Stratos Pahis

Biography

Stratos Pahis specializes in international trade law, international investment law, and sovereign debt. His article, BITs and Bonds: The International Law and Economics of Sovereign Debt, was awarded the 2022 Francis Deák Prize by the American Journal of International Law for best article by a younger author. His other work is cited extensively in Christoph Schreuer’s preeminent treatise on international investment law.

Pahis’ research asks foundational questions about international economic law to better understand its current crisis and to design rules for its reform.  Pahis’ research on international trade law, for example, asks: Why did the United States disable the World Trade Organization’s judicial mechanism rather than defy it?  How has the resulting crisis affected State and adjudicator behavior? Can agreements between subsets of States resolve the crisis by alleviating the tension between trade and national security?  How can the United States use international trade law to its advantage in its rivalry with China?   

Pahis’ research on international investment law likewise asks foundational questions, including: What is an investment?  What is the function of international investment law?  Does it really matter as much as its critics and defenders claim?  What happens when you apply it to the most common type of international investment—sovereign debt?  His answers to these questions provide a novel blueprint for reform focused on the regime’s jurisdiction and its alternatives. 
 
Pahis is currently writing on the legality of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs; about how to manage the tensions between trade, industrial policy, and economic security; and about international investment law and climate change.   

Professor Pahis has published or has works forthcoming in the major peer-reviewed publications in the field, including the American Journal of International Law, the World Trade Review, the Journal of International Economic Law, the ICSID Review - Foreign Investment Law Journal, and the Journal of World Investment and Trade. He has also published in several student-edited law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Journal of International Law, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, and the Virginia Journal of International Law.  

Professor Pahis is an Associate Professor of Law and a Co-Director of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law. He teaches international trade law, public international law, contracts, and the international economic law colloquium.

Before joining Brooklyn Law School, Pahis worked in private practice for almost eight years, including as Counsel in the international arbitration group of WilmerHale. He represented clients in dozens of international investment and commercial disputes involving a multitude of governing laws (including English, German, Japanese, Ecuadorian, Uruguayan, Peruvian, Brazilian, and New York), seated in a multitude of jurisdictions (including London, Paris, and New York), and pursuant to a multitude of procedural rules (including ICSID, UNCITRAL, ICC, ICDR, and JAMS).

Pahis has taught and researched international law and trade throughout the Western Hemisphere. He was a John Sloan Dickey Research Fellow at la Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico; the Robert L. Bernstein Fellow at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva; and a Visiting Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. He has taught at la Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and was on the faculty at Wake Forest University. Most recently, while on the faculty of Brooklyn Law School, he visited at Columbia Law School, where he taught international trade law.

Pahis speaks five languages, including English, Spanish, French, Greek, and (some) Italian.

He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master’s in International Development from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and an A.B., summa cum laude, in Economics from Dartmouth College.