Professor Alexandra Braun
Lord President Reid Chair of Law
Director of Centre for Private Law
By Appointment
Tel: +44 (0)131 651 5560
Email: Alexandra.Braun@ed.ac.uk
View my publicationsAlexandra 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. Between 2004 and 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 as well as an Academic Member of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law. Since 1 January 2021 she is Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Private Law of the University of Stellenbosch.
Professor Braun is the Programme Director of the LLM in Comparative Private Law, Co-Editor of the Edinburgh Private Law Blog, and the Editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Law series published by Edinburgh University Press. She has previously acted as the Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Impact (2018 -2020 and 2022) and as Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law (2021-2024).
Professor Braun has broad research interests in the comparative study of law and legal history. She is particularly interested in topics at the intersection of more than one area of the law and the liminal spaces that law creates. Her current research focuses primarily on the comparative study of succession law, the law of trusts and the law of gifts, as well as on the study of the circulation of legal ideas across legal traditions. Her work further explores the power relationships that underpin succession, trusts and gifts. Professor Braun’s monograph Claiming a Promised Inheritance: A Comparative Study (published by Oxford University Press in 2022) was selected as one of the “Law Books of the Year’’ in the German law journal JuristenZeitung in 2023.
Professor Braun is also interested in death studies, the informal aspects of succession planning and of the transfer of wealth of death, as well as the impact of inheritance on questions of intergenerational equality. Her inaugural lecture on ‘Testamentary Responsibility’ published in the Edinburgh Law Review in 2024challenges testamentary freedom as the organising principle of succession law by bringing into sharper focus ‘responsibility’ as another important value in this field.
Other research 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).
Professor Braun has broad teaching interests. At Undergraduate level she teaches the following courses: ‘Gifts in Context’, ‘Death and the Law’ and ‘Succession and Trust Law’, She further teaches ‘Comparative and International Trusts Law’ and ‘Fundamentals of Comparative Private Law’ at LLM level and UG level.
