For the past several decades, Wolfgang Fikentscher was recognized internationally as one of Germany's great legal scholars. After his studies in Erlangen and Munich, his career path led through the Universities of Münster and Tübingen to a professorship at the Faculty of Law of the University of Munich. Parallel to his function as External Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, he chaired the Commission for Studies in Cultural Anthropology within the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He was also the Director of the Munich Office of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. His wide range of international experience included LL.M. studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as well as guest professorships and fellowships in places as diverse as Georgetown University, Ann Arbor, Yale, Nanjing, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Santa Fe Institute and not least at the University of California at Berkeley, where several years into his retirement he still regularly taught law and anthropology. Among the many honors he received are an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, the German Order of Merit First Class, the Bavarian Order of Merit and a Max Planck Research Prize for the research in law and anthropology he carried out with his friend Robert Cooter.
Wolfgang Fikentscher actively promoted many young scholars. With his vision and his wealth of ideas, he enriched the thinking of many students and doctoral candidates. Up until his death he always enjoyed exchanging ideas with the many scholarship holders and guest researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.
To describe Wolfgang Fikentscher as an expert in civil law and economic law, as a methodologist and a legal anthropologist, would not do full justice to his work. This work reflects not only an astonishingly wide range of interests both within law and across disciplines, but also his incredible visionary power. His central publications were regularly ahead of their time.
This is also true of the projects he conducted in association with the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Long before competition law was fully established as a field of research at the Institute in 2002, it was he who promoted the conviction that research in intellectual property law needed to be complemented by competition law. For many years, he headed a research group at the Institute on the transfer of technology. Among his great accomplishments in this area are his two-volume textbook on national, European and international economic law (Wirtschaftsrecht), which was translated into Chinese, his collaboration with UNCTAD on the development and drafting of a Code of Conduct on Transfer of Technology (TOT Code), and finally the text prepared on his initiative by an international group of scholars for an international competition law agreement (Draft International Antitrust Code) in 1993. This so-called "Munich Code" grew out of his firm belief that, ultimately, even the emerging WTO system needs binding competition rules.
In the years following his retirement, Professor Emeritus Wolfgang Fikentscher was most passionate about law and anthropology. His endeavor in this field to always conceptualize legal issues concerning the regulation of the economy from the perspective of the individual, by taking into account the individual's freedom to act and his or her roots in a certain culture, stands for Wolfgang Fikentscher the humanist. His conviction that the economy too must have rules to ensure that business serves people, and not the other way around, has found renewed support in the wake of the latest banking and economic crises. Wolfgang Fikentscher never stopped working to find solutions to the fundamental economic problems of mankind. In one of his last contributions, under the title "FairEconomy", he proposed an alternative approach to respond to the current economic and financial crisis by particularly building on his anthropological insights.
The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition mourns the loss of a great scholar and a highly dedicated and supportive colleague whose openness to new ideas, diverse cultures and human beings in particular will be remembered by all. His sudden death fills us with sorrow. We extend our condolences to his family, above all to his wife Irmgard and his children and grandchildren.