Laurence is Emeritus Professor of European Law at the University of Groningen in Netherlands and is a Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He is a Bencher of the Middle Temple. Laurence specializes in EU law, in particular in free movement; internal market; public procurement; European tax Law; customs law; trade law; judicial protection, and institutional and governance questions.
Laurence graduated from the University of Oxford in Modern History and Modern Languages in 1975 (M.A., 1979); took a M.Sc. in European Studies at the London School of Economics in 1976, and he was called to the Bar of England and Wales by the Middle Temple in 1978, in which year he was the Middle Temple’s first Bristow Scholar, and held a Rotary Foundation Fellowship at the Europa Institute at Utrecht. He took his doctorate in 1985 at Utrecht, with a dissertation on Prohibiting Restrictions on Trade within the EEC (North-Holland, 1985). After completing pupillage in 1979, and then being a lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool and a door tenant in the chambers of Sir Charles Fletcher-Cooke QC in London, he worked as an official of the Commission of the European Communities in Brussels from 1983 to 1990 (dealing with competition, free movement of goods, and public procurement). Laurence was appointed to the Chair of European Law in September 1990, also holding a Jean Monnet Chair from 1995, and lading the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Groningen, recognised by the European Commission in 1999. He was appointed Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau in 2017, and in April 2019 he was presented with a Festschrift: Amtenbrink et al (eds), The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Laurence became Emeritus Professor in November 2019.
He has published extensively on EU law in leading periodicals; he edited and revised the 2nd. (1989) and 3rd. (1998) editions of Kapteyn &VerLoren van Themaat's Introduction to the Law of the European Communities, and wrote the contributions on customs union and the free movement of goods and on taxation in Vol. 52 of Halsbury’s Laws of England 4th. ed. (1986). His books on EU Taxation Law (2005) and EU Law of Free Movement of Goods and Customs Union (2009) are published by Oxford University Press. He is Joint Editor of Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (CUP); Joint General Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law (in preparation, OUP), and an editorial or advisory board member of various academic journals.