Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht (RabelsZ)
The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law
Journal of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg
Edited by:
Holger Fleischer, Ralf Michaels, Anne Röthel (Max Planck Institute),
Jens Kleinschmidt (University of Trier), Wolfgang Wurmnest (University of Hamburg)
Volume 90 (2026) / Price per volume (4 issues with approx. 820 pages)
The journal was founded in 1927 by Ernst Rabel. Continuing in its original tradition, it serves today as a global forum for scholarly exchange in the fields of private international law and international civil procedure, comparative law, and transnational private law. Articles on central topics written by authors from around the world are published in German, English, or French under an open-access model.
Open Access
Since 2024 Rabels Zeitschrift has appeared in open access under a CC license as part of a subscribe-to-open model (S2O).
The subscribe-to-open model (S2O) is fair and sustainable, being based on tried and tested structures and existing partnerships between the publisher and a journal’s institutional subscribers. The institutional subscriber base enables the transition to open access and thus free access for all readers by simply continuing the subscription as before. If the required threshold of institutional subscribers is not reached in a given year, the following volume will be published again behind the paywall in order to ensure the long-term economic stability of the journal. There is no article processing charge (APC) for contributors and publication in an S2O journal is free of charge. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link or use the full texts of the articles for any lawful purpose in accordance with the CC license without first obtaining permission from the publisher or author. This is in line with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access.