Ernst Rabel (January 28, 1874 – September 7, 1955) was an Austrian-born American scholar of Roman law, German private law, and comparative law, who, as the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law, in Berlin, achieved international recognition in the period between the World Wars, before being forced into retirement under the Nazi regime, and emigrating to the United States, in 1939. In the field of comparative law his methodological perspectives, particularly as articulated and disseminated by his students, including , , and Max Rheinstein, were influential in the development of the "functional" or "function/context" methodology that became standard in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world, in the post-World War II era. His work in Germany in the 1930s in the area of the law of the sale of goods provided a model for later postwar efforts to develop a uniform world-wide sales law.
Biography
Ernst Rabel was born in Vienna, as the son of Albert Rabel and Bertha Rabel (née Ettinger). His father was a distinguished Austrian attorney in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Rabel studied law at the University of Vienna, and received his Ph.D. there in December 1895. His dissertation, written under , was entitled "Die Übertragbarkeit des Urheberrechts nach dem österreichischen Gesetzes vom 26. December 1895" (The transferability of copyright under the Austrian act of December 26, 1895; published 1899). Rabel initially entered law practice with his father, in Vienna, but when his mentor Mitteis moved to the University of Leipzig in 1899, Rabel followed, and continued his studies there. Upon completion of his Habilitation, in 1902, with his work "Die Haftung des Verkäufers wegen Mangels im Rechte" (The seller's liability for failure to deliver conforming goods), he began teaching law at Leipzig as a junior faculty member (Privatdozent), and in 1904 was appointed professor (extraordinarius) of Roman law and German private law.
In 1906 Rabel took up a post as a full professor (ordinarius) at the University of Basel. After a few years he returned to Germany, joining the law faculty in Kiel in 1910, then Göttingen in 1911. It was at the University of Munich, where he was appointed in 1916, that he shifted his focus from legal history to comparative law. He co-founded, with Karl Neumeyer, Munich's Institute for Comparative Law (Institut für Rechtsvergleichung), which was the first of its kind in Germany and served as a model for similar institutes later founded in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. Most famously, his expertise in the field of comparative law led to his appointment, in 1926, as director of the newly created Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht), in Berlin, one of the several independent research institutes founded by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. In the postwar period it became the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (located in Hamburg beginning in 1956).
Rabel was also called upon to serve as a judge on several international judicial bodies during the interwar period. From 1921 to 1927 he was a judge for the German-Italian Mixed Arbitral Tribunal, which had jurisdiction over reparation claims against the German Empire, as well as controversies among private parties arising from contracts interrupted by wartime conditions; and from 1925 to 1928, he was an ad hoc judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice, serving in the Chorzów cases, among others. Later he served on the Permanent German-Italian (1928–1935) and German-Norwegian (1929–1936) Arbitral Commissions.
As a member of the governing council of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), from 1928 to 1933, Rabel initiated discussions concerning unification of rules of law for international sales transactions, which culminated in a report to the League of Nations in 1934. These efforts, as well as his own scholarly work on the law of the sale of goods (Das Recht des Warenkaufs, 1936), were a precursor to what became the proposed convention relating to a "Uniform Law on International Sales," adopted at a diplomatic conference in The Hague in 1964.