The Russian Legal Practitioner

William E. Butler

William E. Butler, M.A., J.D., LL.M., PH.D., LL.D., is The John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor of Law at the Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University and Emeritus Professor of Comparative Law at University College London; Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Russian Academy of Legal Sciences. His standard treatise Russian Law is now in its third edition (2009) and he has published widely on all the legal systems of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

He advises international organizations, governments, and leading companies and financial institutions who invest or do business in those countries with particular reference to the interface between domestic law and practice with international investment transactions. His experience extends to banking, securities, project finance, the creation and operation of companies of all types, commercial agreements, licensing, technology transfer, privatization, finance and other leasing, concessions, economic zones, shipping, aircraft, oil and gas, nuclear power, electric power, and environmental protection.

For more than three decades he has advised on and given formal legal opinions with respect to all aspects of Russian and Soviet Law before English, American, Australia, French, and Swedish courts and tribunals and in international arbitrations, and has prepared expert opinions and reports for the Office of the Legal Advisor, United States Department of State, the United States Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Social Security of the United Kingdom, the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and for international organizations, banks, large corporations, and industry associations.

He has acted as the Counsel to Cole Corette & Abrutyn (1988-92) and Clifford Chance (1992-94) and as Partner and Head of the CIS London Group and the Almaty and Tashkent offices of White & Case (1994-96). From 1997-2001 he was a co-founder and Senior Partner in the PwC (later Landwell) CIS International Law Firm in Moscow, and in 2002 co-founded Phoenix Law Associates CIS, a Russian law firm located in Moscow.

He is admitted to the Bar of the District of Columbia (1967) and the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States (1970), and has been licensed by the respective Ministry of Justice in Uzbekistan (1996) and the Russian Federation (1997).