International Programs
Visiting Faculty
Antonio H. Benjamin serves as Assistant Attorney General of the State of São Paulo in Brazil, and is responsible for consumer and environmental litigation. He has taught at the National School of Judges (Brazil), the University of São Paulo, and the Catholic University of São Paulo College of Law. He serves as the Vice-Chairman of the Brazilian Institute of Environmental Law and Policy. He is co-author or editor of several influential books in Portuguese including Environmental Damage: Prevention, Redress, and Repression (1994). At Texas, he teaches courses on comparative environmental law, biodiversity, Agenda 21, and the protection of the rainforests.
Francesco Francioni, a long time visitor of the UT Law Faculty, Professor Francioni was recently elected to the Chair of International Law and International Human Rights at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. He is responsible for promoting research and for teaching in the area of international law, European law, and human rights, and is co-director of the Academy of European Law and Human Rights. Francioni previously served as the professor of International Law at the University of Siena (Italy), where he directed Siena’s International Peace Studies Center. A member of the American Law Institute, he has been a visiting professor at the European University Institute (Florence), Cornell, Toronto, and Cambridge. He is author, co-author or editor of nine books, including International Responsibility for Environmental Harm (1991) and Italy and EC Membership Evaluated (1992).
Sir Basil Markesinis is an honorary QC and holds doctorates or honorary doctorates from (in alphabetical order) Athens, Cambridge, Ghent, Munich, Oxford, and Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). After holding successively the Chairs of European Law and then Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, where he founded the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law, he moved to University College London to the Chair of Common and Civil Law, which he holds simultaneously with the (part-time but tenured) Jamail Regents Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has authored or co-authored twenty-nine books and over one hundred twenty legal articles, which have been published in leading law journals in America, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. He has lectured extensively in twenty-five different law faculties including Cornell, Ghent, Leiden, Michigan, Munich, Paris I, Paris II, Rome, and Siena, where he has held Visiting Professorships. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Corresponding Fellow of the French Academy, a Foreign Fellow of the Italian Academy (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei), the Royal Belgian and the Royal Netherlands Academies, a Corresponding Fellow of the Academy of Athens, and a Member of the American Law Institute. In 2002 he was appointed Conseiller Scientifique du Premier Président de la Cour de Cassation (France) on matters of European law. Besides his academic work, Sir Basil has advised many Government Ministers on both sides of the Channel on matters concerning Europe and, between 1997 and 2001, he also served as Special Advisor on Eurpean matters to the multi-national firm of Clifford Chance. For his academic work and other services Sir Basil has received high decorations from the Presidents of France (three times), Germany (three times), Greece, and Italy (three times). Most recently (2002) he was promoted by the President of Italy to the highest rank of the Italian Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross, while the President of Germany awarded him the insignia of Knight Commander of the Order of Merit, in May 2003. He was made Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the New Year of 2005 for “Distinguished Services to International Legal Relations”
Jane Stapleton is one of the world’s leading scholars on Products Liability. As a result of her work in products liability on three continents, she offers a comparative perspective that will complement the Law School’s strength in this field. She continues to serve as a Research Professor of Law at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, in the Research School of Social Sciences. Stapleton is also a Statutory Visiting Professor of Law at Oxford University, where she taught for a dozen years before moving to the Australian National University in 1997. From 2003 she has also been Commonwealth Fellow of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Her scholarship centers on the private law of obligations, liability and compensation systems, and ranges from comparative product liability to the philosophical foundations of common law concepts like causation, duty, and good faith. Apart from authoring many journal artilcers, she is the author of Disease and the Compensation Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and Products Liability (London: Butterworths, 1994), and co-editor of Essays for Patrick Atiyah (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and The Law of Obligations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). She is a Member of the American Law Institute and is an Adviser to the current Restatement (Third) of Torts project.