Wim Decock
Biography
Wim Decock is the 29th Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College.
His research focuses on the Roman legal tradition and its interaction with canon law and moral philosophy, particularly in the early modern period. He examines how these traditions shaped private, commercial, and public law, with a particular interest in questions at the intersection of legal, economic, and religious thought, both historically and in contemporary perspective.
His principal publications include Money, Markets and Merit: The Economic Thought of Leonardus Lessius (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Theologians and Contract Law: The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune, 1500–1650 (Brill/Nijhoff, 2013, paperback: 2023).
Before joining Oxford, Decock was Professor of Roman Law, Legal History and Comparative Law at UCLouvain, where he also served as Associate Dean (Teaching/Students), alongside a part-time appointment at the University of Liège. From 2014 to 2021, he taught at KU Leuven, following a prolonged stay in Frankfurt (2012-2014) as Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. Since 2020, he has co-directed the International School of Ius Commune in Erice, Sicily.
Decock received his PhD in Law from Roma Tre and KU Leuven in 2011. In the same year, he spent a semester at Harvard Law School as a Visiting Researcher. His work received several distinctions, including the German Research Foundation’s Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (2014). He subsequently received the VWS Prize of the Royal Flemish Academy (2020) and a Max Planck-Humboldt Medal (2022). In 2021, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels.
Wim Decock holds degrees in Classics and Law from KULeuven, Ghent University, and Roma Tre. He has been a Visiting Professor in several universities around the world, including the EHESS in Paris, the University of Bergen (Norway), ECUPL in Shanghai, the University of Catania and Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.