About
Julian Arato is a professor of law at the University of Michigan. His scholarly expertise spans the areas of public international law, international economic law, and private law.
Arato’s research focuses on public international law, international investment law and arbitration, international trade, contracts, corporations, and legal theory.
Arato is an author of International Law: Cases and Materials, 8th ed. (2025) (with Lori Damrosch and Sean Murphy). He is also an author of International Trade Law Through the Cases, 2025 ed. (with J.H.H. Weiler, Sungjoon Cho, and Kathleen Claussen) (open-access). His article “The Private Law Critique of International Investment Law” won the 2019 Francis Deák Prize for best article by a younger author published in the American Journal of International Law, as well as the inaugural ICCA–Guillermo Aguilar-Alvarez Memorial Prize.
In 2026, Arato will be the Visiting Sat Pal Khattar Professor at the National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law.
Arato serves as a special adviser on international law to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He has consulted with sovereign states and various public entities on matters of public international law and dispute settlement. He is a member of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) List of Rising Arbitrators, and of the European Union’s lists of candidates suitable to serve as Arbitrators and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) Experts. From 2018–2023 he served as an observer delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group III (ISDS Reform).
Arato is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law, a member of the executive board of the European Journal of International Law, and an editor of the EJIL:Talk! blog. He is active in the governance of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), and has been nominated to serve as Vice President of the Society as of April 2026. He has previously served as a member of the ASIL Executive Council, as co-chair of the 2024 ASIL Annual Meeting, and as co-chair of the International Economic Law Interest Group and the International Organizations Interest Group. Arato has also served as chair of the Academic Forum on Investor-State Dispute Settlement and as a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council.
At Michigan Law, Arato serves as faculty director of the SJD program, and as faculty director of the Center for International and Comparative Law. He also founded and directs the Law School’s Program on Law and the Global Economy.
Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, Arato was a professor of law and associate dean of faculty research and scholarship at Brooklyn Law School. Before that, he was an associate-in-law at Columbia Law School. He previously worked as an associate in the international arbitration group at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, where his practice focused on international investment disputes and international commercial arbitration.
