By Carlos Harrison
M
arkus Wagner began his world travels in a picture-postcard town of timbered houses at the edge of the Black Forest. Twice. The associate professor of international law was born in Gengenbach, Germany, near the German-French border. It’s an 800-year-old town that’s closer to Strasbourg, France, than it is to Stuttgart. He thought about going into the foreign service and saw the law as a way of getting there. In Germany, students go straight into law school after high school. So that’s what he did, pursuing a degree with an emphasis on comparative law, international law, and European law. Along the way, he lost his interest in joining the foreign ministry, but discovered a fascination with the law. He also found a career he would pursue across five continents, even though it was a concern over repeated relocations that led him to change his plans in the first place. “The foreign service sounds good in practice,” he says, “but then I decided against it because it would mean moving every few years, uprooting a potential family and so forth. Then the question became do I want to work for an international organization? Do I want to work in more traditional law, or as a lawyer with some kind of relationship to international affairs?” He wound up going to the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg as a research fellow after
he graduated and, he says, “I saw a side of academia that really interested me. Doing the research, doing teaching to a certain extent there just gave me sort of a glimpse into an area that I then decided to pursue.” He got his master’s at Stanford University, then clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel. Then, to be sure about his career path, he says, “I worked as a lawyer for a brief period of time to see whether that would interest me.” He spent six months as a legal consultant at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in Brussels, doing international trade law and competition law and decided that being a lawyer just wasn’t for him. “But law and legal academia interested me nonetheless.” So did biking. He started at “4 or 5,” he says, and bought his first road bike at 15. “I worked all summer for it,” he says, “And I bought my road bike and I just took it out and biked and biked and biked.” His first long-distance trip came while he was in Vancouver, Canada, during an exchange program during law school. “I thought it would be interesting if I biked from Canada to Mexico.” He did: about 1,800 miles in all, in a bit over a month. “And then I thought it would be nice to do a really long bike trip from my parents’ place because I had never started there,” he says. “And when you do that in Europe you think of two places. One is Asia. The other is South Africa.” So, in 2008, after his stint at WilmerHale, Wagner left his
INNOVATIVE
Faculty birthplace to travel the world, yet again. “I decided to bike from the Black Forest to the Yellow Sea.” He covered close to 10,000 miles. It took 265 days. He took pictures and blogged as he went, and used the trip to raise money for charity. It may remain his longest bike trip, he says, but it won’t be his last. “That was a luxury that I could do at that time. I certainly have trips planned in, say, Colombia, Ecuador. Back into Argentina and Chile. There are places in India. There are portions of Africa.” After his return from the road trip to Asia, he accepted the position at Miami Law. Since then, the list of Wagner’s scholarly writings demonstrate two disparate—but, he insists, related— strands: questions about international trade law and, most recently, the use of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) in war. Both deal with questions of science, and uncertainty. And both, he says, raise issues regarding “How do you translate scientific inquiry and the results of scientific inquiry into legal rules?” As an example of the first, Wagner points to the debate in Europe over hormone-treated beef. The U.S. cattle industry insists the evidence shows there’s no harm related to the practice. That’s not good enough for Europeans. “The question is, is there enough scientific evidence to warrant that prohibition of importing beef treated with hormones?” Wagner asks. “You have scientific evidence on both sides that is fraught with uncertainty…
IN N OVA TIV E FA CUL TY
Professor Markus Wagner Engages in International Trade Law and Autonomous Weapons
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