Alexandra Braun

Alexandra Braun holds the Lord President Reid Chair in Law at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Braun completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Genoa and received a PhD in Comparative Private Law from the University of Trento. Prior to joining Edinburgh Law School in August 2017, she was Professor of Comparative Private Law at the University of Oxford, as well as a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford). From 2004-2007 she was a Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. 

Professor Braun is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law in Oxford and an Honorary Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is also an elected Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Since 1 January 2021 she is Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Private Law of the University of Stellenbosch.

Professor Braun is a Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law and the Series Editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Law series published by Edinburgh University Press. She is also the Programme Director of the LLM in Comparative and European Private Law.

Professor Braun has broad research interests in comparative law and legal history. Her current research focuses primarily on the comparative study of both succession law and the law of trusts, as well as on the study of the circulation of legal ideas across legal traditions. She has recently completed a monograph that provides a comparative study of broken promises of an inheritance, to be published with Oxford University Press in 2022. 

Professor Braun is also interested in the impact of the transfer of wealth on questions of intergenerational equality and the cultural history of inheritance. Other interests include legal education, the study of the intellectual history of the law, and the development of various forms of legal scholarship and its interaction with, and impact upon, judicial decision-making.

In 2013/2014 Professor Braun was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers spending time both at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. Her research has also been funded by the British Academy and the John Fell Fund (Oxford).