Boudewijn Sirks
Adriaan Johan Boudewijn Sirks (born 14 September 1947), known as Boudewijn Sirks and as A. J. B. Sirks, is a Dutch academic lawyer and legal historian specializing in Roman law. He was Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2014. Early life. Sirks was born in The Hague, Netherlands. He studied law at the University of Leiden, graduating with a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in 1972. He then studied theology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, where he later graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in law in 1984 . In 2021 he became Doctor of Civil Law (Oxon.) Career. Sirks's first academic position was as research assistant in philosophy at Amsterdam. In 1978 he was appointed as Lecturer in Legal History at the University of Utrecht, where he was later promoted Senior Lecturer in Legal Techniques. At the same time, he was writing a thesis for a doctoral degree in law at the University of Amsterdam. He returned to Amsterdam in 1989 as Reader and acting Professor of Legal Techniques. In 1997, Sirks became Professor of Legal History and German Private Law (the chair of the late Helmut  Coing), later changed into the History of Ancient Law, of the History of European Private Law, and of German Civil Law, at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. In 2002 Sirks became a correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2005, HM The Queen appointed him as the Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford, with effect from 1 February 2006. At the same time, he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford., in succession to the late Professor Peter Birks. Sirks has also been a visiting  scholar at Columbia University, New York, Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas, and Visiting Professor at the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile. He is an Editor of the "Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Legal History Review", and a Vice-President of the Accademia Storico-Giuridico Costantiniana. Published work. Professor Sirks's research interests span civil law, European private law, Roman law and papyrology. He has published work on a variety of subjects related to law, papyrology, and the ancient world, including archaic Roman law, matters of classical private law, the administrative and public law of the later Roman Empire  and the reception of Roman law in Europe and in the former Dutch East Indies. He is co-author of the standard edition of the Pommersfelden Papyri. His "Food for Rome: the Legal Structure of the Transportation and Processing of Supplies for the Imperial Distributions in Rome and Constantinople" (1991) developed from the thesis for his doctoral degree at Amsterdam, completed in 1984. Following the death of the Dutch papyrologist Pieter Johannes Sijpesteijn in 1996, Sirks edited with K. A. Worp a collection of previously unpublished papyri dedicated to Sijpesteijn's memory by his fellow papyrologists, including papyri from the  Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, to reflect Sijpesteijn's wide interests.