Thomas C. Kohler
Thomas C. Kohler is the Concurrent Professor of Law and Philosophy. Professor Kohler is an internationally recognized authority on the labor and employment law of the United States and other western nations, with a special emphasis on German law. He has served as a Fulbright Professor on the Law Faculty of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität (Frankfurt am Main), and has taught at the University of Texas School of Law and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. Among other honors, he has been a Fellow of the German Marshall Fund and a Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Research Fellow. He has served as a member of the Advisory Board for the E.U.-sponsored European Labour Law Network (ELLN), a Consultant to the Industrial Relations section of the Department of Sociology of the University of Warsaw, a member of the International Board for the National College of Ireland, and as a Scientific Expert to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican. He also has acted as a consultant to governments, NGOs and other international organizations on labor and employment law and policy matters.
Prof. Kohler has lectured and published widely in the United States, Europe and Japan. In addition to an extensive body of publications on labor and employment law issues, and in comparative law, he has written on personhood, mediating institutions and other issues in social and political theory, as well as on issues in Catholic social thought. He is only the second American to have been invited to present both the annual Hugo Sinzheimer Memorial Lecture (Univ. of Frankfurt Faculty of Law) and the Japan International Labor Law Foundation Distinguished Lectures (University of Tokyo Faculty of Law). And he has twice been invited to address the biennial meeting of the Deutscher Juristentag (the Association of German Jurists).
Prof. Kohler serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal; the American Journal of Comparative Law, and as an International Advisor to and a member of the Scientific Committee of IUSLabor, a journal sponsored by the Law Faculty of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He also serves on the National Executive Board of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security.
Recent activities include: lectures in the series, Göttingen Lectures in Foreign and International Labor Law (Law Faculty of the University of Göttingen); at the Law Faculty of the University of Jena; and at the Hugo Sinzheimer Institut in Frankfurt. Recent articles include Comparative Law in a Time of Globalization: Some Reflections, 52 Duquesne L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2014); Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Vision, First Things (tracing the roots of the German social market ideas) (forthcoming, 2014), and Neutralität des Arbeitgebers im US-amerikanischem Arbeitsrecht?, in Arbeit und Recht., 60.4. Prof. Kohler is currently working on a book entitled, Solidarity Forever: the Story and Significance of an Idea (forthcoming, Yale University Press).
Prof. Kohler is a member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the Association of German Jurists (Deutscher Juristentag).