Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann

Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann (born 26 August 1945 in Hamburg) is a German law professor who is regarded as a chief architect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization.^[1][2]

Life

Petersmann studied under Friedrich Hayek during his time at the University of Fribourg.^[3] He also studied law and economics at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Geneva, and at the London School of Economics. He obtained a PhD in law at the University of Heidelberg, where he was supervised by Hermann Mosler.^[3]

Petersmann became a professor of international and European law at the European University Institute in 2001. From 1993 to 2001, he was on the international law faculty at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has also taught at the universities of Fribourg and St. Gallen.^[1][4][3]

Petersmann worked and consulted for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade's and World Trade Organization's offices of legal affairs from 1981 to 2023.^[1] He was among a small group of lawyers at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade secretariat in Geneva who helped reform the organization in the 1980s and transform it into the World Trade Organization.^[5] University of Washington law professor Dongsheng Zang has called Petersmann, Jan Tumlir, an economics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and U.S. law professor John Jackson "the GATT's major intellectual architects."^[2][6]

Selected writings

• Economic Integration Law and Investment Legislation of Developing Countries. Basic Problems, Comparative Legal and Multidisciplinary Aspects. Baden-Baden 1974, ISBN 3-7890-0120-1
• Constitutional functions and constitutional problems of international economic law. International and domestic foreign trade law and foreign trade policy in the United States, the European Community and Switzerland. Fribourg 1991, ISBN 2-8271-0533-0
• International and European trade and environmental law after the Uruguay Round. London 1995, ISBN 90-411-0857-2
• The GATT/WTO dispute settlement system. International law, international organizations, and dispute settlement. London 1997, ISBN 90-411-0933-1