Faculty Profile: Professor Frank Emmert
08/09/2015
Professor Frank Emmert is a widely known and highly regarded expert in the law of the European Union, international business transactions, international commercial arbitration, the World Trade Organization, international trade, and the Middle East. He joined the faculty at IU McKinney in 2003, and became Executive Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law, as well as the John S. Grimes Professor of Law. From 2004 to 2008, Professor Emmert directed seven summer study abroad programs for McKinney in Europe and from 2007 to 2013, he was the director of the USAID-funded McKinney Master Program in Egypt. He also served in a number of functions for the Higher Education Support Program (HESP) of the Soros Foundation, and, more recently, co-founded the Council on International Law and Politics based in Chicago.
Professor Emmert describes the importance he places on international law by saying, "In the 21st century, whether it concerns commerce and trade, the protection of intellectual property, consumers, or the environment, family matters or immigration, the law has become international because our world has become internationally dependent and integrated. Even in areas that are not international as such, for example our health and social protection system, we benefit from comparison with solutions found elsewhere because we can learn from the good examples and the mistakes of others. Consequently, legal education in the 21st century must be international."
In 2015, for the third year running, Professor Emmert acted as faculty advisor to the McKinney team in the Willem C. Vis Moot Court in International Commercial Arbitration. The competition takes place each year in the Spring in Vienna, Austria, and IU McKinney’s team traveled there with Professor Emmert to compete against nearly 300 law schools from more than 60 countries. From Vienna, Professor Emmert traveled to Switzerland and made presentations at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva. In the past, Professor Emmert also coached a number of McKinney teams for the European Union Law Moot Court. While McKinney has not had a team in that competition for a while, Professor Emmert still serves as a judge. This year, this took him to Columbia University in New York for the regional final of the EU Moot Court.
In February 2015, Professor Emmert traveled to Saudi Arabia and had meetings at King Saud University and at Dar Al Uloom University. He spent a day at the special court for banking disputes and met with the Minister of Justice to discuss potential involvement of McKinney in judges training in Saudi Arabia. Professor Emmert attended a debate at the Shura Council and was welcomed by the President and Vice President of this institution. At Dar Al Uloom, he taught a law class and found that teaching “with male and female students in a physically separated classroom was a particularly interesting experience,” he said.
In June, Professor Emmert taught a workshop on legislative drafting and rule of law in transitional and developing countries at Tulane University. In the fall, in addition to his regular teaching at McKinney, he will be teaching courses and course modules at Université de Saint-Ésprit to Kaslik (USEK) in Jounieh, Lebanon, as well as Tec de Monterrey, Mexico.
Professor Emmert is the founder of the European Journal of Law Reform and served as its Editor-in-Chief from 1997 to 2010. Before his appointment at IU, he was a visiting professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. He has also served as Dean of Concordia International University Estonia School of Law, Executive Director of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute, and Lecturer in European and International Law at the European Institute of Basle University. He has taught courses for credit at the Universities of Guadalajara (Mexico), Strasbourg (France), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Warsaw and Krakow (Poland), Ljubljana and Maribor (Slovenia), Prague (Czech Republic), St. Gall (Switzerland), the College of Europe (Poland), as well as Stanford Law School and Rutgers University School of Law. His full resume and list of publications are available at http://www.epsilen.com/femmert). Many publications can be downloaded for free from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Emmert2.
Professor Emmert received the Erstes juristisches Staatsexamen (equivalent to J.D.) in 1988 at the University of Munich Law School in Germany; an LL.M. in 1989 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and a diploma in European Law in 1990 from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He completed the Zweites juristisches Staatsexamen (equivalent to the bar exam) in 1992 in Bavaria, Germany; and he received a Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Professor Emmert is fluent in German and English, conversant in French and Italian, and speaks some Spanish and Estonian. He has advised various governments and multinational enterprises, served as an arbitrator in a number of international commercial disputes, and speaks frequently at conferences and seminars in Europe and the US. His publications include some 20 authored, co-authored or edited books and more than 50 articles in the areas of European Union, international and comparative law. Professor Emmert recently completed his chapters for the new edition of the most widely used U.S. casebook on European Union Law by Professors Bermann, Goebel, Fox, Atik, Gerard and Emmert, published by West Academic Publishing. Professor Emmert also edited a book by Ahmed El Demery on The Arab Charter of Human Rights: A Voice for Sharia in the Modern World (Council on International Law and Politics, Chicago 2015), and is finishing the editorial work on the first volume of a series of books flowing from his major research project on "Quality Management in Legal Education" with country reports from Austria, Bulgaria, Egypt, Estonia, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Sweden, and Ukraine.
At IU McKinney, Professor Emmert teaches European Union Law – Foundations, European Union Law – Doing Business in and with the Internal Market, Comparative Law, International Business Transactions, International Commercial Arbitration, and World Trade Organization Law.
