Prof. Francis G. Snyder

Francis G. Snyder


University/ Institution
Université d’Aix-Marseille III, France
Expertise: European Union Law

Small Summary
* B.A. (Hons.) Magna Cum Laude with High Honours in Political Science from Yale University, U.S.A. J.D. from Harvard Law School, U.S.A.
* Professor of European Community Law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.
* Professor of Law at the College of Europe in Bruges.
* Honorary Visiting Professor of Law at the University College of London (University of London).
* Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Law Journal.

Detailed Biography
Francis Snyder is Professor of European Community Law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Professor of Law at the College of Europe in Bruges, and Honorary Visiting Professor of Law at University College London (University of London). He also serves as Co-Director of the Academy of European Law in Florence. He is a U.S. Attorney and a member of the Bar of Massachusetts.

He holds a B.A. (Hons.) Magna Cum Laude with High Honors in political science from Yale University-, was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris; holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where for three years he was research assistant to Professor Jerome A. Cohen, Director of the East Asia Legal Studies Programme; and was awarded the Certificat de Droit et Economie des Pays d’Afrique (C.E.D.P.A.) and the Doctorat de Spécialité (3ème Cycle) Summa Cum Laude at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). The many honors, prizes, and research awards that he has received include Phi Beta Kappa, Charles Washburn Clark Prize, Wrexham Prize, Fulbright Fellowship, Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship, Research Associate Award of the Canadian International Development Research Centre, nomination for the Herskovits Prize, Nuffield Foundation Social Science Personal Research Fellowship, Officier de I’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, the medal of the town of Ségonzac (France), the first Robert Schuman Professorship under the EU-China Higher Education Cooperation Program, and, most recently, a Visiting Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin).

Before joining the EUI as a full-time Professor in 1992, he was Professor of European Law in the University of London (University College) and from 1989-92 was parttime Professor of European Economic Law at the EUI. He has also taught at the University of Warwick and at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Division of Social Science, York University, Toronto-, held visiting appointments at Sussex, Leiden, AixMarseille 111, Hong Kong, Fudan University in Shanghai, and Peking University; and was a Research Fellow in the Program in Law and Modernization at Yale Law School. In 1998 he was awarded a Robert Schuman Professorship and spent a month at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. In addition to teaching regularly in the Master of European Law course at the Instituto de Estudos Europeus de Macau, he has been active in the creation of the newly established Academy of International Trade Law in Macau, designed to train trade law professionals and scholars particularly but not only for the Asia-Pacific region.

He is the author or editor of approximately twenty books and the author of more than one hundred articles in the fields of European Union law, especially constitutional law, law and economic integration, and international trade law; comparative law and development, and law and the social sciences. His books include International Trade and Customs Law of the European Union (1998); Introduction to European Union Law (in Chinese, 1996, 2nd edition in preparation); New Directions in European Community Law (1990); Common Agricultural Policy of the European Community (1990); Law of the Common Agricultural Policy (1985), also translated into French and then into Italian in the collection “Giuristi Stranieri di Oggi” (Giuffrè Capitalism and Legal Change: An African Transformation (1981); and One-Party Government in Mali (1965). Among his edited books are The Europeanization of Law: The Legal Effects of European Integration (1999, in press); Constitutional Dimensions of European Economic Integration (1996); European Community Law, 2 vols. (1993); Me Political Economy of Law: A Third World Reader (with Y.P. Ghai and R. Luckham); and Law, Labor, and Crime: An Historical Perspective (with D. Hay) (1987).

He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Law Journal and a member of the editorial committees of the Modern Law Review (of which he served as the first European Law Editor), Droit et Société, and the Journal of Legal Pluralism. He is a correspondent of Sociologia del Diritto and also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Yearbook of European Environmental Law. He previously served on the editorial advisory board of the Law and Society Review, on the editorial board of the Review of African Political Economy, and as correspondent for agriculture, environment, and fisheries for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly. He is joint editor of the book series ‘Studies in European Law and Integration’ published by Hart Publishing, Oxford, and a member of the editorial board of the book series ‘Cambridge Studies in Law and Society’ published by Cambridge University Press.

He is the founder and coordinator of the Working Group on the Sociology of European Law of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association and a member of the Board of Directors of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law. He has served on scientific boards for several Masters degrees in Portugal and as a Member of the Council of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Juridique at the Centre d’Etudes Juridiques Comparatives of the Universsité de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the International Bar Association, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the United Kingdom Association for European Law, and the Law and Society Association. He regularly reviews manuscripts for various academic journals and evaluates research projects for numerous foundations and other granting agencies.

He has carried out empirical research on law in Senegal, Mali, France, Portugal, and China. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he also speaks French and Italian and reads Spanish and Portuguese. For field research in West Africa he learned the Jola language and developed an international phonetic alphabet for the Banjal dialect. He is currently learning Mandarin Chinese and in 1999 completed an intensive course in Elementary-Intermediate Chinese (CS 100-150-200) in the Summer Intensive Language Program at Monterey Institute of International Studies.

The topics of his current research are European Union constitutional law; EU economic and monetary union; international trade and customs law; the resolution of trade disputes between the EU and China; and globalization and the law.

On the first topic, he participated in the preparation of A United and Simplified Model of the European Communities Treaties and the Treaty of Union in Just One Treaty, directed by Professor Claus-Dieter Ehlermann and carried out for the European Parliament in 1996 in preparation for the last Intergovernmental Conference. He is currently involved in a similar EUI group to prepare a draft Treaty on European Union for the forthcoming IGC, which will be concerned with the institutional reforms necessary to meet the challenges of European Union enlargement. He also gave the General Course on European Community Law at the Academy of European Law in 1995. This was published in the Collected Courses of the Academy as “Constitutional Law of the European Union: Principles, Processes, and Culture”. He is currently writing a book provisionally entitled The Unfinished Constitution of the European Union, to be published by Oxford University Press.

On the second, related topic, he recently published a long article on “EMU Revisited: Are We Making a Constitution? What Constitution Are We Making?”, in P. Craig and G. de Burca (eds), The Evolution of EU Law (OUR, 1999). This followed an earlier article entitled “EMU – Metaphor for European Union? Institutions, Rules, and Types of Regulation”, in R. Dehousse (ed), Europe After Maastricht: An Ever Closer Union? (1994).

On the third and fourth topics, his book International Trade and Customs Law of the European Union was published by Butterworths in late 1998. This has led to more specific research in a joint research project with a colleague from Peking University on Dispute Resolution in EU-China Trade Relations. The aim of the research is to understand when, how, and why various formal and informal means are used to deal with, and if possible resolve, international trade disputes between the EU and China. Areas being studied include quotas, anti-dumping, the development of global production networks, market access in sectors such as textiles, chemicals, light industry, and services, and the role of the WTO in the settlement of EU-China trade disputes. Among the long-term objectives of the project are to make recommendations for improving the resolution of EU-China trade disputes and to lay the foundation for a study of the implications of Chinese accession to the WTO for the future of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding.

This research has led recently to work on the fifth topic. For the past three years he has taught a seminar at the EUI on “Globalization and International Trade Law: The European Union and China”. Participants have included not only PhD researchers in law but also in political science and economics, as well as visiting professors from China, Japan, Canada, and the United States as well as various EU countries. His recent publications on this theme include “Governing Economic Globalisation: Global Legal Pluralism and European Law, (1999) 5(4) European Law Journal, Special Issue on ‘Economic Globalisation and the Law’; “Global Economic Networks and Global Legal Pluralism”, in G. Bermann et al (ed), Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation (OUP, 1999); and “Globalization and Europeanization as Friends and Rivals: European Union Law and Global Economic Networks”, in F. Snyder (ed), The snyder@datacomm.iue.it Internet: Europeanization of Law:Legal Effects of European Integration (Hart Publishing, 2000).