About the Speakers
Thomas Schultz is Professor of International Arbitration at the University of Geneva since 2018. He is also on the faculty of King’s College London. He was previously a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Professor (Professeur Boursier) in international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the same institution. His research covers a range of topics and approaches in arbitration and dispute settlement, including doctrinal private and public international law, empirical studies on investment arbitration, analytic and continental legal philosophy applied to key arbitration concepts, sociological perspectives on commercial arbitration, political systems theory in international arbitration, and law and literature perspectives on dispute settlement. His work has been awarded the Jubilee Prize of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Niccolò Ridi is an Assistant Professor at Liverpool Law School. His main areas of expertise are Public International Law and International Dispute Settlement, as well as Private International Law. He applies doctrinal and empirical methodologies, including large-scale data mining and social network analysis, to questions concerning the work and performance of international courts and tribunals, as well as the makeup of the communities of practice that exist in and 'create' international law. Niccolò Ridis also a co-investigator in the ESRC-funded project The Social and Psychological Underpinnings of Commercial Arbitration in Europe led by Tony Cole at the University of Leicester. Prior to joining Liverpool, he was a research fellow in a Swiss National Science Foundation Project on the role of the principle of comity in private and public international law based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, as well as a Visiting Lecturer in International Law and International Investment Law at King's College London.