https://doi.org/10.54148/ELTELJ.2023.2.107
Professor Jürgen Basedow, Emeritus Director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Hamburg, member of several scientific societies for German and European private law and honorary doctor of several universities, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on 6 April 2023.
Professor Basedow left us an extremely rich scientific legacy. He wrote seminal works on private international law, international economic law and comparative private law, and important studies in the field of the unification of private law. Besides antitrust law, insurance law and transport law, he was also at home with international family law and European private law. He wrote his PhD thesis on problems of international family law; his habilitation work was on transport law, and his LLM studies at Harvard Law School turned his interest towards international antitrust law. He also worked on practical issues regarding the latter field, serving as a member and then chairman of the German Antitrust Committee (Deutsche Monopolkommission) between 2000 and 2008. His research in this area has resulted in a monograph (Weltkartellrecht, 1998) and a volume of studies (Mehr Freiheit wagen, 2002). He was interested in the process of unifying European private law from the very beginning, back in the 1980s. He co-edited with Klaus Hopt and Reinhard Zimmerman The Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law (2011), first published in German (2009). Basedow summarised his research into the problems of European private law in a major monograph published in 2021, EU Private Law - Anatomy of a Growing Legal Order. Private international law was a particular focus of his academic interest: he initiated the publication of the Encyclopedia of Private International Law in four volumes (2017), and he was one of the co-editors-in-chief of this major undertaking. A highpoint in Basedow's career was the Hague Cours Général in 2012. It was published in 2015 under the title The Law of Open Societies - Private Ordering and Public Regulation in the Conflict of Laws. He was also a member of the Groupe européen de droit international privé.
For decades, Professor Basedow maintained an intense scientific relationship with the professors of private law and private international law in our Faculty. We regularly held joint conferences on issues of mutual interest, alternately in Budapest and Hamburg. In 2007, Professor Basedow was elected an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. We cherish his memory with deep gratitude. ■
Visszaugrás