Paris Faculty Bios
Deborah Kay Burand
Professor of Law Emerita
Deborah Burand is a professor of law. She is the Faculty Director of the Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship at NYU Law. She founded the International Transactions Clinic at NYU Law. She writes and lectures on issues related to social entrepreneurship, sustainable finance, impact investing, social finance innovations, microfinance and microfranchising/social franchising. During 2010 - 2011 Prof. Burand served in the Obama Administration as general counsel to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the development finance institution of the United States. She also has worked in the microfinance sector, most recently as executive vice president of strategic services at Grameen Foundation, a global microfinance network. Earlier in her career, she worked as a senior attorney in the international banking section of the Federal Reserve Board's legal division, and at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, first as the senior attorney/adviser for international monetary matters and later as the senior adviser for international financial matters. She also worked in private practice at Shearman & Sterling, where she advised bank advisory committees in the negotiation and implementation of Brady Bond deals that restructured the sovereign debt of Vietnam and Peru, and supported, on a pro bono basis, the development of the world's first debt-for-nature swap. She is an independent director on the board of MicroBuild (a proof-of-concept fund launched by Habitat for Humanity International that is aimed at growing the housing microfinance sector while expanding decent housing for the poor). She also is on the board of Calvert Impact Capita and Climate United. Prof. Burand has been a consultant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), among others. She also was the co-topic leader on finance for the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative. In 1993-1994, she was an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations (during which she was seconded to the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and is currently a member of the Council. She is a member of the Bar of the State of New York. She earned her BA, cum laude, from Depauw University and a joint graduate degree, JD/MSFS with honors, from Georgetown University.
Tim W. Dornis
Global Professor of Law
Tim W. Dornis holds the Chair of Private Law and Intellectual Property Law at Leibniz University in Hannover. His scholarship examines questions of market regulation and policymaking in private international law, international economic law, and intellectual property law, with a special focus on economic analysis, socio-legal theory, and comparative perspectives.
Tim studied law and economics at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tuebingen (JD equivalent, PhD/Dr. iur.), Columbia Law School (LLM, Kent Scholar), Stanford Law School (JSM, SPILS Fellow), and Zurich University (Habilitation). His post-doctoral thesis, Trademark and Unfair Competition Conflicts: Historical-Comparative, Doctrinal, and Economic Perspectives, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press.
Before joining the Institute of Law and Technology at Leibniz University, Tim spent several years practicing in an international law firm and as a tenured civil-law judge in Germany, where he held a number of different positions on the bench and in the Department of Justice. In 2011, he was a Global Hauser Fellow from Practice & Government at NYU Law.
In addition to being a Global Professor of Law at the NYU Law in Paris program, Tim is a visiting professor at the Università di Verona and a honorary professor at the University of Zurich. He is also admitted to practice law in New York.
Lamin Khadar
Global Adjunct Professor of Law
Lamin Khadar is an in-house human rights lawyer at Statkraft, Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy. Based in Statkraft’s Oslo headquarters, Lamin advises on business and human rights with a focus on due diligence, stakeholder engagement, disputes, reporting and disclosure. On an on-going basis, Lamin also advises on pro bono projects related to human rights for international NGOs, international organizations and leading law schools. Lamin is a qualified lawyer (England and Wales, 2012), and has practiced in the fields of ESG compliance and corporate governance, international and European human rights law.
Francesca Ragno
Global Professor of Law
Professor Francesca Ragno is Full Professor of International Law at the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Bologna. She graduated in Law (J.D.) with honors at the University of Bologna and obtained her PhD from the University of Verona. Throughout her career, she has researched and lectured in Italy and in several Universities abroad, such as the University of Heidelberg, Paris Nanterre and the University of Pittsburgh (as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair). Her scholarship spans international litigation, conflict of laws and international commercial arbitration. She is a qualified attorney in Italy.
Friedrich Rosenfeld
Global Adjunct Professor of Law
Prof. Dr. Friedrich Rosenfeld is partner at the arbitration boutique Hanefeld in Hamburg, Germany, and Paris, France. He acts as counsel in international arbitrations with a focus on construction, post-M&A, commercial and investment disputes. Besides, he has been arbitrator in cases involving a range of applicable substantive laws and seats (e.g. Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Luxembourg, Northern Macedonia, Switzerland, United States). Before joining his current firm, Friedrich worked as a consultant for the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials in Cambodia.
Friedrich is Global Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law in Paris, a lecturer for investment arbitration at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg as well as Honorary Professor at the International Hellenic University in Thessaloniki. He has taught arbitration as Global Professor from Practice at NYU School of Law in New York and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. Friedrich studied at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and at Columbia Law School in New York. He earned his PhD summa cum laude and speaks German, English, French and Spanish.
Marco Torsello
Global Professor of Law
JD cum laude (Bologna, Italy, 1994), LLM in European Business Law (Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 1998), admitted to the Bar in 1997 (top 1%) and to the Italian Supreme Court (2015), Marco is a Full Professor at the University of Verona, School of Law and the Director of the Centre of Excellence IUSTeC on Law, Technology, and Social Change.
With over twenty years of experience in private practice, Marco is also a founding partner at ARBLIT – Radicati di Brozolo Sabatini Benedettelli Torsello, a boutique firm specializing in international arbitration and litigation. Since 2014 he has also been a Global Professor of Law at NYU, School of Law (Law-Abroad Program in Paris), teaching European Business Law. Marco’s research and teaching covers a variety of subjects, including comparative and international contract law, transnational commercial law, European and international business law, cross-border litigation and arbitration, law and technology, food law, and others.
He was a visiting professor at several institutions in Italy and abroad, including Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, NYU Law School, Science Po in Paris, Columbia Law School, Fordham Law School, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Université Paris Ouest – La Défense, the University of Western Ontario, Loyola Law School Los Angeles, Loyola Law School Chicago. Marco was also a Guest Researcher at the Max-Planck Institut für Ausländisches und Internationales Privatrecht in Hamburg, and served as the Italian Delegate at UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law), Working Group on International Contract Practices.
Marco is a member of several academic and professional associations, including the International Academy of Comparative Law, the ICC Commission on Arbitration and ADR, the International Council for Commercial Arbitration, the European Law Institute, and the Società Italiana per la Ricerca nel Diritto Comparato, and he is the author of several books and papers dealing with contracts, international business transactions, transnational dispute resolution, and other issues.