Sébastien De Rey is Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches specific contracts, contract law and European contract law. He is also Professor at UCLouvain and teaches the law of obligations at the Royal Military Academy. His research covers comparative contract law and torts, with a particular focus on sanctions and remedies and private law enforcement. He was also appointed by ministerial decree as member of the Commission for the Reform of the Belgian Civil Code, subcommittee for the Book on Nominate Contracts.
After completing his law studies in Kortrijk, Leuven and Switzerland (magna cum laude, 2014), he defended his PhD at KU Leuven in 2018 entitled ‘Non-Monetary Relief’ (Bruges, die Keure, 2019, xxxvi + 927 p.), supervised by Bernard Tilleman and Sophie Stijns, for which he was granted a pre-doctoral fellowship by the Research Foundation Flanders. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Leiden (2016), the Max-Planck-Institüt fur ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht in Hamburg (2016), the University of Zurich (2017) and the University of Paris II - Panthéon-Assas (2018) and participated in the Programme in European Private Law for Postgraduates (Cambridge, Münster, Krakow and Valencia, 2016-'17). Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher: first at the City University of Hong Kong, Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law, with research on the new Chinese Civil Code (2019-'20), then at KU Leuven on a project on private enforcement of non-discrimination law (2020-2022).
He is a member of the International Network for Law and Apology Research, fellow at the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law, City University of Hong Kong, member of the Séminaire Franco-belge en droit des obligations (Paris I - Sorbonne and UCLouvain) and affiliated researcher at the Institute for the Law of Obligations, KU Leuven. He is a member of the editorial board of the bilingual Belgian Journal for Civil Law (TBBR/RGDC) and referee of the Dutch Journal voor Private Law (NTBR). In 2017, he was awarded the TPR-prize for his publication ‘Sorry?! Compelled Apologies under the Law of Torts’ (TPR 2017, pp. 1153-1213). He regularly provides expert opinions in his area of expertise.