Born in Athens of Venetian descent, he trained as a lawyer in Athens, Paris, and Cambridge (England). Sir Basil, who has a part-time practice as a barrister in London, held senior teaching positions in Cambridge (Fellow of Trinity College), Oxford (where he held, first, the Chair of European Law and, later, the Chair of Comparative Law) before being elected to the Chair of Common and Civil Law of University College London, a post he holds jointly with the Jamail Regents Chair at The University of Texas at Austin. In a career which spans nearly forty years he has authored or co-authored twenty-nine books and over one hundred and twenty law articles published in major law journals all over the world. He has given named lectures in some twenty-five universities and has taught (in some instances several times) as Visiting Professor at the Universities of Athens, Cornell, Ghent, Ecole Normale Superieure (France), Leiden, Michigan, Munich, Paris I and II, Rome, and Siena. His work has been recognised by doctorates and honorary doctorates from (in alphabetical order) the Universities of Athens, Cambridge, Ghent, Munich, Paris (Sorbonne), and Oxford, and his election as Ordinary or Foreign Fellow of the Academies of Athens, Belgium, Britain, France (Institute de France, Academie des Sciences Morales et Politques), Netherlands, and Rome (Academia dei Lincei). He is also a Member of the American Law Institute. The Presidents of four European countries have honoured his work on comparative law and European integration by awarding him the insignia of Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit (Italy), Knight Commander of the Order of Merit (Germany), Commandeur de la Legion d’honeur (France), Officier des Palmes Academiques (France), and Commander of the Order of Honour (Greece). He was made Knight Bachelor by H. M. Queen Elizabeth II in the New Years Honours List of 2005 for “Services to International Legal Relations.”
Sir Basil is married to Eugenie (née Trypanis), by birth half-American and half-Greek, and has two children, Julietta (who read history and languages) and Spyro George (who practices law in London as a Solicitor at the international law firm of Richards Butler Plc.).
Dr Jörg Fedtke was born in Tanzania, educated at schools in Zambia, the Philippines, and Germany, and went on to study law and political science at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He was awarded a Ph.D summa cum laude for a ground-breaking analysis of constitutional legal transplants in South Africa, written under the guidance of Professor Ingo von Munch in Hamburg, one of Germany’s leading constitutional lawyers. Entitled “Legal Transplants in Constitutional Law” and written largely at the Institute of Foreign and Comparative Law at the University of South Africa in Tshwane (then Pretoria), this project brought him in close contact with judges at the newly-founded Constitutional Court of South Africa and academic experts involved in the drafting of the two South African Constitutions of 1993 and 1996.
Dr Fedtke joined the Institute for Foreign and International Private Law and Law of Procedure at the University of Hamburg in 2000, where he worked as a researcher and collaborator (with Professor Ulrich Magnus) for the Vienna-based European Group on Tort Law, which published its “Principles of European Tort Law” in April 2005. He is a Fellow of the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law in Vienna and the German reporter at the Centre’s annual conferences on developments in European tort law.
Dr Fedtke joined University College London as Clifford Chance/DAAD Lecturer in German Law in September 2001. Promoted to a Readership in 2004, he is Director of UCL’s prestigious Institute of Global Law. In 2005 he was invited to act as an external advisor in the constitutional negotiations in Iraq and participated in conferences and workshops organised in Amman/Jordan and Cologne/Germany within the framework of the ‘Democratisation Assistance Programme’ of the German Foreign Office. Dr Fedtke is also a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin since 2003, where he regularly teaches courses on comparative constitutional law and European Union law. Dr Fedtke, who specializes in both comparative public and private law, has written extensively in both areas. Most recently he edited and contributed to a volume on Patterns of Federalism and Regionalism (Hart Publishing, Oxford and Oregon).