Appointment of the Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford

The King has approved that Professor Wim Decock, Professor of Roman Law, Legal History and Comparative Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain, be appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford in succession to Professor Wolfgang Ernst.

Professor Wim Decock

Professor Decock is currently Professor of Roman Law, Legal History and Comparative Law, at UC Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He also teaches legal history on a part-time basis at the University of Liège. He took his BA and MA in Classics at KU Leuven before studying law in Leuven (LLB) and Ghent (LLM) and taking his PhD jointly with KU Leuven and the University of Roma Tre in 2011. He subsequently held academic positions at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, Tilburg University and KU Leuven before joining UC Louvain in 2021. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the 'Louvain Lab for Law, History and Society'.

Professor Decock is a leading scholar of Roman Law and its reception, particularly in the early modern period. His thesis on the theological origins of contract law has won several prizes, including the HM Leibnitz-Prize 2014 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Michael Novak Award 2017. In 2020, he was awarded the VWS-Prize by the Royal Flemish Academy for his book on the early modern foundations of the economics of meritocracy. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships across Europe and at Harvard Law School and serves as a co-director of the International School of Ius Commune in Erice, Sicily. In 2021, he was elected associate member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels. In 2022, he was the recipient of a Max Planck-Humboldt medal.