Born in Tunis in 1957, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a Paris-based international lawyer, policy adviser and public intellectual.

A member of the Paris and New York Bars, his practice focuses on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration, competition law, and policy advisory work. In the fall of 2007, he was appointed by the French government to lead a task force on the future of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy, ahead of the French Presidency of the EU ("Beyond Lisbon: A European Strategy For Globalisation", Peter Lang, 2008, www.euroworld2015.eu).

He was previously a partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (2005-2007), Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Sanofi-Synthélabo, a European pharmaceutical group (2004), and a partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (1991-2003). In recent years, he was involved in substantial cross-border mergers such as Vivendi Universal, Sanofi-Aventis and Alcatel-Lucent.

Mr Cohen-Tanugi is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds an agrégation in French literature from the University of Paris and a degree from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris.  He graduated from the University of Paris Law School in 1981 and received an LL.M. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1982. 

He is the author of numerous influential books, including Le Droit sans l'Etat (PUF, 1985), a comparative essay on the French and American legal and political traditions, prefaced by Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University; La Métamorphose de la Démocratie (Odile Jacob, 1989), on the changes affecting the French and European democratic cultures since the late sixties; L'Europe en danger (Fayard, 1992), anticipating the current crisis of political Europe; Le Choix de l'Europe (Fayard, 1995), on the future of European unification, and Le Nouvel ordre numérique (Odile Jacob, 1999), a multi-disciplinary analysis of the communications and information technology revolution. 

His latest English-language works include An Alliance At Risk, The United States And Europe After September 11 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2003), exploring the present state and future prospects of transatlantic relations, and The End of Europe? (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, Volume 84., No. 6), an analysis of the state of the EU following the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty, and most recently, The Shape of the World to Come, on the geopolitics of globalization (Columbia University Press, 2008), which will also be published in China.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a regular columnist in French newspapers Les Echos and Le Monde, and lectures on a variety of subjects internationally. A director of Notre Europe, a think-tank founded by former EC Commission President Jacques Delors, he is actively involved in European policy-making. He is also a member of the French Academy of Technologies and a director of several think-tanks, including the Fondation pour l'innovation politique. A frequent consultant to the French government, he sat on the Commission on Judicial Reform set up by President Chirac in 1997, and on the Commission on the Intangible Economy set up by the French government in 2006. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Council of the French-American Foundation.

Mr. Cohen-Tanugi taught a seminar in European affairs at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 2005 to 2008 and will be teaching a course on Transatlantic Merger and Acquisitions at the Harvard Law School in the spring of 2009. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is the advisor to the Polish government in preparation for his upcoming presidency of the EU in 2011.

This 2009-10 interdisciplinary research workshop examines the trajectory of human rights discourse and institutions in Africa by means of regional and international comparisons. Africa is the third, and most recent, region to establish a regional human rights court, the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights (ACPHR). At this critical juncture in African human rights, there is an urgent need for deeper understandings and applications of the law of human rights.

This workshop will be of interest and benefit to faculty and graduate students conducting research in the following areas: African studies; human rights; law; anthropology; cultural studies; history; political science and international relations; philosophy; and sociology.

The workshop, coordinated by Helen Stacy (Law School, FSI), met once during Fall quarter and will meet three times during the Winter and Spring quarters of the 2009-2010 academic year.