Ralf Michaels

LAPA Fellow
Duke University School of Law

Ralf Michaels is Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law and director of its Center for International and Comparative Law. He is the author of a book on comparative private law and of numerous articles and book chapters published in the United States and in Europe, and is co-editor of two volumes on conflict of laws. In the fall of 2005, he was the Lloyd Cutler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Michaels received a doctorate in law at the University of Passau and an LLM degree from Cambridge University. Prior to his appointment at Duke, he held posts at Harvard Law School and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and Private International Law in Hamburg. Michaels' main research and teaching interests are in comparative law, conflict of laws, and legal theory, all of which he wants to combine into a general theory of globalized law. Currently, this involves two big research projects. The project that he will pursue at Princeton is an analysis of the role of domestic courts, especially US courts, as world courts. The other project, pursued jointly with Profs. Annelise Riles, Cornell, and Karen Knop, University of Toronto, takes private international law as the centerpiece of a general theory of global law.