PUBLISHED:October 22, 2015

Michaels elected to American Law Institute

Ralf Michaels

Professor Ralf Michaels has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (ALI).

ALI members are distinguished lawyers, judges, and legal academics who produce scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law through publication of the highly influential Restatements of the Law, model statutes, and principles of law. The 72 newly elected members were confidentially nominated by their peers, vetted by the group’s membership committee, and elected by the ALI Council, according to an Oct. 21 press release from the organization.

“I am extremely proud to welcome this new group of members to The American Law Institute,” said ALI President Roberta Cooper Ramo. “With every elected group of new members, I continue to be so impressed by their exceptional professional achievement, and I feel lucky to have the opportunity to work with them on ALI’s ongoing legal reform projects.”

Michaels, the Arthur Larson Professor of Law, is an expert in comparative law and conflict of laws. He is the editor or co-editor of two special volumes of the American Journal of Comparative Law, "Beyond the State? Rethinking Private Law" and "Legal Origins," as well as a book and a journal issue on conflict of laws: “Conflict of Laws in a Globalized World” and Transdisciplinary Conflicts (Law and Contemporary Problems, 2008).

Michaels has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Panthéon/Assas (Paris II), Princeton, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and the London School of Economics. He has also held senior research fellowships at Harvard and Princeton, as well as the American Academy in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Private Law in Hamburg. In 2015, he gave a series of lectures on private international law at The Hague Academy for International Law. Michaels studied law at the Universities of Passau and Cambridge, UK. 

Twenty-five Duke Law faculty scholars and more than 50 alumni have been elected members of ALI.