Professor van der Merwe, an ex-Dean of the University of Stellenbosch, is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stellenbosch and a Professor Emeritus of the University of Aberdeen. He held visiting professorships at the University of Tulane, Baltimore and Maryland, La Laguna in Tenerife, the Universiti Technologi in Skudai and Mara in Shah Alam, the Postgraduate Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, the University of Silesia, the Private University of Koç in Istanbul, Seoul National University and Kyushu University. His scholarships include a Rhodes scholarship, a Von Humboldt Stipendium, several Max Planck stipendia and a scholarship of the Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He wrote the chapter on Apartment Ownership for the International Encyclopaedia of Comparative law and has published widely on strata titles and the law of property. He is the chief editor for three questionnaires of the Trento project on the Common Core of European Private Law and a legal consultant for the South African government on the introduction of an Ombud service to solve disputes in strata title schemes.