Anne van Aaken was born in Bonn on 19 April 1969. She is a German national.

Studies and doctoral thesis

From 1987 to 1992, she read economics and communication sciences at the University of Fribourg, and law at LMU Munich from 1992 to 1997. From 1997 onwards, she worked on her doctoral thesis on “Rational-Choice in der Rechtswissenschaft. Zum Stellenwert der ökonomischen Theorie im Recht” at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. In 1997/1998, she was a Visiting Scholar at the legal faculties of the Universities of Berkeley and Yale. From 1998 to 2000, she was an assistant at the Chair of Economic Policy at the University of Fribourg.

Subsequently, Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken worked as a member of the research staff at the Chair of German, European and International Civil and Business Law and Institutional Economics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. At the same time, she served a legal clerkship at the Berlin Court of Appeal (2nd state examination in 2002). She has been an attorney at law since 2003 and is admitted to the Bonn Land Court.

Afterwards, Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. In July 2005, she moved to the interdisciplinary Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. Her habilitation thesis was accepted at the University of Osnabrück in 2012.

Research foci
Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken’s research foci include international law, particularly international business law; law and democracy theories; multi-level governance; the economic theory of law, particularly behavioural economics; financial market regulation and supervision, state liability, and corruption. In the academic year of 2010/2011, she conducted research at the renowned Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. The significance of her research is reflected in the great interest of the international scientific community. In the ranking of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in January 2011, Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken occupied 224th place among all legal authors and 1,008th place among all authors.

Academic work
Since 2007, Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken has published numerous papers in internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals. Since her appointment to St.Gallen, she has also given more than 50 lectures and participated in numerous international conferences. She is Vice-President of the European Association of Law and Economics, a member of the Executive Board of the European Society of International Law and Chair of the Programmatic Steering Board of the Hague Institute for the Internationalization of Law.

Teaching experience
Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken is already strongly integrated in teaching at the Law School. She has successfully offered numerous courses in, for instance, International Investment Protection Law, International Business Law, “Law and Economics of Globalization” (as co-lecturer), ”Regime Theories in International Relations” (also as co-lecturer), International and European Law (MLE) and “Recht im ökonomischen Kontext VWL”. Besides teaching in St.Gallen, she has also taught at the University of Osnabrück, at INSPER São Paulo (Brazil), at Bucerius Law School and at Hamburg University, as well as at the International Academy of International Trade and Investment Law, Macao. She has received an invitation to work as a Global Law Professor (visiting professorship) at New York University in autumn 2014.