Peter Christian SESTER
Partner at Warde Advogados, Professor Peter Christian Sester has been a lawyer in Germany since 1996 and in Brazil since 2017. He is a Professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV Direito Rio) and was a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2023.
Sester has extensive experience in domestic and international arbitrations (serving as arbitrator, expert witness, and co‑counsel) and is frequently retained to prepare legal opinions and address legal queries in the following areas: corporate law, capital markets and energy, domestic and international contracts, financings and financial products, liability of corporate officers and directors, and restructuring and cross‑border insolvency (under Brazilian, German, and European Union law).
He serves on the permanent rosters of arbitrators at several arbitration and mediation centers in Brazil. He frequently sits on challenge committees at CAM‑CCBC and CAM B3. As an arbitrator, he has broad experience in corporate disputes, mergers and acquisitions, complex contracts, and investment financing (infrastructure, oil and gas, and electric power).
He is the sole author of seven books, the editor and contributor to dozens of collective volumes, and has published more than 100 articles in scholarly journals (in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German). He is the sole author of Business and Investment in Brazil: Law and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2023), lead author and sole editor of International Arbitration: Law and Practice in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2020), and sole editor of Comentários à Lei de Arbitragem e à Legislação Extravagante (Quartier Latin, 2020).
Before focusing on legal opinions and domestic and international arbitration, Professor Sester worked for 14 years as a consultant at one of the most respected international law firms of English origin, in the areas of corporate and financial markets law, mergers and acquisitions, project finance (energy, refining, infrastructure, and industry), asset finance (aircraft and vessels), leveraged buyouts & private equity, and public‑private partnerships (e.g., highways, bridges, and airports).
Sester holds a doctorate in Commercial Law from Heidelberg University (Germany) and a doctorate in Economics from Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany). He completed his habilitation (livre‑docência) at the University of Marburg (Germany) in Private International and Comparative Law. Until 2014, he was Full Professor of Commercial Law (successor to Professor Gunther Teubner) and Director of the Institute for Law and Finance at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany). He currently teaches Arbitration, Cross‑Border Business Transactions, and English and Comparative Contract Law at Fundação Getulio Vargas (Rio de Janeiro).
As the top undergraduate student at Heidelberg University, he received a doctoral scholarship from the State of Baden‑Württemberg (Germany) and a habilitation fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). His doctoral thesis in Economics on the Brazilian capital market received an award from the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels).
Having passed public service examinations (1996 and 1997), he declined an offer from the Ministry of Justice of the State of Baden‑Württemberg to become a tenured judge, opting instead to pursue an academic career alongside legal practice. For the same reasons, he declined offers to join the German Central Bank (Deutsche Bundesbank) and Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin).
Sester is fluent in Portuguese, English, French, and German (native), with working proficiency in Spanish.
