Thomas Cottier, former Managing Director of the World Trade Institute and the Institute of European and International Economic Law, is a Professor emeritus of European and International Economic Law at the University of Bern. He was educated at the University of Bern and was a research fellow with Professor Jörg Paul Müller in constitutional and public international law.
Thomas Cottier holds a doctorate from the University of Bern and a Master of Laws from the University of Michigan Law School, where he met Professor John H. Jackson and was exposed to the law of GATT. He was then a post-doc researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK working with Sir Derek W. Bowett in the field of the law of the sea. He founded the World Trade Institute and directed the national research programme on trade law and policy (NCCR Trade Regulation: From Fragmentation to Coherence) at the WTI. He is an associate editor of several journals. He was visiting professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and an associate professor at the University of Ottawa. He teaches at the Europa Institut Saarbrücken, Germany, the University of Torino and Wuhan University, China. He was a member of the Swiss National Research Council from 1997 to 2004. He was ‘of counsel’ to the law firm Baker & McKenzie from 1998 to 2005, and he is President of the Association La Suisse en Europe, engaged in Swiss-EU relations.
Thomas Cottier has long-standing involvement in GATT/WTO activities. He served on the Swiss negotiating team of the Uruguay Round from 1986 to 1993, first as Chief Negotiator on dispute settlement and subsidies for Switzerland, and subsequently as Chief Negotiator on TRIPs. He has held several positions in the Swiss External Economic Affairs Department, and was the Deputy Director General of the Swiss Intellectual Property Office. In addition to his theoretical work in the fields of services, intellectual property and legal counselling, he has also served as a member or chair of several GATT and WTO panels. In 2020 he was appointed to the MPIA roster of ten appeal arbitrators at the WTO. Thomas Cottier has written and published on a wide range of trade and international law issues including particularly general principles of law, constitutionalization of public international law, intellectual property and WTO dispute settlement. He received an honorary professorship at Amity University of New Delhi in 2014, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Lucerne in 2020.
References: Thomas Cottier (wti.org)