Bob Wessels named External Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg
In Summer 2015, Bob Wessels accepted a post as (visiting) External Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law.
The Institute started in May 2013 and now has around 35 researchers and staff members. Its targeted growth is to have 65 staff and in the future overall up to 150 persons, to work at the Institute. International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law includes three areas of research: (i) dispute resolution under public international law, (ii) regulatory procedural law (in particular the currently insufficient regulation in the capital and financial markets), and (iii) European and comparative civil procedure law. This field addresses the whole range of judicial and extrajudicial settlement of civil law disputes, as well as dispute resolution.
This department has a special focus on European civil procedure law, on the one hand on cross-border cases within the scope of application of Article 81 TFEU, on the other hand on the influences and requirements of the EU law vis-à-vis the national procedural laws. Another field of research in this department concerns the interfaces between the structure of the judiciary (especially questions related to institutional aspects and to professional law) and the settlement of disputes, for example the competing influence of private and state actors in the area of arbitration and (consumer) mediation. The Institute’s current research seamlessly aligns with my present and ongoing research, which includes the complex interaction between (near to) insolvent commercial debtors, appointed insolvency practitioners and advisors concerned and courts in national or cross-border rescues and insolvencies (which follows from my research for the European Law Institute’s project to draft a legislative guidance for Business rescue in insolvency in Europe) and the further development of rules and practice for cross-border coordination of insolvency cases by insolvency practitioners and courts, including the use of ‘protocols’, as a core tenet in the EU Insolvency Regulation (recast).