Reinhard Zimmermann
Zimmermann was a member of the “Lando Commission” which drafted Part III of the Principles of European Contract Law; he was also a member of the Working Group that revised and extended the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, and of the Working Group jointly appointed by the German Federation and its individual states to prepare the modernization of the German law of obligations.
Reinhard Zimmermann has been closely associated with the German Academic Scholarship Foundation – first as a student, later as a mentor, from 2004 as member and deputy chairman of its supervisory board (Kuratorium).
On the occasion of the end of his term of office the Foundation dedicated a booklet to him under the title “Begabung und Verantwortung” (Talent and Responsibility: Essays, Documents, and Milestones from 12 years of presidency).
[2] In his trilogy of novels “The 2 ½ Pillars of Wisdom “ (which gently mocks the German professor, as symbolized in the figure of Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld) the Scottish author Sir Alexander McCall Smith has used experiences and recollections of his friend Reinhard Zimmermann; the first volume (“Portuguese Irregular Verbs”) is dedicated to him.
[4] An ambitious project which Zimmermann initiated and edited together with Nils Jansen, has led to the publication, in 2018, of the “Commentaries on European Contract Laws”.
Since 2007 Reinhard Zimmermann, together with his friends and colleagues Marius de Waal (who died in 2022) and Kenneth Reid, directs an international research group on the law of succession in historical and comparative perspective which has, in the meantime, produced four books.
With this and a number of other initiatives, Zimmermann aims to deliver the law of succession from the status of Cinderella of academic scholarship which has been its lot since the days of codification.
Ugo Mattei describes Zimmermann's approach, just as the one pursued by Friedrich Carl von Savigny at the beginning of the 19th century, as “thoroughly ethnocentric, conservative, class-privileged (and) self-serving”.
It is not far-fetched to project this forward too: as we move towards a European private law, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it is through the continuation of this process of the adaptation of Roman principles that this will be achieved.”[8] In the meantime, Grossi himself appears to have changed his mind.
[9] In a similar vein, the Belgian authors Dirk Heirbaut and Mathias Storme write: “[I]n 1990 Reinhard Zimmermann delivered a general wake up call in his famous book about the law of obligations.
The rest can follow later and that may take some time.”[10] In 1996 Zimmermann was awarded the Gotttfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
The award of the honorary doctorate by the University of Cape Town was made also in recognition of Zimmermann's contribution towards the restoration of the rule of law in a South Africa emerging from the apartheid system.
Zimmermann's academic pupils presented to him in 2022 a special issue of RabelsZ (the Rabel Journal for Comparative and International Private Law) with historical-comparative essays.
It contains 48 contributions, analyzing legal problems in various fields of private law in a historical-comparative perspective; they are written by authors who have worked with Zimmermann or under his supervision, and thus regard themselves as members of his “academic family”.
Among Zimmermann's academic pupils teaching today at German-speaking Universities, are Nils Jansen (Münster), Sonja Meier (Köln), Stefan Vogenauer (Frankfurt), Jens Kleinschmidt (Trier), Phillip Hellwege (Augsburg), Sebastian Martens (Passau), Birke Häcker (Bonn), Hartmut Wicke (München), Walter Doralt (Graz), Gregor Christandl (Graz), Johannes Liebrecht (Zürich), Jan Peter Schmidt (Hamburg), and Ben Köhler (Bayreuth).
Beck) and "Comparative Studies in Continental and Anglo-American Legal History" (Duncker & Humblot) (originally jointly with Helmut Coing, Richard Helmholz, and Knut Wolfgang Nörr).
