The King has formally approved the appointment of Professor Wim Decock as Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford, one of the most prestigious legal chairs in the United

Kingdom. He succeeds Professor Wolfgang Ernst, who previously held the position.

Professor Decock currently serves as Professor of Roman Law, Legal History and Comparative Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UC Louvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and also teaches legal history on a part-time basis at the University of Liège. He will now take up the historic Regius Professorship at Oxford, a role traditionally associated with excellence in civil law scholarship and teaching.

Born and educated in Belgium, Professor Decock studied Classics at KU Leuven, completing both his BA and MA, before pursuing legal studies in Leuven (LLB) and Ghent (LLM). He obtained his PhD in 2011, jointly awarded by KU Leuven and the University of Roma Tre. His academic career includes appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, Tilburg University, and KU Leuven, before joining UC Louvain in 2021. He is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Louvain Lab for Law, History and Society.

Professor Decock is internationally recognised as a leading scholar of Roman law and its reception, with particular expertise in the early modern period. His doctoral research on the theological origins of contract law received several major honours, including the HM Leibniz Prize (2014) awarded by the German Research Foundation and the Michael Novak Award (2017).

In 2020, he was awarded the VWS Prize by the Royal Flemish Academy for his influential book examining the early modern foundations of the economics of meritocracy. His academic distinction has also been recognised through visiting fellowships and professorships across Europe and at Harvard Law School. He currently serves as Co-Director of the International School of Ius Commune in Erice, Sicily.

Further honours include his election as an Associate Member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels in 2021 and the award of the Max Planck–Humboldt Medal in 2022.

Professor Decock’s appointment reinforces Oxford’s long-standing reputation as a global centre for legal scholarship and reflects the continuing importance of historical and comparative perspectives in the study of civil law. Photo by Oxford University: English and Law Faculties by Christopher Hilton, Wikimedia commons.