What has contract got to do with topics such as economic efficiency, global sustainability, security of supply, societal development or existential questions, such as our right to pursue meaningful lives? More broadly, what is the role of law in shaping global production and its social and ecological externality footprints on our world system? And how can we regulate contractually organized global value chains towards increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, development or other interests?

These are some of the central questions that I focus on in my research and teaching. I underscore the constitutive role of contract as a foundational structure for societal transformations from self-subsistence focused agricultural economies to industrialization and today's digital and circular global value chain economy. Through a focus on dogmatic, historical, comparative and transnational private law I highlight how contract is used as a nearly invisible tool for global governance and examine the switches we can hit and levers we can pull to recalibrate production towards interests ranging from security to efficiency to development to sustainability. 

My research on contract has been internationally acclaimed and appeared in fora such as the American Journal of Comparative Law, Competition and Change, the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the European Review of Contract Law, among others. I have received external funding inter alia for the Law for Secure Supply (LEXSECURE) project, charting a legal geography of the governance of global production in times of global-systemic crises such as pandemics, global warming and outright war.

This reseach also informs my teaching and lecturing on contract law, where I combine an appreciation of private (international) law tradition and legal dogma with an awareness of its global impact and potential for new forms of production governance and doctrinal developments.

Feel free to contact me in relation to any of these topics—there is much left to uncover in charting the role of contract in global governance, regulation and private law doctrine! I am especially happy to discuss interdiscipinary avenues for research combining law and e.g. management, organizational economics, development, political economy and geography.