Wim Decock

Wim Decock (1983) holds the chair in 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 Flemish University of Louvain (KU Leuven) in Leuven. From 2012 through 2014 he led a junior research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. Decock received his PhD in law in 2011 from the universities of Roma Tre and KU Leuven with a dissertation on the theological origins of contract law that won several prizes, including the H. M.-Leibnitz-Prize 2014 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Michael Novak Award 2017. In 2020, he was awarded the VWS-Prize 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 University, summa cum laude). Since 2021, he is a member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels.