The Fondation Wiener-Anspach is pleased to announce that the holder of the 2025-2026 Ganshof van der Meersch Chair at the Université libre de Buxelles is Liz Fisher, Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Oxford and Corpus Christi College.
Grounded in national common law jurisdictions, her research explores the mental constructs lawyers and legal scholars use to reason, particularly in relation public administration and environmental problems. She has published numerous works, including Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (CUP 2020), co-authored with Sidney Shapiro, and Risk Regulation and Administrative Constitutionalism (Bloomsbury 2007), which received awards from the American Bar Association and the Society of Legal Scholars respectively. Her other publications include Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017) and Environmental Law: Text, Cases and Materials (Fisher, Lange and Scotford, OUP 2019), as well as two recently co-edited volumes: The Foundations and Future of Public Law (OUP 2020) and An Environmental Court in Action: Function, Doctrine and Process (Hart 2022).
Liz Fisher was General Editor of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies from 2021-2025 and served as General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law from 2012 to 2022. She is a Non-Executive Board Member of the Office for Environmental Protection and an Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2022-25 for a project exploring legal imagination and environmental law.
She will be welcomed at the ULB by Professors Chiara Armeni and Emmanuel Slautsky (Faculty of Law and Criminology).
As part of the Chair, Professor Fisher will give a public lecture at the ULB on Thursday 3 March 2026 titled “Environmental Law, Law Jobs, and Legal Expertise”. More information on this lecture will be published on our website in January.
The Ganshof van der Meersch Chair was established in 1995 in memory of Walter Jean Ganshof van der Meersch, founder and president of the Institute for European Studies at the ULB, holder of the chair of Public Law at the ULB, attorney general at the Belgian Court of Cassation and vice-president of the European Court of Human Rights. He was also the second president of the Fondation Wiener-Anspach. The chair, held at the ULB by a visiting professor from Cambridge or Oxford, focuses on the economic, historical, political and legal aspects of European integration or on public law.