Stratos Pahis

Stratos Pahis teaches and writes on public international law, international economic law—including trade, investment, sovereign debt—and contracts.  His article, BITs and Bonds: The International Law and Economics of Sovereign Debt, was awarded the 2022 Francis Deák Prize by the American Journal of International Law for best article by a younger author.  His other work is cited extensively in Christoph Schreuer’s preeminent treatise on international investment law. 

Professor Pahis has published or has works forthcoming in almost all of the major peer-reviewed publications in the field, including the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, the World Trade Review, and the Journal of World Investment and Trade.  He has also published in several student-edited law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Journal of International Law, and the Virginia Journal of International Law.

Pahis’ research asks foundational but underexplored questions about international economic law.  His research on international investment law asks, for example: What is an investment?  What is the function of international investment law?  Does it really matter as much as its critics and defenders claim?  What happens when you apply it to the most common type of international investment—sovereign debt?  His novel answers to these foundational questions provide a new blueprint for reform that is focused on the regime’s jurisdiction and its alternatives.

Pahis’ research on international trade law is similarly reform-oriented and focused on foundational questions, including: Why did the United States choose to disable the World Trade Organization’s judicial mechanism rather than to defy it?  How has the resulting crisis affected State and adjudicator behavior?  Can agreements between subsets of States help to resolve the tension between trade and national security—one of the main underlying causes of the crisis?  His novel answers to these questions likewise write a roadmap for reforming one of international law’s most important institutions.

Professor Pahis teaches international trade law at Columbia Law School.   He is a fulltime member of the faculty at Brooklyn Law School and a Co-Director of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law.

Before joining Brooklyn Law School, Pahis practiced, taught, and researched international law and trade throughout the Western Hemisphere.  He worked in private practice for almost eight years, including as counsel in the international arbitration group of WilmerHale in New York.  He was a visiting researcher at la Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico; the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva; and the European University Institute in Florence.  He taught at la Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Wake Forest University.

Pahis speaks five languages, including English, Spanish, French, Greek, and (some) Italian.

He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master’s in International Development from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and an A.B., summa cum laude, in Economics from Dartmouth College.