Appointment: Thomas Burri

Prof. Dr. Thomas Burri conducts leading research in the fields of peaceful settlement of international disputes by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the European Court of Justice as well as law and ethics of intelligent technologies. He recently published a Nature-paper, organized an international competition endowed with prize money of 100’000 CHF to test the feasibility of the EU’s new legislation on artificial intelligence, conducted a new quantitative analysis together with the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs on the ICJ’s climate change advisory proceedings, and supported certain islanders in the decolonization of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean from the United Kingdom. He published early on machine learning and had a paper in 2016 at the renowned international Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS, in Barcelona. He is currently writing a book on „phenomenal international law” scheduled for publication in the fall. (Three preliminary chapters are available on SSRN.) He is establishing a Competence Center for International Legal Practice at the Institute for Legal Studies and Legal Practice (IRP) at the University of St.Gallen and takes part in the initiative on the part of the Institute of Management and Strategy, led by Prof. Dr. Christoph Lechner, to establish a transdisciplinary Center for Geopolitics and Strategic Management. In the future, Prof. Dr. Burri will engage in even greater depth with the practice of dispute settlement (through the ICJ and arbitration).

Prof. Dr. Burri came as an assistant professor of international law and European law to the University of St.Gallen in 2011. After his “Habilitation” in 2015, he was promoted in 2021 to associate professor and now, in 2026, to full professor. He studied law in Basel and Paris and holds a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Zurich (2009) and an LLM from the College of Europe in Bruges (2008). From 2015 to 2026 he directed the Master of Arts program in International Law (MIL) at the University of St.Gallen. In 2023, he co-founded the Law & Tech Lab with five colleagues at the HSG Law School. He substituted for professors in Berlin (Chair of International Law at Humboldt-University) and Dresden (Chair of International Law at Technical University Dresden) and was a guest researcher at Harvard Law School, Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, University of Queensland in Brisbane, and University of California, San Diego. His research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and other third parties.