Anne Röthel studied law at the University of Cologne and the University of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1994, she joined the Institute for Environmental and Technology Law at the University of Trier, where she completed her doctoral studies in 1997 with a dissertation on fundamental rights in a mobile society. She habilitated through the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2003 with a monograph entitled Normkonkretisierung im Privatrecht [The concrete interpretation of norms in private law].

In 2004, she took a professorship at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, where she held the Chair for Civil Law, European Private Law, and Private International Law until the end of 2023. She has been an annual guest lecturer at the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas since 2010. She has also conducted research at Oxford and Kyōto.

She has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg since 2024. She still teaches at Bucerius Law School.