Gabrielle 

KAUFMANN-KOHLER

Gabrielle Kaufmann-Kohler is a Professor Emerita at Geneva University Law School where she taught international arbitration, and previously private international law. She is also the founder and a Faculty member of the Geneva LLM in International Dispute Settlement (MIDS), and is or was a Visiting Professor at NUS, Tsinghua, University of São Paulo, Georgetown and Sciences Po Paris.

In her practice, Gabrielle has acted in over 250 commercial, investment and sports arbitrations, presently exclusively as arbitrator and previously also as counsel. Gabrielle is regularly ranked among the top arbitrators worldwide; she is in particular the arbitrator with the highest number of chair appointments in investment arbitration and a study of investment arbitration released in 2016 concluded that she was the “most influential arbitrator in the world”.

She is the author of numerous publications, a list of which is available here.

Among other positions, Gabrielle is Honorary President of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration, which she headed from 2018 to 2020. She is also Honorary President of the Swiss Arbitration Association (ASA), which she chaired from 2001 to 2005. She is further a founder of the Foundation for International Arbitration Advocacy and the President of its Advisory Board, and a former member of the ICC Court, LCIA Court, and AAA Board. She was a member of the Swiss delegation to UNCITRAL Working Group II on transparency, and is currently part of that delegation to Working Group III on the reform of investor-state arbitration, for which she co-authored two reports. In the context of such reform, she also co-authored a book on the interaction between national courts and ISDS.

Her accolades and awards include the GAR Lifetime Achievement Award (2023) and the Chambers Europe Award for Outstanding Contribution to Arbitration (2021).