Arthur Hartkamp - Biography#

Hartkamp began his career as assistant of Roman Law in the University of Amsterdam (1968-1974) and wrote his thesis in that field (Der Zwang im römischen Privatrecht, 1971).

He then became one of the leading members of the Civil Code Revision Office (Dutch New Civil Code, 1992) (1974-1989).

He was an Advocate General (1986 - 2001) and Procureur General (2001-2006) at the Dutch Supreme Court, writing approximately 1000 opinions in private law cases.

Next to his work in legal practice he wrote important commentaries on the Dutch law of Obligations (24 volumes since 1984) and he acted as a part time professor at the Universities of Utrecht (1991-1999) and Amsterdam (1999-2006), where he worked on comparative contract law. In that field he has been active for a long time in, among other things, the Commission on European Contract Law ('Lando Commission') and in the UNIDROIT Working Group on Principles of International Commercial Contracts.

In 2006 he returned full time to the university (Radboud University Nijmegen) and set up a research group and various research projects on the way European treaty law influences national private law. Strange as it may seem, this was at that time an almost completely unexplored field of research. He wrote extensively on the subject, both nationally and internationally. The publications offer new scholarly insights; at the same time he writes and lectures for the benefit of practising lawyers and judges.