Horst Eidenmüller

Biography

Horst Eidenmüller joined the Faculty of Law as a Visiting Professor in 2009 and took up the Freshfields Chair for Commercial Law and a Professorial Fellowship at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 2015.

Eidenmüller was born in Munich, Germany. He obtained an LLM at Cambridge University (1989) and a PhD from Munich University (1994) after working for McKinsey & Co. in the 1990s. After his Habilitation in 1998, he was a law professor at the University of Münster from 1999 until 2003. From 2003 to 2014, he held the Chair for Private Law, German, European and International Company Law at Munich University. This position was designated as a research professorship under the excellence scheme of the German Research Foundation from 2007 to 2011.

Eidenmüller’s main research areas are contract law, company and bankruptcy law, and alternative dispute resolution. He is known for his economic and empirical analysis of important problems in these fields.

Eidenmüller has held visiting positions at major other universities such as Cambridge (2007), Harvard (2011), NYU (2013 and 2015), Stanford (2014) and Columbia (2018). From 2008 to 2009, he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Eidenmüller is a Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute (since 2009) and a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (since 2008). As member of expert committees, he has advised the European Commission and the Federal Republic of Germany on issues of company and insolvency law reform. He has also acted as arbitrator in more than 40 commercial disputes (DIS, ICC, UNCITRAL, Ad Hoc) and as mediator in more than 60 commercial disputes since 1995.

In Oxford he lectures on Corporate Insolvency Law, on Comparative Corporate Law, and on Commercial Dispute Resolution (Commercial Negotiation and Mediation, International Commercial Arbitration).