Professor R.C. (Ruth Christa) Tobler is Professor of European Law at the Universities of Basel (Switzerland) and Leiden.

More information about Christa Tobler

Christa Tobler is Professor of European Union Law at the Europa Institute of Leiden University, on a part-time basis. She is also part-time Professor of European Union Law at the Europainstitut – Institute for Global European Studies at Basel University (Switzerland).

Christa Tobler studied law at Zurich University (Switzerland), from where she obtained her doctorate in 1989. Having qualified as an attorney-at-law at the Zurich bar, she obtained the degree of “LLM in European Community Law” at Leiden University in 1994. During her studies in Leiden, she was Winning Advocate General in the European Law Moot Court Competition. In 2004, Christa completed the ‘habilitation’ procedure at Basel University (Switzerland), which made her eligible as ordinary professor, with a venia legendi for Swiss public law, European Union law and gender law. Her habilitation thesis dealt with the legal concept of indirect discrimination under European Community law and under Swiss Constitutional law (EU law part published by Intersentia).

In terms of research, the focus of Christa’s research has been mostly on legal equality and discrimination as well as on the legal relationship between Switzerland and the EU. Following her habilitation thesis, research on indirect discrimination has become a particularly prominent topic. This has led to publications both on EU social law (including in recent years notably a report written for the European Commission and published in 2022) and EU economic law, including notably EU-Swiss agreements on matters such as air transport and the free movement of persons. Further, Christa has a particular interest in the question of legislative and interpretative homogeneity of the EU-Swiss treaties with the EU law from which important parts of those treaties are derived, notably from a perspective of comparative research that includes other association regimes of under EU law, such as the law of the European Economic Area (EEA). – Apart from Leiden and Basel, Christa done research in various places, among which Kyoto (Japan), Florence (Italy) and Hobarth (Tasmania, Australia).

Christa is the Academic Director of the Advaned LLM Programme in European and international Business Law (EIBL).

She has a particular interest in teaching methodology, which has led her to be a co-founder of “The EU Law in Charts Project”, which aims at using visualisation in legal teaching. She is also an enthusiastic Moot Court judge (regional level) for the European Law Moot Court Competition. She contributes on a regular basis to the educational courses offered by the European Law Academy (Europäische Rechtsakademie, ERA). For some years, she was a member of the Board of Trustees of the ERA.

Christa is a part of the executive committee of senior experts of the European Equality Network – European network of legal experts in gender equality and non-discrimination (which is an expert network set up by the European Commission). Christa is also part of the editorial board of the Swiss Review of International and European Law. She was part of the Curatorium for the Chair in Comparative Sexual Orientation Law at the Law Faculty of Leiden University. Christa is a member of a number of professional organisations, including in particular the Nederlandse vereniging voor europees recht (www.nver.nl) and the European Women’s Lawyers Association (www.ewla.org). 

Research areas

Christa’s research is mainly in two specific sub-fields of European Union law, namely:

1. Legal equality and discrimination, both in economic and in social law;

2. The legal relationship between Switzerland and the EU, seen in particular in the broader context of EU association law (such as the law of the European Economic Area).

Publications