Professor Katharina Boele-Woelki

​Katharina Boele-Woelki is the President of Bucerius Law School, the first private law school in Germany, where she also serves as the Claussen Simon Foundation Professor of Comparative Law. Until September 2015, she was Professor of Private International Law, Comparative Law and Family Law at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Extraordinary Professor for Legal Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She established the Commission on European Family Law (CEFL) and the Utrecht Centre for European Research into Family Law (UCERF). She is member and board member of various professional associations and institutions, such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht and the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, and serves on editorial boards for Global, European and South African law journals, book series and open access platforms. In 2014, she was elected president of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She taught at the Hague Academy for International Law and was awarded honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, the University of Lausanne and the University of Antwerp, as well as the Anneliese Maier-Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is an elected member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg.