Professor Sofie Cools

Sofie Cools is professor of corporate law and co-director of the Jan Ronse Institute for Company and Financial Law at KU Leuven. 

She is a member of the European Company Law Experts (ECLE), the editorial boards of the European Company and Financial Law Review and TRV/RPS and the Sanction Commission of the Belgian FSMA. From 2023 until 2025, she has held an exchange chair at Radboud University Nijmegen. 

Sofie Cools holds a master of laws degree from KU Leuven and an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School (Francqui Fellow, BAEF). Prior to entering academia, she practiced as an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. She pursued her doctoral research as an FWO Fellow at the KU Leuven and as an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. Subsequently, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. 

Sofie Cools authored national and international publications in English, French, German and Dutch and is associate author of the third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law (OUP 2017). For her research she among others received the Fernand Collin prize for law, the prix Pierre Coppens, and the Irving Oberman Memorial Award at Harvard Law School.