Anne McNaughton is a comparative lawyer who researches at the intersection of international and comparative law.  She was appointed as Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies (ANUCES) in March 2020 (having been its Deputy Director since 2015).

As a recipient of a DAAD scholarship, Anne completed her first LLM at the Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen (Germany) in 1991, writing her thesis The incorporation of the territory of former East Germany into the European Union entirely in German.  Following her return to Australia, Anne worked as a commercial lawyer while establishing the undergraduate course on European Union (EU) law at University of New South Wales (UNSW) and commencing her second LLM at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), specialising in International Law.

Since becoming a full-time academic, Anne has been particularly interested in the complex issues associated with how global economic integration affects the local legal framework at various levels.  Anne researches the concept of mutual recognition as developed in EU jurisprudence and its migration into international trade treaties and agreements.  Building on this work, her current research examines the nature of legal transplants between new and emerging legal systems of international law.  Anne has conducted this research as a member of an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant project that examined the changing nature of the trade and business relationship between Australia and the European Union. She has also been a member of several research projects funded through the European Union’s Jean Monnet activities programme and is currently a research lead in a Jean Monnet network and Centre of Excellence based at the ANU Centre for European Studies.   

Anne has taught in Europe and China and has extensive experience teaching courses on the European Union at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She also has experience teaching courses on comparative law, contract, commercial, international business and private law to law and non-law students, at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at ANU, Sydney University, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, in Germany (Potsdam University) and China (Guangzhou University).