Prof. Dr. Jan Dirk Harke

Jan Dirk Harke was born in Düsseldorf in 1969 and studied law at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg in Breisgau from 1991 to 1994, where he worked as an assistant at the Institute for Legal History after passing the First State Examination. His legal clerkship at the Regional Court of Freiburg was followed in 1998 by the Second State Examination and a doctorate based on a thesis on the method of the famous Roman jurist Celsus. From 1998 to 2000, Harke worked as an attorney in the Berlin office of a large international law firm. Thereafter, as a postdoctoral fellow of the German Research Foundation under the supervision of Ulrich Manthe (Passau), he wrote a habilitation thesis on the doctrine of mistake in classical Roman contract law. The habilitation by the Law Faculty of the University of Passau took place in 2003. In the same year, Harke received a call to the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, where he held the chair of Civil Law, Roman Law and Historical Comparative Law until 2016. After turning down a call to the University of Göttingen, Harke accepted a call to the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in 2016. From 2009 to 2016, Harke was a judge at the Nuremberg appeal court. Since 2016, he has served as judge at the Thuringian Court of Appeal. He is currently Dean of the Jena Faculty of Law.