Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann (born 26 August 1945 in Hamburg) is a German law professor who is regarded as a chief architect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization.
Life.
Petersmann studied under Friedrich Hayek during his time at the University of Fribourg. He also studied law and economics at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Geneva, and at the London School of Economics. He obtained a PhD in law at the University of Heidelberg, where he was supervised by Hermann Mosler.
Petersmann became a professor of international and European law at the European University Institute in 2001. From 1993 to 2001, he was on the international law faculty at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has also taught at the universities of Fribourg and St. Gallen.
Petersmann worked and consulted for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade's and World Trade Organization's offices of legal affairs from 1981 to 2023. He was among a small group of lawyers at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade secretariat in Geneva who helped reform the organization in the 1980s and transform it into the World Trade Organization. University of Washington law professor Dongsheng Zang has called Petersmann, Jan Tumlir, an economics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and U.S. law professor John Jackson "the GATT's major intellectual architects."