Institute for Food Laws and Regulations

Michael T. Roberts is the founding executive director of the Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law. He is a prolific and respected author, lecturer, and commentator nationally and internationally on matters related to food law and policy.

Michael has extensive teaching and practice experience in China and Asia. He is a research fellow for the Center for Coordination and Innovation of Food Safety Governance, Renmin University of China Law School, Beijing. He is also a guest law professor for the East China University of Science &Technology (ECUST) School of Law and deputy director of the ECUST FDA Research Center, Shanghai. He has recently agreed to write a China Food Law Update for the Journal of Food Law and Policy, and has also worked extensively in Asia as a consultant on various projects on food law and policy.

In 2000, Michael left his law practice and enrolled in the LL.M. program on agricultural law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Since then, he has engaged in a variety of professional capacities related to food law and policy. A few years after completing the LL.M. program, he was invited to join the University of Arkansas School of Law as a Research Professor of Law and as the Director of the National Agricultural Law Center, where he taught food law and policy and founded the law school’s Journal of Food Law and Policy.

Michael is the former first chair of the Lex Mundi (world’s largest association of private law firms) international Agribusiness practice group. He also was of counsel in Washington with Venable LLP as a member of the firm’s food and agricultural law practice group, and special counsel to the Roll Global farming and food companies headquartered in Los Angeles, where he was responsible for global food regulation, trade, and public policy.

A visiting scholar and consultant to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Michael has also served on the advisory board for the World Food Law Institute and was an expert panelist for Oxford Economics.

Michael is a guest instructor in FSC 815, Food Laws and Regulations in China.