Rate My Professor Anne Peters

Anne Peters, LL.M. (Harvard), is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. She serves as L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Titular Professor at the University of Basel, Honorary Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Freie Universität Berlin, and Global Law Professor at Peking University. Born in Berlin in 1964, she studied law at the Universities of Würzburg, Lausanne, and Freiburg, obtained her LL.M. from Harvard University, and earned her Habilitation qualification at the Walther-Schücking-Institute of Public International Law at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 2000 with the thesis “Elemente einer Theorie der Verfassung Europas” (Elements of a Theory of the Constitution of Europe). From 2001 to 2013, she held the chair of public international law at the University of Basel. She was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin from 2012 to 2013 and has held visiting professorships at Sciences Po Paris, Université Panthéon-Assas Paris, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Tel Aviv University.

Her research interests encompass public international law including its history, global animal law, global governance, global constitutionalism, international environmental law, and the status of humans in international law. She has taught international law, human rights law, international humanitarian law, the law of international organizations, EU law, comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, and Swiss constitutional law. Career highlights include presidency of the European Society of International Law from 2010 to 2012 and the German Society of International Law from 2019 to 2023, membership in the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the Institut de Droit International, and service on the German Federal Government's Advisory Council on International Law and the Management Board of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Notable awards include honorary doctorates from the Universities of Vienna and KU Leuven in 2025 and from the University of Lausanne in 2020, the ESIL Collaborative Book Prize in 2023 for Animals in the International Law of Armed Conflict, the American Society of International Law Book Award in 2014 for the Handbook of the History of International Law, and the Cross 1st class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2021. Key publications include The Cambridge History of International Law, Vol. 1: The Historiography of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2024), The Individual in International Law: History and Theory (Oxford University Press, 2024), Animals in International Law (Brill Nijhoff, 2021), Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2012).