School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet)

Anthea Roberts, a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), is an interdisciplinary researcher and legal scholar who focuses on new ways of thinking about complex and evolving global fields. Her research areas include international law, trade and investment, the effect of geopolitical change on global governance, and understanding and navigating complex systems. Anthea is the Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice and chairs the ANU Working Group on Geoeconomics. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and formerly taught at the London School of Economics, Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School.

In 2019, the League of Scholars named Anthea the world’s leading international law scholar and Australia’s leading law scholar. Her new book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters (co-authored with Nicolas Lamp) with Harvard University Press was listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Financial Times and Fortune Magazine. Anthea’s first book Is International Law International? (2017) won numerous prizes, including the American Society of International Law’s Book Prize, and was Oxford University Press’s top-selling law monograph worldwide in 2017-2018.

Anthea is engaged in a long-term project with Dr Taylor St John studying the evolution of governance of investor-state arbitration: https://www.isdsreform.com/. She has twice been awarded the Francis Deák Prize for the best article published in the American Journal of International Law by a younger scholar and received an ANU Futures Award and a UK Philip Leverhulme Prize. Anthea also has a BA/LLB from the ANU (National Undergraduate Scholarship, 1st Class Hons and University Medal), an LLM from NYU (Fulbright Scholar, Hauser Scholar and Jerome Lipper Award) and PhD from the ANU (JG Crawford Award).

Anthea is or has been an editor for the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, the Journal of World Trade and Investment and the ICSID Review. She was one of the Reporters for the Restatement of the Law Fourth, Foreign Relations of the United States (2018), and was one of two inaugural Legal Fellows for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2017-18).

Anthea has served as counsel and an expert in investment treaty arbitrations, as an arbitrator and sole arbitrator in international commercial arbitrations, and as a testifying and consulting expert in international law cases. Prior to becoming an academic, Anthea spent five years as a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York and London and was an Associate to Chief Justice Murray Gleeson at the High Court of Australia. Read more about Anthea’s case experience here.

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