It’s with some delight that I congratulate Joseph H.H. Weiler, Joseph Straus Professor of Law at New York University, who has been selected as the next president of the European University Institute, where he received his doctorate and where he taught law from 1978 to 1985. 

Weiler was my international trade professor in law school at NYU, and although I studied under an impressive roster of legal scholars at NYU — including former Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer, Chicago Law dean Michael Schill and Middle East / constitutional academic rockstar Noah Feldman — Weiler’s course on the law of the World Trade Organization and the North America Free Trade Agreement (and really, the European Union as well) opened quite a new world of international law to me, and his relationship with the EUI gave me the chance, as a law student, to study there for a semester with any number of other top legal and political science scholars.

The EUI, situated in the hills just above Florence and just below Fiesole in Tuscany, is an international, pan-European postgraduate and research institute established by the European Union’s member states in the 1970s.