The Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria congratulates Professor Elsabe Schoeman on her appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Law for the term 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2023.  Prof Schoeman is the successor-in-title of former Dean Professor André Boraine, whose second term concluded on 31 October 2019.  More notably is the fact that Prof Schoeman is the first woman to be appointed as Dean in the Faculty of Law after more than a century of its existence, marking her appointment as a significant milestone for the Faculty.

Prof Schoeman has been a professor in the Department of Private Law since 2016 and holds the degrees BLC (Pret) LLB (cum laude) LLD (Unisa). The title of her LLD thesis is “Domicile and Jurisdiction as Criteria in External Conflict of Laws”. She is admitted as Advocate of the High Court of South Africa.

Prior to her joining the Faculty of Law in 2016, Prof Schoeman was a member of the Law School at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) for fourteen years, where she served as Deputy Dean of the Faculty and Deputy Director of the cross-faculty Europe Institute. Before taking up her academic position at the University of Auckland in 2002, she spent a year at the Institut für internationales und ausländisches Privatrecht (University of Cologne) as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Prior to that she was a professor in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of South Africa.

Her main areas of research are jurisdiction in cross-border civil and commercial litigation and choice of law in contract, delict/tort and selected areas of family law. She has made contributions to international legal encyclopaedias in her areas of interest, as well as submissions to law commissions (in South Africa and New Zealand) and she regularly advises law firms on transnational litigation in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany.