Rene David

Rene David was a French legal scholar who lived from 1906 to 1990 and taught at the universities of Grenoble, Paris and Aix-en-Provence over a career spanning nearly five decades, along with visiting positions at Cambridge, Columbia, Munich and Tehran. He is regarded as one of the leading figures in comparative law of the twentieth century, best known for his 1964 book Les grands systemes de droit contemporains, which classified the world's legal systems into families for comparative study and remains a standard reference in the field; he also directed the publication of the International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law beginning in 1973. Beyond scholarship, he was active from 1930 in the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, led French delegations to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law during the 1960s, and helped draft civil codes for Ethiopia and Rwanda, work recognized with the Erasmus Prize in 1976.