Adriaan Johan Boudewijn Sirks (born 14 September 1947), known as Boudewijn Sirks and as A. J. B. Sirks, is a Dutch academic lawyer and legal historian specializing in Roman law. He was Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2014.

Early life

Sirks was born in The Hague, Netherlands. He studied law at the Leiden University, graduating with a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in 1972. He then studied theology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, where he later graduated with as Doctor of Law in 1984. In 2014 he was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (RNL) and in 2021 he became Doctor of Civil Law (Oxon.).

Career

Sirks's first academic position was as research assistant in philosophy of culture and esthetics at Amsterdam in 1975. In 1978 he was appointed Lecturer in Legal History at the University of Utrecht, where he was later promoted Senior Lecturer in Legal Techniques. At the same time, he was writing a thesis for a doctoral degree in law at the University of Amsterdam. He returned to Amsterdam in 1989 as Reader and acting Professor of Legal Techniques. In 1997, Sirks became Professor of Legal History and (German) Civil Law (the chair of the late Helmut Coing), later renamed into History of Ancient Law, History of European Private Law, and (German) Civil Law, at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. In 2002 he was elected correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2005, Sirks was appointed as the Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford, with effect from 1 February 2006, in succession to the late Peter Birks. At the same time he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He retired from the chair in 2014, but is still Fellow of All Souls College. Sirks has also been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas, and Visiting Professor at the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile. In 2018/2019 and in 2022 he taught at the University of Bonn. He is an Editor of the Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Legal History Review. He is further a Member of the Direttivo of the Associazione Storico-Giuridico Costantiniana.

Published work

Professor Sirks's research interests span civil law, European private law, Roman law and papyrology. He has published work on a variety of subjects related to law, papyrology, and the ancient world, including archaic Roman law, matters of classical private law, the administrative and public law of the later Roman Empire and the reception of Roman law in Europe and in the former Dutch East Indies. He is co-author of the standard edition of the Pommersfelden Papyri. The Theodosian Code and the colonate in the Roman empire are particularly subjects of research. His Food for Rome: the Legal Structure of the Transportation and Processing of Supplies for the Imperial Distributions in Rome and Constantinople (1991) developed from the thesis for his doctoral degree at Amsterdam, completed in 1984. Following the death of the Dutch papyrologist Pieter Johannes Sijpesteijn in 1996, Sirks edited with K. A. Worp a collection of previously unpublished papyri dedicated to Sijpesteijn's memory by his fellow papyrologists, including papyri from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, to reflect Sijpesteijn's wide interests.

Selected publications