Professor Wolfgang Ernst

LLM, DJur

Law

Emeritus Fellow from 2025

My research interests concern topics of Roman (private) law, both as products of Roman lawyers and as building blocks of civilian legal doctrine from the high middle ages onwards. Topics recently worked on include money in the western legal tradition and the legal history of ‘social choice’, with a specific focus on rules for decision-making in collegiate courts and multi-arbiter proceedings. Other current areas of interest: reciprocity v. altruism in contract law; history and theory of default rules in contract law.

Research Areas

Roman Private Law

Default Rules in Contract Law

Legal History of Social Choice

Money in the Western Legal Tradition

Reciprocity Versus Altruism in Contract

Selected Publications

‘Mommsen on Money’

Banking and Finance Law Review 38 (2022) 307-329

‘Actio empti, actio venditi’

in: U. Babusiaux et al. (eds.), Handbuch des Römischen Privatrechts (Tübingen: MohrSiebeck 2022), 2039-2288

‘The Politics of the lex Aquilia’

Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Revue d'Histoire du Droit/The Legal History Review 90 (2022) 315-352

‘Insulam exurere – Reading Collatio 12.7.1-3 Closely’

in: B. Spagnolo/J. Sampson (eds.), Principle and Pragmatism in Roman Law (Oxford: Hart 2020) 159-169

Justinian’s Digest 9.2.51 in the Western Legal Canon

Roman Legal Thought and Modern Causality Concepts, (Cambridge: Intersentia 2019)

‘The Fine-Mechanics of Judicial Majoritarianism’

in: B. Häcker/W. Ernst (eds.), Collective Judging in Comparative Perspective – Counting Votes and Weighing Opinions (Cambridge: Intersentia 2020)

Background

Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College (from 2025)
University Academic Fellow, All Souls College (from 2015 to 2025)
Professor of Roman Law and Private Law, University of Zurich (from 2004 to 2015)
Professor of Private Law and Director, Institute of Roman Law, Bonn University (from 2000 to 2004)
Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science, Cambridge and Visiting Fellow, Magdalene College, Cambridge (from 2002 to 2003)
Professor of Roman Law and Private Law, Tübingen University (from 1990 to 2000)
Assistant, Faculty of Law, Bonn University (from 1983 to 1989)
Postgraduate, Yale Law School (from 1981 to 1983)
Student of Law, Bonn University (from 1976 to 1981)

Additional Publications

The Legists' Doctrines on Money and the Law from the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries’, in: D. Fox/W. Ernst (eds.), Money in the Western Legal Tradition. Middle Ages to Bretton Woods (Oxford: University Press 2016)
‘Plinius, Epist. 8, 14’, in ‘Meditationes de iure et historia, Essays in honour of Laurens Winkel’, Fundamina 2014 (special edition), 248 seq.
‘The Glossators’ Monetary Law’, in John W. Cairns and Paul J. du Plessis (eds.), The Creation of the Ius Commune (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
‘Nisi aliud actum est’, in Tomasz Giaro (d.), Roman Law and Legal Knowledge (Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 2011).
‘Fritz Schulz (1879–1957)’, in Jack Beatson and Reinhard Zimmermann (eds.), Jurists Uprooted. German speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Die Einrede des nichterfüllten Vertrages: Zur historischen Entwicklung des synallagmatischen Vertragsvollzugs im Zivilprozess (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000).