Eric Descheemaeker

Professor Eric Descheemaeker is a private lawyer at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, where he joined as Professor in 2017, having previously been Reader in European Private Law at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from France, he studied law at Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees, followed by an LL.M. at the London School of Economics and a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, where he served as a Fellow of St Catherine’s College for five years. His doctoral dissertation was published as The Division of Wrongs: A Historical Comparative Study (Oxford University Press, 2009). Descheemaeker holds honorary positions as Visiting Research Fellow of the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, Research Scholar at the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law at McGill University, and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town. He has held visiting appointments including Herbert Smith Freehills Visitor at the University of Cambridge (2017), visitor at Paris-II Panthéon-Assas University (2016), Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Queensland (2015), visitor at Sciences Po Paris (2012), and at the University of Pennsylvania (2004).

Descheemaeker’s main interests lie in non-contractual obligations, including tort and unjust enrichment, and their comparative legal history in common-law, civilian, and mixed systems. He has written extensively on defamation and privacy, damages, unjustified enrichment, and structural issues in private law. Key publications include Pecuniary and Non-Pecuniary Loss: A Reinterpretation (Law Quarterly Review, 2022), Legal Persons and the Right to Privacy (Cambridge Law Journal, 2024), Against Normative Damages (Current Legal Problems, 2023), Iniuria and the Common Law, and Obligations quasi ex delicto and strict liability in Roman law. He received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2012) for a project on reconstructing the law of defamation and was elected to the International Academy of Comparative Law (2012). Descheemaeker is book reviews editor for the Revue trimestrielle de droit civil, the leading private law journal in the French-speaking world, and serves on the editorial boards of the Revue marocaine d’histoire du droit, Revue Tribonien, and Revue trimestrielle de droit civil. He founded and formerly organised the Oxford French Law Moot, now in its 10th edition.

Professional Email: eric.descheemaeker@unimelb.edu.au