W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture 2026

The Edinburgh Centre for Private Law presents

The W.A. Wilson Memorial Lecture: “Adoption and the Power of Law: Lessons from a Comparative Study” to be delivered by Prof. Dr. Anne Röthel, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany.

About the lecture

We are delighted to invite you to join us for this year’s W.A.Wilson Memorial Lecture, delivered by Prof. Dr. Anne Röthel, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany.

Adoption reconfigures the legal family. This increasingly evokes mixed feelings. On the one hand, adoption stands for autonomy and plurality; on the other, it reaffirms the power of the law to define what constitutes a legal family. Hence, the concept of adoption is caught between the ideal of ‘elective affinities’ and the ‘dilemma of difference’.

This lecture surveys adoption frameworks across diverse legal traditions, tracing key developments, prevailing narratives, and ongoing scholarly debates. It argues that our judgments about adoption also depend on the legal and sociocultural context, and on the ‘doing’ of adoption.

About the speaker

Prof. Dr. Anne Röthel is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany. Prior to joining the Max Planck Institute in January 2024, she was Professor of Civil Law, European Private Law, and International Private Law at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. Professor Dr. Röthel received a doctorate in constitutional law from the University of Trier and completed her postgraduate studies in 2004 with a study on legal methods and European private law. Her main fields of research are family law and the law of persons, comparative law, and interdisciplinarity in law all areas in which she has published widely. She is inter alia a member of the Association Henri Capitant, and the Göttingen

Academy of Sciences. Professor Röthel is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh.

About W.A. (Bill) Wilson

WA (Bill) Wilson (1928-1994) taught law at the University of Edinburgh from 1960 until his death in 1994 at the age of 65. From 1972 onwards he was the Lord President Reid Professor of Law. His academic interests were exceptionally wide. A memoir of Bill Wilson forms the first chapter of a series of essays which were published in his memory: see Hector L MacQueen (ed), "Scots Law into the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of WA Wilson" (1996).

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

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