Born in Germany, Matthias Lehmann studied law at the University of Jena from 1991 to 1996. From 1997 to 1998, he attended post-graduate studies at the Université Panthéon-Assas in Paris. From 1999 to 2002, he was a judicial service trainee at the Kammergericht Berlin, which included an internship at the World Bank in Washington, DC. In 2003, he defended his doctoral thesis on the arbitrability of commercial disputes. From 2003 to 2004, he attended a Master’s programme at Columbia University. After a brief period at the University of Dresden, he returned to Columbia University in 2005 to start another doctoral thesis, which he completed in 2011.

Meanwhile, he had finished his habilitation on the dematerialisation of securities at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and started his first position as a tenured professor in Halle-Wittenberg in 2009. In 2014, he moved to the University of Bonn, where he was the Director of the Institute of Private International Law. Since 2020, he has worked at the University of Vienna.

Matthias Lehmann has been a Visiting Academic at London School of Economics (LSE) and Oxford University. He regularly teaches as a Guest Professor at Sorbonne University, the University of Fribourg, and the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville.