Ars longa, vita brevis
Roaming
Alain Wijffels (b. Switzerland, 1954) studied at various universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and England. He holds degrees in philosophy (Antwerp), law (Antwerp, Louvain), criminology (Louvain), canon law (Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve), Roman law (Paris-2) and medieval history (Louvain-la-Neuve). He defended a doctoral thesis in law at the University of Amsterdam on learned rights in the practice of the Court of Holland and the Grand Council of Malines in the 15th and 16th centuries, followed by another thesis (PhD) at the University of Cambridge on the practice of the High Court of Admiralty in London towards the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Cambridge University also awarded him the Doctor of Letters (DLitt) for his body of historical work.
He has worked as a teacher and researcher at the Universities of Antwerp and Amsterdam, Research Fellow at Churchill College (Cambridge), Fellow Commoner at Trinity Hall (Cambridge) and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Visiting Scholar at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Brussels (FUSL/KUB/Academy of Legal Theory), Frankfurt am Main (Mercator Chair of the DFG, German Scientific Research Community), Nantes, Paris-2, Paris-12, and was appointed to the Francqui Chair at Ghent University. In Leiden, he directed a research project in judicial history supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He is a member of several scientific and editorial committees, and an associate member of the Académie royale in Brussels, the Comité d'histoire du droit of the Académie royale flamande, and the Commission royale pour la publication des anciennes lois et ordonnances de Belgique. He is director of research at the CNRS, attached to the Centre d'histoire judiciaire (Lille-2), and an associate member of the Centre Georges Chevrier (CNRS and Université de Bourgogne, Dijon). He teaches the history of public law in Europe (including the history of international law) in Leiden (as a professor at the Faculty of Law), comparative constitutional history in Leuven (as an ordinary professor at the Faculty of Law), legal history and various lectures on comparative law in Louvain-la-Neuve (as an extraordinary professor at the Faculty of Law). These courses, which cater for some 2,000 students a year from all institutions, include lectures in French, Dutch and English.
He has also been involved in a number of research committees. He was a member of the scientific committee of the Catholic University of Louvain, the Burgundy region's research advisory committee, the (junior) jury of the Institut universitaire de France, the advisory committee of the Institut d'études avancées in Nantes, the selection committee of the European Council of Institutes for Advanced Studies (EURIAS), the Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research (FWO), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and occasionally advises on scientific projects at the request of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, Oxford and Cambridge University Press, the German Research Foundation (DFG), etc.
