Anne Peters was born in Berlin in 1964. She began her graduate studies in 1984 and studied a combination of Law, Modern Greek and Spanish at the Universities of Würzburg, Lausanne, and Freiburg im Breisgau respectively.
She was a fellow of the National Scholarship Foundation of the German People (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) and was awarded the prize from the Scientific Society at Freiburg im Breisgau for her doctoral dissertation on territorial referendums in international law. Peters then completed her LL.M at Harvard Law School before returning to Germany as an Assistant Professor at the Walther-Schücking-Institute of Public International Law. In 2000 she obtained the Habilitation-qualification from the Christian Albrechts University Kiel on the basis of her Habilitation-Thesis “Elemente einer Theorie der Verfassung Europas” (Elements of a Theory of the Constitution of Europe).
In 2001 Peters became the chair of public international law and Swiss constitutional law at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In the academic year 2004/05 she was Dean of the Basel law faculty and in 2009 a visiting professor at Sciences Po, Paris. In 2014, she became a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg. Her teaching and research activities cover the fields of public international law, international and European human rights law, international humanitarian law/international criminal law, the law of international organizations, EU law, comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory, and Swiss constitutional law. Peters is a member of the Council of Europe’s Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) in respect of Germany and currently serves as the President of the European Society of International Law. She is also a member of the Swiss National Research Council, of the advisory board of the Social Science Research Center (WZB) Berlin, and a member of the International Law Association’s committee on the use of force. She is a co-editor of the journals Rechtswissenschaft and jusfull and is on the scientific advisory boards of the following journals: European Journal of International Law, Human Rights & International Legal Discourse, Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, and Friedens-Warte.