Jan Peter Schmidt

Max Planck Fellow

Jan became a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg in 2004, and from then until 2011 he was Head of the Department for Latin American Law, regularly visiting universities in South America for research and lectures. In 2009 he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Reinhard Zimmermann, with a historical and comparative study of the new Brazilian Civil Code from 2002.

On his Max Planck Fellowship in Oxford, he is working on contract law, family law, and succession law, both in comparative and private international law. His postdoctoral dissertation (?Habilitation?) analyses the different systems of transfer of property upon death in the European legal orders, in the context of the recently adopted European Regulation on Successions and Wills.