Biography
S.I. Strong is the K.H. Gyr Professor of Private International Law, specializing in private international law, international commercial arbitration, international commercial mediation and comparative procedural law. Strong has taught at law schools around the world and has acted as a dual-qualified (England-US) practitioner with major international law firms in the UK and the US. She has also written over 130 books, articles, and other works and has acted as an expert consultant to a variety of governmental, non-governmental, and intergovernmental organizations.
Prior to joining Emory, Strong taught at the University of Sydney Law School, where she was Professor of Comparative and Private International Law; The University of Missouri School of Law, where she was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law; and at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. She has acted as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the Graduate Institute at the University of Geneva and the University of Medellín in Colombia, and holds an adjunct professorship at the University of Georgetown in Washington, DC.
Strong has served as a US Supreme Court Fellow and as the Henry G. Schermers Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. She has also held visiting fellowships at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge.
Strong has won numerous national and international awards for her scholarship, including the 2022 American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section’s Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work for career contributions to research in dispute resolution and Academic of the Year (2021) in the Australian ADR Awards.
Before entering the legal academy, Strong practiced as a US-qualified lawyer and English solicitor with Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in London and New York and as Counsel with Baker & McKenzie LLP in Chicago. During her years in practice, Strong handled complex commercial disputes involving both private parties and state and other public entities in US and English courts. She also represented clients in bilateral and multilateral arbitrations seated in a wide variety of jurisdictions and proceeding under the auspices of the PCA, the ICC, the ICDR, the LCIA, the AAA and the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules.
Strong currently serves as an arbitrator, mediator, and expert witness in complex commercial disputes. She has handled dozens of cases as sole, presiding or party-appointed neutral, including high-value (multi-million dollar) and multi-party matters, and has testified as an expert witness in foreign courts and international arbitral proceedings.
Strong also provides expert advice to various governmental, non-governmental and intergovernmental bodies, including the US State Department, the Federal Judicial Center, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, and the European Union Intellectual Property Office. Among other achievements, Strong was instrumental in assisting the US State Department in developing the proposal that eventually led to the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (the Singapore Convention on Mediation).
Strong is a member of numerous academic and policy-making organizations, including the American Law Institute, the European Law Institute, the International Academy of Comparative Law, and the ICC Council. She is admitted to practice in New York and Illinois as well as the United States Supreme Court, and as a solicitor in both Ireland and in England and Wales. She is proficient in Spanish and holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford in England and from Duke University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Davis, in the United States.