Dr. Michel Erpelding
Max Planck Research Group
Curriculum Vitae
Michel Erpelding is Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany. His work focusses on the history of international and European integration law, with a special interest in their interaction with colonial law and practices. His research group ‘The Hidden Heritage of the European Union: the Legacy of the Law of the League of Nations’ further explores this theme. It analyses how legal practices developed during the interwar period both in Europe itself and on its colonial peripheries and informed European ‘integration-through-law’ after the Second World War.
Dr Erpelding studied at the Sorbonne Law School (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Columbia Law School (New York) and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Paris). He holds a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne Law School. His doctoral thesis, which addresses the international legal status of slavery and forced labour between 1815 and 1945, won several awards and was published in 2017.
Before joining the MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory, Dr Erpelding worked as Senior Research Fellow at the MPI Luxembourg for Procedural Law and as a Research Scientist at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance of the University of Luxembourg, where he was awarded a CORE Junior grant by the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
Dr Erpelding is an associate member of the Institut de recherche en droit international et européen de la Sorbonne (IREDIES). His scientific expertise has been solicited by the Luxembourg National Library, the Luxembourg Chamber of Deputies, and the Special Committee on Belgium’s Colonial Past of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives.
He lectures at the University of Luxembourg and the Institut de droit des affaires internationales, the Cairo branch of the Sorbonne Law School.