Arato’s research focuses on public international law, international investment law and arbitration, international trade, contracts, corporations, and private law theory.
Arato is an author of International Law: Cases and Materials, 8th ed. (2024) (with Lori Damrosch and Sean Murphy). He also co-edits an open-access casebook on international trade law, The Law of the World Trade Organization Through the Cases (with J.H.H. Weiler, Sungjoon Cho, and Kathleen Claussen). His article “The Private Law Critique of International Investment Law” won the 2019 Francis Deák Prize for best article by a younger author published in the American Journal of International Law, as well as the inaugural ICCAGuillermo Aguilar-Alvarez Memorial Prize.
Arato serves as a special adviser on international law to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Since 2018, he also has served as an observer delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group III (ISDS Reform).
Arato is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law. He is active in the governance of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), having served as co-chair of the 2024 ASIL Annual Meeting, as a member of the executive council, and as co-chair of the International Economic Law Interest Group and the International Organizations Interest Group. He also has served as chair of the Academic Forum on Investor-State Dispute Settlement and as a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council.
Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, Arato was a professor of law and associate dean of faculty research and scholarship at Brooklyn Law School. Before that, he was an associate-in-law at Columbia Law School. He previously worked as an associate in the international arbitration group at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, where his practice focused on international investment disputes and international commercial arbitration.
