Professor Gregory Shaffer is the Scott K Ginsburg Professor of International Law. Professor Shaffer also serves as President of the American Society of International Law.

Professor Shaffer is a globally recognized expert on law and globalization, with a specialization in international trade law. His publications include eleven books and over one hundred articles and book chapters, and his work is among the most cited in the international law field. The work is cross-disciplinary, addressing such topics as transnational legal ordering, legal realism, hard and soft law, comparative institutional analysis, public-private networks in international trade, the impact of the rise of China and other emerging economies on international law, and the ways trade and investment law implicate domestic regulation and social and distributive policies. His substantive law specialty is international economic law. His book Emerging Powers and the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law (CUP 2021) won the 2022 Chadwick F. Alger Prize of the International Studies Association. He also won the Inaugural John Jackson Memorial Prize for the best publication in the Journal of International Economic Law.
Professor Shaffer is a recipient of multiple U.S. National Science Foundation awards, was a Shimizu Visiting Professor at London School of Economics, a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Rome, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation, and University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law Schools. He has given invited lectures and keynotes in over 25 countries. He has published, had his work cited, and been interviewed widely, including in the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg News, and other press and media outlets around the world.

He has served on the Board of Editors or Advisory Boards of the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, Law and Society Review, Journal of Transnational Environmental Law, Direito GV Law Review, Asia Pacific Law Review, and the Journal of World Investment & Trade, among other boards. He is co-editor of the Hart Series on International Trade and Investment Law, founding Advisory Board member of the Society of International Economic Law, and founding coordinator of the Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network on Transnational and Global Legal Ordering.
Professor Shaffer previously was Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, inaugural Wing-Tat Lee Chair at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College and his J.D., with distinction, from Stanford Law School. He practiced law in Paris for seven years for Coudert Frères and Bredin Prat, where he was a member of the Paris bar.
He also has published a chapbook of poems, Forest (Artemis, 1998), was a Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and his poems have appeared in around a dozen journals.

Scholarship

Forthcoming Works - Journal Articles & Working Papers

Gregory Shaffer & Wayne Sandholtz, The Rule of Law Under Challenge: The Enmeshment of National and International Trends (working paper). [Gtown Law] [SSRN]

Books

Transnational Fiduciary Law (Seth Davis, Thilo Kuntz & Gregory Shaffer eds., New York: Cambridge University Press 2024). [BOOK]

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

Nicolás M. Perrone & Gregory Shaffer, Introduction to the Symposium on International Economic Law and Its Others, 116 Am. J. Int’l L. (Unbound) 90-95 (2022). [W]

Book Chapters & Collected Works

Seth Davis & Gregory Shaffer, Theorizing Transnational Fiduciary Law: A Processual Framework, in Transnational Fiduciary Law (Seth Davis, Thilo Kuntz & Gregory Shaffer eds., New York: Cambridge University Press 2024). [BOOK]
Gregory Shaffer, Legal Realism and International Law, in International Legal Theory: Foundations and Frontiers 82-100 (Jeffrey L. Dunoff & Mark A. Pollack eds., New York: Cambridge University Press 2022). [BOOK]