Thomas Schultz is Professor of Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Governance and Dispute Resolution (CIGAD). He is also Editor-in-Chief and founder of the Journal of International Dispute Settlement.

He studied law and legal theory in Geneva and Brussels, completed postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, and has held faculty positions at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva, where he co-directed the Center for International Dispute Settlement and remains affiliated. He has held visiting appointments in Canada, France, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Earlier in his career, he practised as an international arbitrator.

He has served on the editorial boards of eight journals and book series, chaired the James Crawford Prize in International Dispute Settlement, contributed to working groups of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, and secured approximately £4 million in competitive research funding. 

His work received the Jubilee Prize of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Research Interests

Thomas Schultz’s research centres on the theory of international arbitration, broadly understood, and extends into international law, investment law, legal theory, and the study of legal scholarship and expert knowledge. He is interested in dispute settlement as a legal, political, and intellectual practice: how it generates authority, how it relates to the rule of law, how it interacts with institutions and markets, and how ideas of justice are expressed, transformed, or displaced through it. His recent work has also explored the dynamics of change in international investment law, arbitration as a form of law beyond the state, the production and circulation of arbitration scholarship, the privatisation and commodification of justice, and the role of emotions and patterns of thought in legal scholarship and international law.

Books

• Arbitration: A Very Short Introduction, with Tom Grant, Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Transnational Legality: Stateless Law and International Arbitration, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Information Technology & Arbitration: A Practitioner’s Guide, Kluwer Law International, 2006.
• Réguler le commerce électronique par la résolution des litiges en ligne: Une approche critique, Bruylant, 2005.
• Online Dispute Resolution: Challenges for Contemporary Justice, with Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler, Kluwer Law International, 2004.

Visit his PURE profile for further publications.

Teaching

Thomas Schultz currently teaches International Investment Law. His previous teaching has included International Arbitration, Contract Law, Law without the State, Jurisprudence, and Public Law.