A first Project Meeting and first Advanced Training Course of the Marie Curie Network on TTIP took place in Passau (Germany) between the 13 and 15 December 2017. These events assembled all recruited Early Stage Researchers (ESR), many of their supervisors, the network administrators, and outside speakers at the University of Passau in Lower Bavaria.
Passau is one of the 11 beneficiary institutions of this Innovative Training Network on Transatlantic Trade and Investment (TTIP-ITN) funded by the EU’s Horizon2020 programme and coordinated by Professor Martin Trybus at the University of Birmingham.
During the first Project Meeting all 14 of the already recruited ESRs presented their research projects (focussing on research questions and methodology) to the other ESRs, the Network Coordinator and Director of Research Professor Trybus, the Director of Teaching Professor Fabian Amtenbrink (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and a selection of the other academics supervising ESRs in the context of the Network. Each ESR faced questions and received feedback from the Meeting. These presentations built on the first presentations at the Kick-off Meeting of the Network in Birmingham in October 2017. The second Project Meeting will be held at the German University of Public Administration in Speyer in April 2018 and then followed by similar meetings twice every year as the ITN progresses until 2021.
The first Advanced Training Course covered “The Law of TTIP” and was organised by Professor Christoph Herrmann of the University of Passau. It included seminar presentations on “The Structure and History of International Economic Law” by Professor Herrmann; “US Constitutional Law and Trade Policy Decision Making in the context of TTIP “ by Professor Chris Yukins (George Washington University); “EU Commercial Policy Decision-Making with a view to TTIP”, “WTO Law and TTIP” by Professor Mary Footer (University of Nottingham), “The Current State of EU-US Trade Relations” by Jan Vandenberghe (EU Commission), and presentations on “Ethics and research” by Professor Footer and “Starting your Ph.D. research on TTIP – An introduction” by Professor Amtenbrink.
The next Advanced Training Course will be held in Rotterdam in January 2018 and cover “The Law and Economics of TTIP”. This will be followed by two courses on “The US Perspective of TTIP” in Speyer (April 2018) and Washington D. C. (September 2018), “The Politics of TTIP” in Brussels (May 2018), “Applied Transatlantic Trade and Investment Law” in Turin (April 2019), of and a Dissemination Workshop in The Hague (September 2019).
All TTIP-ITN Advanced Training Courses are open to up to 20 participants from outside the Network, provided they cover their own costs. Five such outside participants were registered in Passau for “The Law of TTIP”.