Thom Wetzer

Thom Wetzer is Associate Professor of Law and Finance at the University of Oxford and the Founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. His research explores how to align private initiative and the public good. Specifically, he studies how legal and financial mechanisms address, or fail to address, governance challenges generated by the presence of externalities, with a particular emphasis on climate change and financial stability. 

Wetzer’s work combines traditional legal scholarship with multidisciplinary analysis and has been published in legal, economic, and scientific journals (including Science, Nature, and Nature Climate Change). He is also a co-editor of the Handbook of Financial Stress Testing (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Wetzer actively collaborates with and advises governments, central banks, international institutions, corporations, and NGOs – including the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, and law firm De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek. He is currently serving as a member of the United Nations Task Force on Net Zero Policy and the European Securities and Markets Authority's Working Group on Sustainable Finance. At Oxford, Wetzer also co-leads the Net Zero Regulation and Policy Hub, acts as a Co-Investigator of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.        

Wetzer has taught at various universities around the world, including Yale and Stanford, and has educated supreme court justices as well as senior leaders in the public, private, and NGO sectors. In 2023, he was the recipient of the Smith School's inaugural Teaching Excellence Award. Wetzer holds a DPhil (Clarendon Scholar) and an MSc in Law and Finance from the University of Oxford and received a BA(Hons) and an LLB from Utrecht University. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, Yale University, and Berkeley Law School, and worked at the European Commission and Goldman Sachs.  

A full list of academic publications is available on Google Scholar.