Stefan VOGENAUER
Professor Vogenauer is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt. Previously he served as the Linklaters Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law (2003-15)..
He holds dual citizenship of Germany and the United Kingdom. He is fluent in German and English and has a good working knowledge of French. He read law at the universities of Kiel, Paris V and Oxford and is eligible for judicial appointment in Germany. Among his main research interests are comparative private law, contract law, transnational commercial law and international commercial arbitration.
Professor Vogenauer has taught and lectured widely in many European countries and has been a regular Visiting Professor at the University of Paris 2 and the University of Melbourne since 2014. He held further visiting professorships at NYU Law School, the University of Auckland, the University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University, National Taiwan University, National Law University Delhi and Tel Aviv University. He founded Max Planck Law, the network of the nine law-related Max Planck Institutes, ranging from legal anthropology to IP and tax law, which he chaired from 2015 to 2025.
When teaching at Oxford, he introduced the graduate course in International Commercial Arbitration and taught, among others, Comparative Contract Law, Transnational Commercial Law (with a focus on the CISG, the UNIDROIT PICC and an arbitration component) and Roman Law of Contract.
He is an expert in contract law where he has worked extensively on national laws (English, French and German) and on comparative, European and transnational aspects. He is the sole editor of the Commentary on the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2015), the standard reference work in the field. He is also a co-author of the leading student textbook in comparative contract law, the Ius Commune Casebook for the Common Law of Europe: Cases, Materials and Text on Contract Law (3rd edn, Hart Publishing 2019). His co-authored monograph on contracts written in English but governed by another law (Englisch als Vertragssprache) was published with CH Beck in 2018, and he is the sole editor of a German language introduction to English commercial law, Englisches Handels- und Wirtschaftsrecht (4th edn, CH Beck, 2024). He is the Chief Editor of a six-volume series of monographs comparing Asian contract laws with Oxford University Press (2016-26). His work has been cited in the Privy Council, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, the Singapore Court of Appeal and in the opinions of Advocates-General at the Court of Justice of the EU.
He has been involved in various commercial arbitrations and expert determinations as both arbitrator and expert. He has acted as an expert on German law in the English Commercial Court and as an expert on English and Hong Kong law in German courts. Inter alia, he acted as a court-appointed expert on English law in the challenge of an LCIA award before the Regional Appeal Court of Hamm (Rustenburg v RWE and Dr Großmann), reportedly the highest value commercial case ever litigated in a German court at that stage. The Court followed the opinion on all counts (ECLI:DE:OLGHAM:2019:1125.8U86.15.00). He was an expert before the Berlin Regional Appeal Court in the litigation between Air Berlin (in administration) and Etihad, the biggest ever insolvency proceeding in German history (value of claim: 2 billion EUR). More recently, Saini J in the Commercial Court took the highly unusal approach of adopting a lenghty passage from 'Prof. Vogenauer’s clear and well-structured Report' by simply copy-pasting it into his judgment in Nova Leipzig SARL v Gravity Fitness Ltd [2025] EWHC 1262 (Comm) [46]-[47].
Professor Vogenauer has advised the European Parliament, the UK Ministry of Justice, the House of Lords Select Committee European Affairs, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the 'Jackson Review' of the costs of civil litigation. He served as a member of the group of experts preparing the UNCITRAL, Hague Conference and UNIDROIT Legal Guide to Uniform Instruments in the Area of International Commercial Contracts (2021). He was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in the same year.
For further information on his activities, including a full CV and list of publications, please see https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/vogenauer/en.html.
