Appointment of a new Associate Professor of Socio-Legal Studies

The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Florian Grisel as an Associate Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in January 2021. Dr Grisel is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris (B.A./M.A.), Columbia University (M.P.A.), Yale Law School (LL.M.), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (M.A./PhD) and Ecole normale supérieure (Habilitation). He is the recipient of the Alexandre Varenne Prize in Legal Theory (2011) and the Bronze Medal of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (2018).

His work continues a long tradition of socio-legal empirical work on dispute resolution and governance at the Centre. His past research has focused on the evolution of international arbitration from a dispute resolution process based on the consent of parties to a lawmaking process embedded in a larger system of transnational governance. His empirical work has sought to capture the extent to which arbitral tribunals and institutions, such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) or the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), are progressively discharging governance functions normally associated with State courts. Dr Grisel has authored two books (L'arbitrage international ou le droit contre l'ordre juridique, LGDJ, 2011 and The Evolution of International Arbitration, Oxford University Press, 2017 (the latter with Alec Stone Sweet)) and several articles (Law & Society Review, European Journal of International Law, ICSID Review, etc…) on the subject.

Dr Grisel is currently engaged in a research project focusing on governance based on social norms. He has carried out empirical research on a private institution that has governed a major fishery in the South of France since the Middle Ages. His book on the subject, provisionally titled The Limits of Private Governance: Norms and Rules in a Mediterranean Fishery, will be forthcoming at Hart Publishing in 2021. His preliminary findings bring a corrective to the optimistic analysis of social norms that is usually prevalent in socio-legal scholarship.

Dr Grisel’s future research will focus on the judicial governance of virtual communities (based on the empirical study of Wikipedia’s arbitration system) and the role of marginalised groups in the emergence of global law.

Before joining academia, Dr Grisel was a clerk at the French Supreme Court, a consultant at the World Bank in Washington, DC and an attorney in leading arbitration firms based in Paris and Geneva. He is authorised to practice law in New York and Paris, and has been listed as a “Future Leader in International Arbitration” by Who’s Who Legal (2020 and 2021).