The first Lichtenberg Professorship for Bremen: Dr. Moritz Renner has been awarded a Lichtenberg Professorship for Transnational Business Law and the Theory of Economic Law in the Law Faculty of the University of Bremen. Starting this winter semester, the Volkswagen Foundation will be funding the Bremen Professorship in an amount of some EUR 1 million over the next five years. In return, the University of Bremen has committed to making the professorship permanent once the funding is terminated, which could be up to as long as eight years.
The Volkswagen Foundation’s “Lichtenberg-Professorship” program was created especially to support excellent research talent in innovative fields of teaching and research. The funding initiative addresses young researchers with an outstanding record of achievement, enabling them to embark on their own independent research projects in new and interdisciplinary fields at an early stage in their career.
As a main focus of his Lichtenberg Professorship entitled “Transnational Business Law between Contract and the Firm”, Renner and a team of colleagues comprising jurists, economists, and sociologists will be analyzing the impact on legislation triggered by economic globalization. The objective is to develop the foundations on which transnational business law can one day be built beyond the boundaries of the national state. Transnational business combination law and legislation governing cross-border loan transactions are to be analyzed and serve as examples.
The University of Bremen is not unknown to Renner. Following his studies in law at the universities of Berlin and Padua as well as the Columbia Law School in New York, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Bremen. In 2010 the “unifreunde” [Friends of the University of Bremen] awarded him the Bremer Studienpreis by for his doctoral dissertation entitled “Zwingendes transnationales Recht. Elemente einer Wirtschaftsverfassung jenseits des Staates“ [Mandatory legal requirements. Elements of an economic constitution beyond the national state], and in 2011 he was awarded the Deutsche Studienpreis by the Körber Foundation. From 2007 till 2009, Renner worked as a research assistant at the University of Bremen in the Collaborative Research Center “Transformation of the State” funded by the German Research Foundation, and since 2009 he has been a research assistant for the Chair for German, European, and international private law at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
The Lichtenberg-Professorship program is named after Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799). He was the very first German professor of Experimental Physics, and from 1770 held a professorship for Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of Göttingen.
