Nicolas Diebold new Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne

Nicolas Diebold will be the new Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne on August 1, 2022.  In addition, Bernhard Rütsche takes over as Vice-Chancellor for University Development and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lucerne.

Diebold has been working at the University of Lucerne since 2012, first as a lecturer and since 2016 as a full professor of public law and commercial law. He succeeds Andreas Eicker, who has headed the Faculty of Law since August 2019.

Before his appointment, he ran the Internal Market Competence Centre at the competition authorities in Bern, and previously worked as an antitrust lawyer at an international corporate law firm in Zurich. He became a Member of the Competition Commission in April 2018.

Nicolas Diebold was born in South Africa in 1978 and grew up in Baden, Switzerland. He studied law at the Universities of Geneva and Zurich and received an LL.M. degree from Duke University in 2004 as a participant in the Geneva-Duke partnership programme. After qualifying as a lawyer in the canton of Aargau and in New York, he gained experience in international economic law as a stagiaire at the European Commission in Brussels and at UNCITRAL in Vienna. Whilst completing his doctorate (PhD) he worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Institute of European and International Economic Law at the University of Bern, and spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at Stanford University on an SNSF grant. In 2009, Nicolas gained his doctorate from the University of Bern with a thesis entitled ‘Non-Discrimination in International Trade in Services’, published by Cambridge University Press. His work was awarded the Paul Guggenheim Prize and the Professor Walther Hug Prize. He completed the ‘Habilitation’ postdoctoral qualification at the University of Lucerne in 2016 with a monograph entitled ‘Free Movement and Multi-Level Governance’. Whilst completing this qualification, Nicolas Diebold spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh.