prof. dr. L.W. (Laurence) Gormley, MA MSc

Laurence Gormley is Emeritus Professor of European Law. From 1 September 1990 to 2 November 2019 (when he became Emeritus Professor), he was the third holder of the Chair of European Law in the Faculty of Law at Groningen (the oldest Chair of European Law in The Netherlands), succeeding  Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst and Christiaan Timmermans. Between 1995 and 2019 he also held a Jean Monnet Chair, and from 1999 to 2019 he led the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Groningen, both titles awarded by the European Commission. 

Laurence is a Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges, and a Bencher of Middle Temple, London.

He has published extensively on EU law, particularly in the areas of the free movement of goods; the internal market; customs law; taxation; public procurement; judicial protection, and judicial architecture. His books include: Prohibiting Restrictions on Trade within the EEC (North Holland, 1985); EU Taxation Law (Oxford University Press, 2005), and EU Law of Free Movement of Goods and Customs Union (Oxford University Press, 2009). He contributed Parts 12 and 20 to volume 52 of Halsbury's Laws of England (4th edn, Butterworths, 1986) and edited the 2nd and 3rd editions of Kapteyn & VerLoren van Themaat's Introduction to the Law of the European Communities (Kluwer Law International, 1989 & 1998).

In April 2017 he was appointed Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau, and in April 2019 he was honoured to be presented with a Festschrift: Amtenbrink et al. (eds), The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration (Cambridge University Press, 2019, 854 pp.).

Laurence was the first chairman of the Dutch Association for Procurement Law (of which he is an Honorary Member (Erelid)). He is a Fellow of the European Law Institute; a member of the European Association of Tax Law Professors; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Emeritus Member of the Society of Legal Scholars. He has been a Visiting Professor at, inter alia, University College, London; Bremen; Bonn; Bucerius, and Leuven. He has been a Visiting Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and the Centre of European Legal Studies at Cambridge. In 2015-2016 he was President of the European Law Faculties Association (ELFA).

He is a member of the Editorial or Advisory Boards of myriad Law Reviews, including the European Business Law Review; the European Law Review; the European Journal of Consumer Law; the European Journal of Legal Education; The Irish Jurist, and the Public Procurement Law Review.

Laurence is Joint Series Editor of Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy, with Professors Jo Shaw (Edinburgh) and Mark Dawson (Hertie); Laurence is also Joint General Editor, with Professor Sacha Garben (College of Europe), of the Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law.