Professor Aaron D. Simowitz

Aaron D. Simowitz is an associate professor at Willamette University College of Law (WUCL), where he teaches civil procedure, bankruptcy, negotiation, and a seminar on negotiating and drafting a complex transaction. His research focuses on cross-border business transactions, litigation, and arbitration. He is a chair emeritus of the AALS Section on Conflict of Laws, the director of the Business Lawyering Institute (BLI) at Willamette University, and an Affiliated Scholar with the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University (NYU). He is a co-author of a leading civil procedure casebook (Civil Procedure: Theory and Practice, 2022) and a co-author of the Annual Survey of Choice of Law in the American Courts.

Before joining WUCL, Aaron was a research fellow at NYU’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law and a fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute (CLI) at NYU. At NYU, he taught International Litigation & Arbitration with Professor Linda Silberman, a seminar on international commercial law with Professor Franco Ferrari, and the first-year Lawyering course. He has also taught the International Business Transactions and Transnational Litigation & Arbitration courses at Columbia Law School.

Aaron co-convened the inaugural BLI Symposium on “Teaching Better Business Lawyering” and the WUCL-CLI symposium on “The Extraterritorial State.” He received the Young Scholar’s Award from the American Society of International Law’s Private International Law Interest Group for his work on judgment and award enforcement against intangible assets. He practiced at the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and clerked for Judge D. Brooks Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.