By Prof Paula Giliker, Professor of Comparative Law (University of Bristol Law School) and President of the British Association of Comparative Law.
Professor Bernard Rudden DCL, LLD, FBA was Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford from 1979-1999 and Professorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. On 6 September 2016, the British Association of Comparative Law (BACL) held its annual seminar in his honour at St. Catherine’s College Oxford. Its theme was: ‘Bernard Rudden – Comparativist, Legal Scholar, Polymath’.
Professor Rudden, a noted comparative private lawyer, passed away on 4 March 2015, aged 81. His obituary in The Times newspaper described him as a “legal polymath who published extensively on Soviet law”, but the seminar sought to go beyond this succinct description and identify not only Rudden’s contribution to comparative law scholarship but also his impact as a friend, colleague, teacher of law and mentor to numerous comparative law academics. (more…)