Born in Tunis in 1957, Laurent
Cohen-Tanugi is a Paris-based international lawyer, policy adviser and public
intellectual.
A member of the Paris and New York
Bars, his practice focuses on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, international
arbitration, competition law, and policy advisory work. In the fall of 2007, he
was appointed by the French government to lead a task force on the future of
the European Union's Lisbon Strategy, ahead of the French Presidency of the EU ("Beyond Lisbon: A European Strategy For
Globalisation", Peter Lang, 2008, www.euroworld2015.eu).
He was previously a partner of
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (2005-2007), Senior Vice President
and General Counsel of Sanofi-Synthélabo, a European pharmaceutical group
(2004), and a partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (1991-2003). In
recent years, he was involved in substantial cross-border mergers such as
Vivendi Universal, Sanofi-Aventis and Alcatel-Lucent.
Mr Cohen-Tanugi is an alumnus of
the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds an agrégation in French literature from the University of Paris and a degree from the
Institute of Political Studies of Paris.
He graduated from the University of Paris Law School in 1981 and
received an LL.M. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1982.
He is the author of numerous influential
books, including Le Droit sans l'Etat (PUF, 1985), a comparative essay on the French and American legal and political
traditions, prefaced by Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University; La Métamorphose de la Démocratie (Odile
Jacob, 1989), on the changes affecting the French and European democratic
cultures since the late sixties; L'Europe
en danger (Fayard, 1992), anticipating the current crisis of political
Europe; Le Choix de l'Europe (Fayard,
1995), on the future of European unification, and Le Nouvel ordre numérique (Odile Jacob, 1999), a multi-disciplinary
analysis of the communications and information technology revolution.
His latest English-language works
include An Alliance At Risk, The United States And Europe After September 11 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2003), exploring the present
state and future prospects of transatlantic relations, and The End of Europe? (Foreign
Affairs, November/December 2005, Volume 84., No. 6), an analysis of
the state of the EU following the French and Dutch rejections of the EU
constitutional treaty, and most recently, The Shape of the World to Come, on the geopolitics of globalization (Columbia
University Press, 2008), which will also be published in China.
Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a regular
columnist in French newspapers Les Echos and Le Monde, and lectures on a variety of
subjects internationally. A director of Notre Europe, a think-tank founded by
former EC Commission President Jacques Delors, he is actively involved in
European policy-making. He is also a member of the French Academy of
Technologies and a director of several think-tanks, including the Fondation
pour l'innovation politique. A frequent consultant to the French government, he
sat on the Commission on Judicial Reform set up by President Chirac in 1997,
and on the Commission on the Intangible Economy set up by the French government
in 2006. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Council of the
French-American Foundation.
Mr. Cohen-Tanugi taught a seminar
in European affairs at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 2005 to 2008
and will be teaching a course on Transatlantic Merger and Acquisitions at the
Harvard Law School in the spring of 2009. Laurent
Cohen-Tanugi is the advisor to the Polish government in preparation for his
upcoming presidency of the EU in 2011.
