The team is led by Alexander Hellgardt, professor of civil law at University of Augsburg. Alexander read law and philosophy at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. He passed his First State Exam in Law in 2003 and clerked for the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court Hamburg, to take the Second State Exam in Law in 2008. During this period, he was a research associate for Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Klaus J. Hopt at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and obtained a PhD in Law also in 2008 from the University of Hamburg. He then moved to the USA to obtain an LLM from Harvard Law School. After returning to Europe, he has joined the team of  Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Wolfgang Schön at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich where he continues to be affiliated until today. In 2015 he has obtained his Habilitation at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He held an interim professorship at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and from 2017 until 2024 he held the Chair of Private Law, Corporate Law and Jurisprudence at the University of Regensburg. Since October 2024 he holds the Chair of Private Law at the University of Augsburg. He has visited the Oxford Faculty of Law in 2012 and 2022. Not to take sides on the famous feud, he also visited the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge in 2016.