Manfred Weiss

Manfred Weiss was born on 1 June 1940 in Tuttlingen, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. He studied law at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg between 1960 and 1964.

In 1965 and 1966 he was a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in American legal thinking led to his doctoral dissertation on the theory of judicial decision making in the United States, accepted by the law and economics faculty of the University of Giessen in 1970 and published in 1971.

After his doctorate Weiss worked at the University of Frankfurt am Main as a research assistant until 1972 and then as a lecturer. In 1974 he was appointed to the chair of labour and civil law at the University of Hamburg, and in 1977 he returned to Frankfurt to take the chair of civil law and labour law at the Goethe University, a post he held until his retirement as professor emeritus on 1 October 2008.

He maintained extensive international contacts, above all with South Africa, where he was an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town and an extraordinary professor at the universities of Stellenbosch and the Western Cape. He held extended visiting professorships in France, Belgium and the United States and was a faculty member of annual international seminars in Szeged, Bordeaux, Bologna, Vilnius and Venice.

Weiss was a member of the standing deputation of the Deutscher Juristentag, the German Jurists Forum, from 1990 to 2002 and its vice president from 1998 to 2002. He was president of the German Industrial Relations Association from 1990 to 1995, served on the executive committee of the International Industrial Relations Association from 1989 to 1995 and from 2000 to 2006, and was its president from 2000 to 2003. He coedited several labour law journals and the Kritische Vierteljahresschrift für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft.

His writings included a study of trade union workplace representatives published by the Otto Brenner Foundation in 1978 and the English language handbook Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Germany, whose fifth edition, written with Marlene Schmidt and Daniel Hlava, appeared in 2020.

Weiss spent most of his working life in Frankfurt am Main, where he kept an office at the Goethe University's Westend campus long after his retirement. Little has been published about his private and family life. Colleagues knew him for his commitment to international exchange, and he remained active in teaching and research networks abroad, particularly in South Africa, well into his emeritus years.

Manfred Weiss died on 9 November 2026 at the age of 86. His death was announced on his faculty page at the Goethe University Frankfurt. The place and cause of death have not been reported.

Weiss is remembered as a German labour lawyer with an unusually international outlook, who helped connect German scholarship on labour law and codetermination with researchers around the world through his leadership of the International Industrial Relations Association and his long ties with South African universities. His honours included the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon in 1992 and the Federal Cross of Merit, first class, in 2002, honorary doctorates from the universities of Bordeaux (2001), Budapest (2005), Lima (2006) and North West University in South Africa (2015), election as a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science in 2012, and the International Labour Law Network's award for outstanding contributions to labour law in 2015.