Wim Decock (1983) holds the chair of Roman law and legal history at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve. He also teaches legal history on a part-time basis at the University of Liège.
Before joining UCLouvain, Decock was a research professor at the Law Faculty of the Flemish University of Louvain (KU Leuven), where he also directed LECTIO – the KU Leuven Institute for the Study of the Transmission of Texts, Ideas and Images in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
From 2012 through 2014 he led a junior research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt within the LOEWE-funded project “Judicial and Extrajudicial Conflict Resolution”, involving the J.W. Goethe University and Frankfurt’s University of Applied Sciences.
Decock received his PhD in law (2011) from the universities of KU Leuven and Roma Tre with a dissertation on the theological origins of contract law that won several prizes, including the Raymond Derine Prize 2012, the Prize of the Louvain Academic Foundation (ASL) 2012, the H. M.-Leibnitz-Prize 2014 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Michael Novak Award 2017.
In 2020, Decock was awarded the Prize of the Flemish Scientific Foundation (VWS) by the Royal Flemish Academy for his more recent book on the early modern foundations of the economics of meritocracy.
Decock holds master degrees in classics (KU Leuven, summa cum laude) and law (Ghent Univ, summa cum laude). In 2021, he was elected associate member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels.
Key publications
W. Decock (ed.), Konfliktlösung in der Frühen Neuzeit, (Handbuch zur Geschichte der Konfliktlösung in Europa, 3), Berlin, Springer, 2021, xxxiv + 730p. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-56102-7
W. Decock, Le marché du mérite. Penser le droit et l’économie avec Léonard Lessius, Bruxelles, Zones Sensibles, 2019, 249p., http://www.zones-sensibles.org/livres/
G.A. Yimer, W. Decock, M.G. Ghebregergs, G.H. Abera, G.S. Halibo, The Interplay between Official and Unofficial Laws in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (Eqqub) in Tigray, Ethiopia, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 50 (2018), 94-113 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07329113.2017.1407525?journalCode=rjlp20
W. Decock et C. Birr, Recht und Moral in der Scholastik der Frühen Neuzeit 1500-1700, (methodica – Einführungen in die rechtshistorische Forschung, 1), Berlin, De Gruyter/Oldenbourg, 2016, xii + 135p., https://www.rg.mpg.de/publications/methodica/1
W. Decock, Theologians and Contract Law : The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (ca. 1500-1650), (Legal History Library, 9), Leiden/Boston, Brill/Nijhoff, 2013, xix + 723p, https://brill.com/view/title/21931?lang=en
Complete list of publications