Erik Franckx is full-time research professor, President of the Department of International and European Law, and Vice-dean for Internationalization, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (V.U.B.).

He holds moreover teaching assignments at Vesalius College (V.U.B.); Université Libre de Bruxelles; Brussels School of International Studies (University of Kent); Institute of European Studies (V.U.B.); Université Paris-Sorbonne Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and the University of Akureyri, Iceland.

He is appointed by Belgium as: expert in maritime boundary delimitation to the International Hydrographic Organization (2005 - ); member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (2006 - ); arbitrator under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (2014 - ); and member of the national Commission for the Reform of Private and Public Maritime Law (2012 - ).

He has taught about 20 short courses since 1992 in diverse countries and was an invited speaker at about 70 international conferences during the period 2006-2015.

He served as a consultant to governments, international, supra‑national and non-governmental organizations. He served as the only foreign legal counsel on behalf of the Netherlands in the Arctic Sunrise Arbitration against the Russian Federation (2013 - ).

He has published widely, with a special interest in the law of the sea (for a complete list, see http://www.vub.ac.be/IERE/efranen.html). As a former student of Prof. Louis B. Sohn at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA, where he obtained an LL.M., he was privileged to be invited to update the second editions of the two major publications by the hand of this author with respect to the law of the sea, namely Louis B. Sohn, John E. Noyes, Erik Franckx and Kristen Gustafson Juras, Cases and Materials on the Law of the Sea, Leiden, Brill, 2014, 1006 pp. and Kristen Gustafson Juras, John E. Noyes and Erik Franckx, Law of the Sea in a Nutshell, St. Paul, Minnesota, West Publishing Company, 2010, of which is a third edition is being prepared at present.