Ms Anne McNaughton

Anne McNaughton is a comparative lawyer who researches at the intersection of international and comparative law.  She was appointed as Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies (ANUCES) in March 2020 (having been its Deputy Director since 2015). Supported by a DAAD scholarship, Anne completed her first LLM at the Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen (Germany) in 1991, writing her thesis The incorporation of the territory of former East Germany into the European Union entirely in German.  Following her return to Australia, Anne worked as a commercial lawyer while establishing the undergraduate course on European Union (EU) law at University of New South Wales (UNSW) and commencing her second LLM at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), specialising in International Law.

Since becoming a full-time academic, Anne has been particularly interested in the complex issues associated with how global economic integration affects the local legal framework at various levels.  Anne researches the concept of mutual recognition as developed in EU jurisprudence and its migration into international trade treaties and agreements.  Building on this work, her current research examines the nature of legal transplants between new and emerging legal systems of international law.  Anne has conducted this research as a member of an Australian Research Grant Linkage project that examined the changing nature of the trade and business relationship between Australia and the European Union. She has also been a member of several research projects funded through the European Union’s Jean Monnet activities programme and is currently a research lead in a Jean Monnet network and Centre of Excellence based at the ANU Centre for European Studies.

Anne has been an external assessor for the University of the South Pacific (USP) Law School for their course on EU law in the South Pacific (2004), where she was also an external LLM thesis supervisor.  She is currently Scientific Director of the International Association of Legal Science (IALS) and co-chair of the Special Interest Group, Global Private Law of the European Law Institute (ELI). In addition to these academic activities, she was also a member of the executive of the not-for profit German-Australian-Pacific Lawyers Association (GAPLA) from 2007-2018.

Most recently, Anne has been a panel member for a PhD candidate writing on international investment law and the normative leverage of the EU in respect of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform (awarded, with no revisions, in November 2020).

Anne has presented her research at international conferences and participated in workshops in Europe, the US, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and China.

BA (UoN) LLB (UNSW) LLM (Tübingen) LLM (UTS) Grad Cert HE (ANU)

Anne's particular research focus is at the intersection of international and comparative law. It includes the European Union as a legal system, comparative aspects of the EU and the Indo-Pacific region, legal transplants and the concept of mutual recognition with a focus on services and the professions; and the Europeanisation of private law, particularly in the areas of contract, property and commercial law.