Giovanni Gruni joined ESADE in 2019 as a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow. Previously he was an assistant professor at Leiden Law School and he worked for the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization. He holds a PhD in international economic law from the University of Oxford and an LLM from the European University Institute. Dr Gruni is also a member of the Committee of the International Law Association on world trade law and the green economy and of the Oxford Human Rights Hub.

Dr Gruni’s primary research interests have focused on the interplay between world trade law and other areas of international law such as human rights, environmental law and labor standards. His PhD thesis focused on the role played by food security in the free trade agreements between the European Union and sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

He is now working on a research project on how to include climate change policy in the new generation of free trade agreements concluded by the EU. At the moment he is developing a legislative proposal to utilize world trade law to enforce environmental standards. His research has been published in scholarly journals such as the European Law Journal and Legal Issues of Economic Integration. Dr Gruni’s first book, The EU, World Trade Law and the Right to Food, was published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Hart.