Helge Dedek

Full Professor

Wainwright Chair in Civil Law

3674 Peel Street 
Room 101b
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3A 1W9

514-398-1296 [Office]
helge.dedek [at] mcgill.ca (Email)

Helge Dedek

 


Wainwright Chair in Civil Law

List of Publications (September 2023).

Selected publications (full text) on SSRN 

John W. Durnford Teaching Excellence Award

“Historicizing  Comparison. The Comparative Method and Its Colonial Roots”,  opening plenary panel,  2020  Annual  Meeting  of  the  American  Society  of Comparative  Law on “Comparative  Legal  History” (at 12:25)


Biography

Helge Dedek is a full professor and the Wainwright Chair in Civil Law at McGill University’s Faculty of Law.  

He is interested and has published in the areas of comparative law, (comparative and transnational) legal history, private law, and legal theory. In recent years, his work has focused, in particular, on the intellectual history of the concept of individual rights, and the colonial past (and present) of comparative law.  

At McGill, Professor Dedek teaches lecture courses and seminars on private law, comparative law, and the history of the Civil law tradition. At the Spring 2021 Convocation for the Faculty of Law, he received the John W. Durnford Award for Teaching Excellence. From 2012 to 2016, he served as Director of the Institute of Comparative Law. He has been appointed Wainwright Chair in Civil Law in 2023 and will take on the role of Associate Dean (Academic) at the Faculty of Law in 2024.  

Since 2014, he has been serving as the co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Comparative Law and as a member of the Executive Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law. In 2020, he was elected Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He has held several visiting positions abroad and also regularly taught, as professeur associé, seminars on comparative law at the University Lausanne, Switzerland, from 2018 to 2021. He has been an invited Fellow at the interdisciplinaryKäte Hamburger Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany, and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany.  

Before joining McGill as a Boulton Fellow, Professor Dedek undertook doctoral studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University Bonn, Germany, where his dissertation received the award of the University Society (‘Universitätsgesellschaft’) Bonn as best doctoral thesis in 2007. He completed his LL.M. at Harvard Law School as a Langdon H. Gammon fellow. He holds two German ‘State Examinations in Law’, both with rare distinction, and held several prestigious scholarships throughout his studies. 

Education 

  • PhD in Law (summa cum laude), University of Bonn, Germany, 2006 

  • LLM, Harvard Law School, U.S.A., 2004 

  • Second State Examination in Law (13.02), Düsseldorf, Germany, 2000 

  • First State Examination in Law (14.46), Cologne, Germany, 1997 

Employment 

  • Arnold Wainwright Chair in Civil Law, McGill University, 2023- 

  • Full Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2021- 

  • Professeur associé (part-time appointment), University of Lausanne, Faculty of Law, Switzerland, 2018-2021 

  • Editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Comparative Law, 2014- 

  • Director of the Institute of Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2012-2016 

  • Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2012-2020 

  • Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2007-2012 

  • Boulton Fellow, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2006-2007 

  • Research and Teaching Fellow, Institute of Roman Law and Comparative Legal History, University of Bonn, 2005-2006 

  • Candidate Notary (“Notarassessor”), Rhenish Chamber of Notaries, Germany, 2004-2005 

  • Research and Teaching Fellow, Institute of Labour and Commercial Law, University of Cologne, 2001-2003 

  • Clerkship, Court of Appeal, Cologne, Germany, 1998-2000 

Areas of Interest 

Comparative law, (comparative and transnational) legal history, private law, and legal theory. Professor Dedek is always interested in supervising graduate work in these areas. 

 

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