Boudewijn Sirks to Deliver Lecture on Roman Law

Boudewijn Sirks, Emeritus Regius Professor of Civil Law at University of Oxford, will give a dean’s lecture on April 7 at 4:30 p.m. The lecture is titled “Will the real Roman Law please stand up? Pandectism, promissory estoppel and other aspects of Roman Law.”

“Boudewijn Sirks is a man who embodies centuries of the greatest traditions of European scholarship in Roman Law. At the same time, he is a man who has brought a marvelous spirit of scholarly innovation to all of his work,” says Professor James Q. Whitman ’88. “He has unmatched learning in the sources of the law, and an unimpeachable mastery of the work of the great scholars. But in a career that has brought him prominent professorships not only in his native Netherlands but also in Frankfurt and Oxford, he has done more than just continue the great philological tradition of which he is a past master. He has also written with the imagination and urgency of a true historian, able not just to understand the sources, but to explain why they matter for humanity more broadly.”

Professor Sirks’ research interests span ancient history of law, papyrology, European private law and civil law. He spent time as Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University, New York and Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas and recently as Visiting Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago). Professor Sirks is a Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Boudewijn Sirks was educated in Law at the University of Leiden, followed by studies in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, where he took up his first post as a Research Assistant in Philosophy.