Rui Pereira Dias is Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, where he presented his first thesis on Substantive and Conflict-of-Laws Aspects of Shareholders’ Liability for Harmful Influence Exercised upon Directors of Publicly Held Companies, published in 2007.
He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Porto, where he graduated first in his class, at the Law School at the University of Minho (in Braga, Portugal), and held post-graduate courses and conferences in, Angola, Brazil, Germany, Mozambique, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. He published in Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, South-African, and German law reviews in the fields of Private International Law, International Litigation and Arbitration, and Company Law.
Rui studied in Porto, Heidelberg, Coimbra, and New York, in addition to having benefited from fellowships of the Max-Planck-Society and of Santander for research stays in Hamburg (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil), respectively. He holds an LL.M. ('11) by the New York University School of Law (on International Business Regulation, Litigation and Arbitration), where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.
After delivering his thesis in 2015 on Choice-of-Forum Clauses in Company Law-Related Litigation, publicly discussed and approved summa cum laude in July 2017, he received tenure at the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra. This thesis has been published in 2018 by Almedina.
Rui was Editorial Secretary (2009-2017) and is Executive Editor (Redator-Delegado, since 2017) of the Portuguese Company Law Review (DSR), and also a member of the team of authors responsible for the ongoing (2010- ) seven-volume project of a Commentary of the Portuguese Companies Act (Código das Sociedades Comerciais em Comentário, IDET/Almedina), now in the course of publication of its 2ndeditions, where he is in charge, among others, of the comments on the rules on Financial Reporting and on International Company Law, including Groups of Companies.
In 2017 he became co-editor of the blog Conflict of Laws (http://www.conflictoflaws.net/).
Rui is also actively involved in issues of Corporate Governance: in 2018 he has been appointed Executive Director of the newly created Monitoring Executive Committee in charge of accompanying and analysing compliance by Portuguese listed companies, with the recently approved Corporate Governance Code (2018). He participated in the 2020 and 2023 revisions of this Code. Having stepped down from the executive directorship in 2023, he remains a member of the Monitoring Committee as a non-executive member.
Since 2013, Rui is Vice-President of the Deutsch-Lusitanische Juristenvereinigung e.V., the Portuguese-German Lawyers Association. In 2018, he became a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationales Recht, the German Society for International Law.
Rui is admitted to practice in Portugal and has acted as independent legal consultant in complex commercial transactions and litigation, having also been officially nominated by German courts to provide expertise on the applicable Portuguese law.
He has been appointed as arbitrator, in domestic and international arbitral proceedings, and he has co-edited and co-authored the first handbook focused on the law and practice of international arbitration in Lusophone countries, namely Angola, Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal, published by Almedina in 2020.
Rui speaks Portuguese, English, German, Spanish, French and Italian.
