Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Kieninger
Professional career
Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Kieninger studied law at the University of Passau and King's College, London (1983-1989). After completing her legal training and passing the Second State Examination in Law (1992), she worked as a research assistant at the University of Augsburg (1992-1995) and at the Free University of Berlin (1995-1997), both under Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Jürgen Basedow.
She obtained her doctorate in 1995 with a thesis on ‘Mobiliarsicherheiten im Europäischen Binnenmarkt’ (Movable Property Securities in the European Single Market). From 1997 to 1998, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and from 1999 to 2001, she was a postdoctoral fellow of the German Research Foundation. In July 2001, she was awarded her postdoctoral qualification by the Faculty of Law at the University of Hamburg in the subjects of civil law, commercial and corporate law, comparative law and private international law and procedural law with a thesis on ‘Competition between legal systems and the European single market’.
Since December 2001, she has held the Chair of German and European Private Law and International Private Law at the University of Würzburg. She declined a parallel appointment offer from the University of Jena (2001) as well as appointments from the Universities of Zurich (2008) and Marburg (2009).
From 2012 to 2014, she was Vice-Dean and from 2014 to 2016 Dean of the Faculty of Law at JMU Würzburg. From 2011 to 2015, she was a member of the University Council of the University of Passau. Since 2021, she has been a member of the committee for the awarding of Humboldt Research Prizes and, since 2023, a member of the advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg.
Prof. Dr. Kieninger is a member of the German Council on Private International Law (since 2003), the Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé (since 2009), the European Law Institute, the Council of the German Society of International Law (since 2013) and the Executive Board of the Society for Comparative Law (since 2023), among others. From 2017 to 2023, she was Vice-President of the German Society of International Law. She is a co-founder and was a member of the Scientific Council of the European Association of Private International Law.
Ms Kieninger is a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Akademia Europaea. On 1 February 2026, Ms Kieninger was appointed a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities by the Federal President.
Prof. Dr. Kieninger is co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht (ZEuP), the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Privatrechtswissenschaft (ZfPW) and the European Property Law Journal (EPLJ).
Main areas of research:
- International private law with a focus on property law
- International credit security law
- European private law
- Sustainability and private law
- Human Rights due diligence in supply chains
- Climate change litigation
