Biographical note

Alfonso-Luis Calvo Caravaca studied law at the University of Murcia (LLM, Extraordinary Award, 1976) and at the University of Bologna (PhD, Vittorio Emanuele II Award, 1978). He has been Professor of Private International Law at the University Carlos III of Madrid since 1992. He was formerly Professor of Private International law at the University Autónoma of Madrid and at the University of Murcia, and visiting professor at São Paulo State University (1993), at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, D.F. (2001), and at the School of Law of the University of Bologna (2012). Since 2009 he has been co-director of Cuadernos de Derecho Transnacional (CDT), which is published by the University Carlos III in Madrid, and, since 2005, he has been a Permanent Member of the General Codification Commission (Civil section) at the Spanish Ministry of Justice. He is a member of Hamburger Freunde des Max Planck Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht since 1988, a Fellow of the European Law Institute since 2012 and a titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) since 2015. He is author, co-author, editor or co-editor of about three hundred publications in the fields of private international law, EU antitrust law and international commercial law, notable of which include Derecho Internacional Privado, Volume 1 and Derecho Internacional Privado, Volume 2 (both with Javier Carrascosa González), now in their 15th edition. Angelo Davì is Professor of Private International Law and Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University 'La Sapienza' in Rome. He was formerly a professor in the Universities of Cagliari, Catania and Florence. He was a member of the Italian Delegation at the XVIth Session of the Hague Conference of Private International Law in 1988, when the Succession and Wills Draft Convention was adopted. He was invited in 2004 to present a report on the issue of applicable law at the Conference held in Brussels for discussing the study 'Conflict of Law of Succession in the European Union: Perspectives for a Harmonisation' made by the Deutscher Notarinstitut, upon request of the EU Commission, in view of the adoption of an EU regulation on matters of succession and wills. He is author of several monographs and articles in legal journals in the areas of private international law, public international law and European law, and author of a comprehensive commentary of the EU Succession Regulation together with Alessandra Zanobetti, published in 2014. He is a lecturer at the Hague Academy of International Law. His course 'Le renvoi en droit international privé contemporain', published in the Academy Collected Courses in 2012 (vol. 352), was awarded the prize for 2013 by the Italian Ministry of Culture, upon selection by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. He is a member of the Italian Bar (Rome) and is admitted to practice before the Italian Supreme Court. Professor Dr Heinz-Peter Mansel is the director of the Institute of Foreign Private and Private International Law at the University of Cologne and holds the Chair for Private Law, Private International Law, Comparative Law and Civil Procedure Law. He holds a guest professorship at Wuhan University, China and the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Fellow of the European Law Institute. He was a Legal Expert for the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament (Successions and Wills, 2005), lecturer at the Hague Academy of International Law (1998, 2008) and President of the German Council of Private International Law (Scientific Council in connection with the German Ministry of Justice). He is a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, the Società Italiana degli Studiosi del Diritto Civile and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. He is managing editor of the journal Praxis des Internationalen Privat- und Verfahrensrechts (IPRax).