Biography (Lebenslauf in englischer Sprache)

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Dr. jur. Thomas Giegerich, LL.M. (Univ. of Virginia 1985),

holds a Chair of European Union Law, Public International Law and Public Law at the Faculty of Law, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany (since 2012). He also is Director of the Europa-Institut of that Law Faculty which runs a well-known LL.M. programme in European and international law attracting ca. 80 students from 40 countries per year. From 2016-2018, he was the Vice Dean of the Law Faculty. In 2017, he was awarded a Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration, Antidiscrimination, Human Rights and Diversity (until 2021). He previously held a Jean Monnet Chair for European Law and European Integration (2013-2016). He is co-editor of the peer-reviewed quarterly Zeitschrift für Europarechtliche Studien (Journal of European Legal Studies).

Before joining Saarland University, he held chairs at the Universities of Bremen (2002-2006) and Kiel where he also was Director of the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law (2006-2012) and co-editor of the German Yearbook of International Law. Formerly, he was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg (1990-1991 and 1993-2002), and a law clerk at the German Federal Constitutional Court (1991-1993).

Thomas Giegerich studied at the University of Mainz, Germany, and the University of Virginia School of Law in the USA (on a Fulbright scholarship) where he was awarded the LL.M. degree in 1985. He passed the two German state examinations in law in 1984 and 1988 with distinction. His German doctoral thesis (summa cum laude) deals with the state action doctrine of the US Supreme Court (published in 1992) and his second doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) with the relationship between the European constitution and the German constitution in the process of transnational constitutionalization (published in 2003).

Thomas Giegerich has lectured at universities in Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the PR of China, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge (2007), a Visiting Professor at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh (2011-2012), and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence (2016).

His print and electronic publications include numerous books, chapters and articles on various topics of European Union law, public international law and (comparative) constitutional law with an emphasis on global, European and national human rights law in German and English (see his separate list of publications). Since 2013, he has run the blog “Jean-Monnet-Saar” featuring posts on current issues of European Union and public international law (https://jean-monnet-saar.eu/). He has given several expert opinions on questions of EU law to the government of the Saarland.

Since 2012, Thomas Giegerich has successfully raised third-party funds for a number of projects, including three international and interdisciplinary conferences. Currently, he coordinates the “South East European-EU Cluster of Excellence in European and International Law”, a joint project with numerous academic partners on the Balkans that is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (2015 – 2021). He is coordinator in a new project with eight academic partners on “Modernising European Legal Education” (2020 – 2023). He is also involved in a project funded by the EU's ERASMUS+ programme to develop a Master's programme in "Law and Gender" (LAWGEM).

From 2008-2014, Thomas Giegerich was involved in the EU accession negotiations with Turkey as an independent expert of the European Commission for the independence and impartiality of the judiciary. In this capacity, he was on five different missions to Turkey and published his findings in five reports. In 2017-2018, he wrote three confidential studies on the independence of the judiciary (courts and public prosecution service) in Serbia (candidate country for EU accession) for the European Commission.

Thomas Giegerich was counsel for the Federal Republic of Germany in cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2010-2012 (Hizb Ut-Tahrir v. Germany) and 2017-2018 (Ilnseher v. Germany) in both of which Germany prevailed. In the second case, he pleaded before the Grand Chamber. He currently acts as counsel for the Federal Republic of Germany in another pending case concerning trade union rights.