Sergei Sarbash

Sergei Vasilyevich Sarbash was born in Moscow on 12 June 1967. He finished secondary school in 1983 and went straight into the court system, working as a court hearing secretary in 1984 and 1985. After military service he worked as a bailiff.

In 1988 he enrolled at the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute, and from 1991 he worked as a lawyer in one of the first legal cooperatives, specialising in civil law. He graduated from the Moscow State Law Academy in 1994. In 1997 he completed the Russian School of Private Law with distinction as a member of its first intake, earning a master's degree in private law for a thesis on the history of the right of retention.

Sarbash entered state service at the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation in 1996, working until 2000 as chief consultant in the department for the analysis and generalisation of judicial practice. In 2000 he became deputy head of the court's legislation department. On 13 July 2005 the Federation Council appointed him a judge of the Supreme Arbitration Court, and from 2007 he presided over one of its judicial panels. In 2013 the Higher Qualification Board of Judges recommended him for the post of deputy chairman of the court. He retired as a judge in 2014, the year the court was merged into the Supreme Court.

Alongside his judicial work he built an academic career. At the law faculty of Moscow State University he defended a candidate's dissertation on the right of retention as a means of securing obligations in 1998 and a doctoral dissertation on the general theory of performance of contractual obligations in 2005. From 2014 to 2019 he headed the department of general problems of private law at the Alekseev Research Centre for Private Law under the President of the Russian Federation, and the chair of general problems of civil law.

He was a member of the Presidential Council for the Codification and Improvement of Civil Legislation until July 2014 and led its working group on legislation on securities and financial markets during the Civil Code modernisation of 2008 to 2012. He sat on the editorial boards of the Herald of the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Civil Law Review, lectured widely to lawyers in public and private practice, served as an arbitrator of the Russian Arbitration Centre and ran a non-commercial online project on arbitration.

He wrote more than 100 publications, including the monographs The Bank Account Contract (1999), Performance of a Contractual Obligation by a Third Party (2003), The Right of Retention as a Means of Securing Obligations (2003), Performance of a Contractual Obligation (2005) and the textbook Elementary Dogmatics of Obligations (2017).

Sarbash kept his private life out of public view, and little has been published about his family. Colleagues described him as a person of exceptional professionalism, deep intellect and principle, and he remained closely tied to the Russian School of Private Law, where he had studied and later taught.

Sergei Sarbash died in Moscow on 24 October 2026, aged 59. The cause of death was not made public. The Alekseev Research Centre for Private Law announced his death the same day and expressed its condolences to his family, saying that civil lawyers, scholars and practitioners alike shared in the loss. The Association of Lawyers of Russia also published a tribute, calling him an outstanding legal scholar whose contribution to Russian civil law, judicial practice and the modern legal system was difficult to overstate. Funeral arrangements were not reported.

Sarbash is remembered as one of the most authoritative Russian writers on the law of obligations. His studies of the right of retention, performance of contracts and third party performance, and his work on the Supreme Arbitration Court and on the reform of the Civil Code, influenced commercial court practice and the teaching of civil law. The Association of Lawyers of Russia said his works on contracts and creditors' rights had become fundamental reference points for many generations of lawyers.