Political groups

1999-2004: Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party
2004-2012: Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

National parties

1999-2012: Liberal Democrats

Biography

Diana Wallis was born in Hitchin, United Kingdom. She studied history at the Polytechnic of North London and graduated with a Bachelor in 1975. She obtained a Master of Arts in Local Government from the University of Kent in 1976. She then attended two years of Law Degree course at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In 1984, Wallis received a certificate of aptitude for working as a solicitor. Between 1984 and 1999, she worked as a solicitor in London and Hull. For over fifteen years, Wallis worked as a litigation lawyer mainly in a London firm, where she specialised in European cross border practice and became one of the first British solicitors to be admitted to the German bar in the 1980s. 

Wallis then spent over a decade as a Member of the European Parliament. Particularly during her membership of the Committee on Legal Affairs, Wallis' legislative work focused on European private international law (as a rapporteur on Brussels I and Rome II), contract law, alternative dispute resolution and mediation, collective redress, property rights, e-justice and as an author of a report on the role of the national judge in EU law. In 2007, she was elected to serve as Vice-President of the European Parliament and was responsible for transparency and access to documents.

Ceremonial signing of co-decision legislation: Citizens' Initiative. L-R: Gerald Häfner, Diana Wallis, Erminia Mazzoni, Carlo Casini, Zita Gurmai, Alain Lamassoure © European Union 2011 – European Parliament

Since leaving the European Parliament in 2012, Wallis has continued her activities in the European legal field particularly as president of the European Law Institute from 2013 to 2017. She is currently a member of the EU Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales, a member of the board of trustees of the European Law Academy in Trier and a member of the board of trustees of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

Wallis is also a senior fellow of the law school at the University of Hull, her local university, where she previously taught part-time in the 1990s. She teaches in the areas of EU law, private international law and international commercial arbitration. She is also a practicing mediator and arbitrator and is a CEDR-accredited mediator and a member of the Charter Institute of Arbitrators. 

Wallis was elected to the board of the International Mediation Institute in April 2012. She has also been active within the Civil Mediation Council’s government relations committee.

For more information on her time as an MEP, click here. 

What's in the archives

The fonds contains documents related to Diana Wallis' parliamentary activity as member of the Committee on Legal Affairs (previously the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market), the Committee on Petitions, the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, the Committee of Inquiry into the crisis of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, the Temporary committee on human genetics and other new technologies in modern medicine, and the Delegation for relations with Switzerland, Iceland and Norway and to the European Economic Area Joint Parliamentary Committee. The typologies of these documents are notes, correspondence, reports and projects.

The series regarding her political work contains documents illustrating her activity as Vice-President of the European Parliament (2007-2012) and as a member of the political group Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, as well as working documents concerning her local constituency correspondence, letters, meetings minutes and speeches. 

A small part of the archive is comprised of the correspondence and working documents regarding the Campaign for the European Citizens' Initiative and Referendum in Britain.