Ernst Rabel was born in
Vienna, as the son of Albert Rabel and Bertha Rabel (née Ettinger). His father was a distinguished Austrian attorney in the era of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rabel studied law at the
University of Vienna, and received his Ph.D. there in December 1895. His dissertation, written under , was entitled "Die Übertragbarkeit des Urheberrechts nach dem österreichischen Gesetzes vom 26. December 1895" (The transferability of copyright under the Austrian act of December 26, 1895; published 1899). Rabel initially entered law practice with his father, in Vienna, but when his mentor Mitteis moved to the
University of Leipzig in 1899, Rabel followed, and continued his studies there. Upon completion of his
Habilitation, in 1902, with his work "Die Haftung des Verkäufers wegen Mangels im Rechte" (The seller's liability for failure to deliver conforming goods), he began teaching law at Leipzig as a junior faculty member (
Privatdozent), and in 1904 was appointed professor (extraordinarius) of Roman law and German private law. In 1906 Rabel took up a post as a full professor (ordinarius) at the
University of Basel. After a few years he returned to Germany, joining the law faculty in
Kiel in 1910, then
Göttingen in 1911. He co-founded, with Karl Neumeyer, Munich's Institute for Comparative Law (Institut für Rechtsvergleichung), which was the first of its kind in Germany and served as a model for similar institutes later founded in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. Most famously, his expertise in the field of comparative law led to his appointment, in 1926, as director of the newly created Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht), in Berlin, one of the several independent research institutes founded by the
Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Rabel was also called upon to serve as a judge on several international judicial bodies during the interwar period. From 1921 to 1927 he was a judge for the German-Italian Mixed Arbitral Tribunal, which had jurisdiction over reparation claims against the
German Empire, as well as controversies among private parties arising from contracts interrupted by wartime conditions; and from 1925 to 1928, he was an ad hoc judge on the
Permanent Court of International Justice, serving in the
Chorzów cases, among others. Later he served on the Permanent German-Italian (1928–1935) and German-Norwegian (1929–1936) Arbitral Commissions. These efforts, as well as his own scholarly work on the law of the sale of goods (
Das Recht des Warenkaufs, 1936), were a precursor to what became the proposed convention relating to a "Uniform Law on International Sales," adopted at a diplomatic conference in
The Hague in 1964.). Having been employed in the German
civil service since before the First World War (since his position in Leipzig in 1904), he initially fell under one of the exceptions in the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 1933, which forced many other Jews from their positions; however, his resignation was compelled under the terms of the Law of the Reich Citizen (Reichsbürgergesetz), part of the
Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, which deprived Jews of German citizenship and eliminated once and for all the possibility of Jews serving in public office, or the civil service. In February 1937 he resigned as director of the Institute he had founded. He finally emigrated with his family via Belgium, to the United States, arriving in New York City in September 1939. In the United States, he continued his work and supported himself through research grants that he received from the
American Law Institute (ALI), the
University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, and
Harvard Law School. In 1942 Rabel and German
émigré colleague
Karl Loewenstein were among those invited by the ALI to join an international experts' committee charged with preparing a global restatement of 'essential
human rights.' The document that the ALI committee formulated later was an important point of reference in the drafting of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the
United Nations. After the war, while resident in the United States, Rabel completed what is considered to be his
magnum opus,
The Conflict of Laws: A Comparative Study, a four-volume work. At some point during this period he became an American citizen. While abroad, he died in a hospital in
Zurich, Switzerland, on September 7, 1955. ==Personal life==