Symeon C. Symeonides of Willamette University College of Law was elected member of the?Academia Europaea, the European Academy of Humanities, Letters, and Sciences, also known as the Academy of Europe. The Academia is based in London and its members are scholars who live and work in Europe. In cases of "extraordinary achievement," scholars who live outside Europe may be elected as "foreign" members. Symeonides was elected in this category.?
Symeonides recently completed a 30-year project involving the annual collection of surveys on American conflicts-of-laws cases. Beginning as a survey request by the Association of American Law Schools of fewer than 1,000 yearly cases, the project and case load grew and has helped define conflicts law. Symeonides is an Adviser on the Restatement Third of Conflict of Laws project.
“An important thing that came out of the survey is I developed decisional patterns and extracted from them certain rules, which I used in drafting a codification for Louisiana,” Symeonides says. “When I came to Oregon in 1999, we drafted a similar statute that tells courts what to do in these cases.”
The last 20 of the 30 surveys have been published in a three-volume book entitled Choice of Law in Practice: A Twenty-Year Report from the Trenches (Brill | Nijhoff 2021).