Wolfgang Alschner

Wolfgang Alschner
Wolfgang Alschner
Hyman Soloway Chair in Business and Trade Law

BA(Dresden)
MA (Geneva)
LLB (London)
JSM (Stanford)
PhD(Geneva)

Room
57 Louis Pasteur, Room 376
Phone
Office: 613-562-5800 ext. 2054


Biography

Wolfgang Alschner is an empirical legal scholar specialized in international economic law and the computational analysis of law. He holds the Hyman Soloway Chair in Business and Trade LawHis new book, Investment Arbitration and State-Driven Reform: New Treaties, Old Outcomes, recently published with Oxford University Press (2022), explores how a new generation of international investment treaties has been rolled back in investment arbitration practice. 

Professor Alschner is an Associate Professor at the Common Law Section with cross-appointment to the Faculty of Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a faculty member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa and heads the uOttawa Legal Technology Lab. Professor Alschner’s teaching materials on computational legal analysis are available on www.datascienceforlawyers.org.

Among his other roles and affiliations, Professor Alschner acts as a co-editor of the World Trade Review, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of International Economic Law (JIEL) and a member of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA). He also co-founded the investment treaty analytics portal www.mappinginvestmenttreaties.com and the Electronic Database of Investment Treaties (EDIT).

Professor Alschner holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, a Master of Law from Stanford Law School, a Master in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute as well as an LLB from the University of London and a BA in International Relations from the University of Dresden, Germany.

Highlights for 2022-2023

Areas of Expertise

  • International Investment Agreements
  • Investor State Dispute Settlement
  • Law of the World Trade Organization
  • Empirical Legal Studies
  • Computational Analysis of Law (Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning)
  • Legal Network Analysis
  • Coding for Lawyers

Teaching

  • CML 4105 - International Trade Law (Fall 2022)
  • CML 3729 - Droit du Commerce International (Fall 2022)
  • CML 1105 - First Year Thematic: Data Science for Lawyers (Winter 2022) [see CBA Article]
  • CML 4504 - L’analyse de données juridiques (Winter 2022)

Research Projects and Opportunities

  • Investment Arbitration and State-Driven Reform: New Treaties, Old Outcomes, Oxford University Press, 2022
  • Ontario Early Researcher Award: "Equipping Tomorrow's Lawyers - Using Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Legal Document Production and Analysis"
  • SSHRC Insight Development Grant: "Multilateralizing 'WTO-extra' Issues: A Computational Analysis of Rule Convergence in Preferential Trade Agreements"
  • SSHRC Insight Development Grant: "Judging Equality Judgments: Applying Legal Data Analytics to the Canadian Supreme Court's Section 15 and Equality Caselaw"
  • Project with the Canada School of Public Service: "Semantic Analysis of Canadian Regulation" [github page] 

I am looking for students in law and computer science at the JD, LLM and PhD level interested in working on these and other projects in international economic law, computational analysis of law or a combination of both.

Recent Publications

Recent Publications on International Economic Law

Recent Publications on Computational Analysis of Law

For complete publication list see SSRN Author Pagehttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1758638 

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