pietro Franzina
Deputy Secretary General; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
Pietro is a Professor of Private International Law at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. He authored and edited several works in the field of private international law. He served as an expert for the Italian Ministry of Justice and took part on behalf of the Italian Government in meetings of the European Judicial Network in Civil and Commercial Matters and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.
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Susanne Gössl
Member of the Scientific Council
Susanne is Director of the Institute of Private International Law and Comparative Law an the University of Bonn. She founded what today is the EAPIL’s Young Research Network. In her research she focusses on general questions of private international law, in particular with a focus on EU PIL, the interaction of EU law with national procedural law and questions of AI regulation. She served as a legal expert both for the EU Commission and the German govenment and is – inter alia – member of the German Council for Private International Law.
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Bettina Heiderhoff
Member of the Scientific Council
Bettina has been Professor of Private International Law, International Civil Procedure and German Private Law and Director of the Institute for German and International Familiy Law at the University of Münster (Germany) since 2013. She is a member of the German Council for Private International Law. Bettina has a particular interests in international family law, including the interface between family law and migration law. She also has a focus on EU private law and has recently been involved in various projects on the use of AI in decision-making. Since 2011, Bettina has been organising the annual “Programme in European Private Law for Postgraduates” (PEPP) to support the exchange and networking between young legal scholars from different European countries.
Marion Ho-Dac
Member of the Scientific Council
Marion is a Professor of Private Law at the University of Artois (France). She authored and edited several works in the fields of private international law and EU substantive law, including a casebook on European and international Family Law (Bruylant, 2018). Her last coedited book deals with the Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the EU (Bruylant, 2023). She is a member of the editorial committee of the Revue Trimestrielle de Droit européen. She also serves as an expert for the French Artificial Intelligence Standardisation Committee (CNIA, Afnor).
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Thomas Kadner Graziano
Member of the Scientific Council
Thomas is Professor at the University of Geneva and Director of the Department of Private International Law and of the programme on transnational law. He holds a PhD from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, a Habilitation degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and an LL.M. from Harvard. He has held visiting professorships at Universities in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Lithuania, England, the USA, and China. Thomas is one of the founders of the European Association of Private International Law (EAPIL) and chairs the EAPIL’s Working Group on the Feasibility of a European Private International Law Act.
For a more detailed bio, see here.
Alexander Layton
Member of the Scientific Council
A short bio will be available soon.
Vesna Lazić
Member of the Scientific Council
Vesna is Associate professor at Utrecht University and senior researcher at the Asser Institute. She authored and edited several works in the field of private international law and international commercial arbitration. Her last co-authored book is The Brussels I-bis Regulation: Interpretation and Implementation. The handbook is one of the outputs the JUDGTRUST research project co-financed by the European Commission (DG Justice), which she coordinated.
Tobias Lutzi
Member of the Scientific Council
Tobias is Junior Professor for Private Law at the University of Augsburg. He has published extensively on questions of private international law, including his monograph Private International Law Online (OUP 2020). He is the General Editor of conflictoflaws.net and has co-chaired the EAPIL’s Young Research Network.
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Johan Meeusen
Member of the Scientific Council
Johan (LL.M. University of California at Berkeley, 1993; Ph.D. University of Antwerp, 1997) is Full Professor of EU Law and Private International Law at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He is a member of the European Group for Private International Law (GEDIP) and an associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He is the general editor of the Belgian-Dutch academic journal ‘SEW, Tijdschrift voor Europees en Economisch Recht’. Johan is a former holder of an ad personam Jean Monnet Chair, served as Vice-Rector and Dean at the University of Antwerp and held invited professorships at universities in China, Estonia, France, South-Africa and the United States.
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Ralf Michaels
Member of the Scientific Council
Ralf is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, holder of a chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University in London, and a Professor of Law at Hamburg University. Until 2019 he was the Arthur Larson Professor at Duke University School of Law; he has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and Tel Aviv, as well as the London School of Economics. Michaels holds an LL.M. from Cambridge University and a PhD in Law from Passau University.
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Morten Midtgaard Fogt
Vice-President; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
A short bio will be available soon. See here for a full bio.
Dário Moura Vicente
Member of the Scientific Council
A short bio will be available soon. See here for a full bio.
Marta Requejo Isidro
Member of the Scientific Council
Marta is a Professor of Private International Law at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). After several years as a senior researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law, she moved to the Court of Justice of the European Union, where she currently serves as a legal secretary in the chambers of Advocate General Manuel Sánchez Campos-Bordona. She is the editor or co-editor of several works related to judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters, such as Brussels I Bis: A Commentary on Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012 (2022), and The European Service Regulation: A Commentary (with Apostolos Anthimos, 2023), as well as the author of chapters and papers in the same area in books and journals in different languages.
Giesela Rühl
Secretary General; Member of the Scientific Council and of the Board of Administration
Giesela is a Professor of Private International and Comparative Law at Humboldt-University Berlin. She is author and editor of books, articles and book chapters on European private international law, including the 4-volume Encyclopedia of Private International Law (Edward Elgar, 2017). In addition she is an editor of Conflictoflaws.net, a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Law Institute as well as the International Academy of Comparative Law.
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Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm
Member of the Scientific Council
Verónica is Professor of Private International Law at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). She holds a J.D. and M.A. from the Catholic University in Uruguay and LL.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. Verónica’s expertise in private international law spans across legal systems in the UK, Europe and Latin America. Veronica was Director of Studies, The Hague Academy of International Law (2023). She is Vice-President for External Relations of the American Association of Private International Law (ASADIP) (2019-); and represented ASADIP before the Hague Conference on Private International Law for the Special Commission meetings of the Judgments project. She is correspondent for Uruguay before UNIDROIT (2022-). President of the European Law Faculties Association (2023-), member of the International Academy of Comparative Law (2014-) and Member of the Court of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (2024-).
Jan von Hein
Member of the Scientific Council
Jan von Hein is a Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he holds a chair in Civil, Comparative and Private International Law and is the Director of the Institute for Comparative and Private International Law, Dept. III. Apart from being a member of the EAPIL’s Scientific Committee, he is also Chairman of the 2nd Commission of the German Council for Private International Law, a board member of the German branch of the International Law Association, an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, and a Fellow of the European Law Institute. He is the editor of and/or author in numerous standard commentaries (most recently Münchener Kommentar zum Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch, vol. on Private international law, 9th ed. 2024; Staudinger, Art. 24 EGBGB and the Hague Adult Protection Convention, 2022) and of articles in the field of private international law, international civil procedure and comparative law.
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Former members of the Scientific Council:
Sabine Corneloup
Member of the Scientific Council from 2019 to 2022.
Eva-Maria Kieninger
Member of the Scientific Council from 2019 to 2022.