Ernst Rabel

Ernst Rabel, born 28 January 1874 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and who died 7 September 1955 in Zurich, Switzerland, was an Austrian-born jurist, later an American citizen, who earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1895 under Ludwig Mitteis. He held professorships at Leipzig from 1902, Basel from 1906, Kiel from 1910, Gottingen from 1911 and Munich from 1916, co-founded Munich's Institute for Comparative Law, and directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Berlin from 1926 until Nazi persecution forced his resignation in 1937, after which he emigrated to the United States in 1939 with research support from the American Law Institute, the University of Michigan Law School and Harvard Law School. He pioneered the functional method of comparative law that became an international standard, his 1930s work on international sales law directly influenced the 1964 Hague Convention on Uniform Sales Law, he completed his four-volume magnum opus The Conflict of Laws, A Comparative Study between 1945 and 1954, and he took part in drafting principles that informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.