Center for Law & the Economy Workshop: Julian Arato (Michigan)
"Trade Unilateralism from American Exceptionalism to America First"
Professor of Law at Michigan Law
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The Murphy Institute's Center for Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring Tulane and guest faculty from the fields of law, economics, and political science. Presenters share their latest research on a range of topics, including regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and political economy. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.
The workshops, organized by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community. The Spring 2026 workshop series, co-convened by Associate Professor of Law and Murphy Affiliate Faculty Mateusz Grochowski, will focus on themes in consumer law, broadly construed.
Julian Arato is a professor of law at the University of Michigan. His scholarly expertise spans the areas of public international law, international economic law, and private law.Arato’s research focuses on public international law, international investment law and arbitration, international trade, contracts, corporations, and legal theory. At Michigan Law, Arato serves as faculty director of the SJD program, and as faculty director of the Center for International and Comparative Law. He also founded and directs the Law School’s Program on Law and the Global Economy.
Professor Arato is an author of International Law: Cases and Materials, 8th ed. (2025) (with Lori Damrosch and Sean Murphy). He is also an author of International Trade Law Through the Cases, 2025 ed. (with J.H.H. Weiler, Sungjoon Cho, and Kathleen Claussen) (open-access). His article “The Private Law Critique of International Investment Law” won the 2019 Francis Deák Prize for best article by a younger author published in the American Journal of International Law, as well as the inaugural ICCA–Guillermo Aguilar-Alvarez Memorial Prize.
Arato serves as a special adviser on international law to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He has consulted with sovereign states and various public entities on matters of public international law and dispute settlement. He is a member of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) List of Rising Arbitrators, and of the European Union’s lists of candidates suitable to serve as Arbitrators and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) Experts. From 2018–2023 he served as an observer delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group III (ISDS Reform).
Arato is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law, a member of the executive board of the European Journal of International Law, and an editor of the EJIL:Talk! blog. He is active in the governance of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), having served as co-chair of the 2024 ASIL Annual Meeting, as a member of the executive council, and as co-chair of the International Economic Law Interest Group and the International Organizations Interest Group. He also has served as chair of the Academic Forum on Investor-State Dispute Settlement and as a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council.
