Speakers

Damian Clifford is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University, College of Law and a chief investigator of the ANU Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge project and the Socially Responsible Insurance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence ARC Linkage Project. He is also an affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London). Damian’s research focuses predominantly on data protection, privacy, consumer protection and the regulation of technology.

Huber Hurst Professor of Contract Law & Legal Studies
Warrington College of Business & Levin College of Law
University of Florida

J.D. Cornell Law; LLM Harvard Law; PhD Monash University. 2012 University of Florida’s Teacher-Scholar of the Year; Editor-in-Chief, American Business Law Journal; author of over 160 publications including 17 books. Recent books include: DiMatteo & Cannarsa, Metaverse and Law (Cambridge University Press/CUP forthcoming); DiMatteo, et al. (eds), Artificial Intelligience & Consumers (2023); DiMatteo, et al. (eds.) Artificial Intelligience: Global Perspectives on Law & Ethics (CUP 2022); DiMatteo, et al. (eds) Smart Contracts, Blockchain Technology & Digital Platforms (CUP 2020), as well as DiMatteo, et al. (eds) Judicial Control of Arbitral Awards (CUP 2021) and DiMatteo, Chinese Contract Law: Civil and Common Law Perspectives (CUP 2018) (with Chen Lei).

Mateusz Grochowski, Ph.D., LL.M. (Yale) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project (Yale Law School). Previosuly he was an Emile Noël Fellow at New York University School of Law, a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and at Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Fox International Fellow at Yale University, and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He is also a Member of the Research Group on the Law of Digital Services of the European Law Institute and an editor at the “Journal of European Consumer and Market Law” (EuCML) as well as at the “Rabels Journal for Comparative and International Private Law” (RabelsZ). He works on intersections of private law and new technology, especially on the platform economy, algorithmic price personalization and regulation of the online consumer economy.

Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker, LL.M. (Yale), holds the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS), at European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Prior to joining ENS, he served as an AXA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law of Humboldt University of Berlin; a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, and an A.SK Fellow at WZB Berlin Social Science Center. In 2021, he was a research fellow at Weizenbaum Institute for the Connected Society, Berlin. His research focuses on the intersection of law and technology. In particular, he analyzes the impact of tracking technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things on consumer, privacy, and anti-discrimination law. He often cooperates with computer scientists and mathematicians, especially on questions of explainable AI and algorithmic fairness. He has received several awards for his research, most recently the Science Award of the German Foundation for Law and Computer Science (2020).

Prof. Janssen is an expert on private law, especially where contract and tort law, European private law and international sales law, and artificial intelligence and law are concerned. He is the chief-editor of the European Review of Private Law (ERPL), editorial board member of the International Arbitration Law Review (IALR) and board member of the German-Dutch Lawyers Association.

Elwira Macierzyńska-Franaszczyk – PhD in Law, MBA; Lawyer, Assistant Professor at the Civil Law Department, Kozminski University in Warsaw; Research Assistant European Legal Studies Institute, University of Osnabrück. Former member of the working group on Service Contracts of the Codification Commission on Civil Law at the Polish Ministry of Justice; member of the European Law Institute, Wien. Specialised in Polish and European private law, consumer and e-commerce law, law of new technologies and private international law. Author of numerous publications (law).

Dr. Eliza Mik teaches Legal Technologies, E-Commerce Law and Contract Law at the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on the legal aspects of transaction automation. Before joining academia, she worked in-house for a number of software and telecommunications companies in Australia, Poland, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, advising on technology procurement and e-commerce regulation. Eliza has also advised the World Bank and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. At present, she is a member of the UNCITRAL Expert Group for the Digital Economy, a member of the Inclusive Global Legal Innovation Platform on ODR (Hong Kong), a Research Associate at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Society and Technology and an Affiliate Researcher with the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne. She currently leads two research projects, one on the feasibility of data-driven approaches in LegalTech and one on the legal responses to smart contracts.

Maria Lillà Montagnani is Professor of commercial law at Bocconi University in Milan, where she teaches and research in the field of Law and Technology, and acts as Director of the LL.M in European Business and Social Law. She is Transatlantic Technology Law Forum Fellow at Stanford Law School. She has been visiting professor at Peking University School of Transnational law and Haifa School of Law, Global Research Fellow at NYU Law School, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard University and scholarship holder at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. Lillà has widely published in the field of IP and technology in national and international journals and prestigious book series; she is also on the editorial board of several law journals and acts as an independent expert with the European Commission (lastly in relation to AI liability).

Marie-Claire Najjar is Research assistant and Teaching assistant at Bocconi University in Milan, where she also acts as co-coordinator of the LL.M. in European Business and Social Law (of which she is an alumna). She is also specialising in Privacy, Cybersecurity and Data Management at Maastricht University (at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity). This builds a bridge between her multi-disciplinary studies in economics/computer science (B.Sc.) and business law (LL.M.) at Bocconi University, and her experience in product management of AI-powered products. Her fields of interest are Responsible AI, Emerging Digital Technologies and the law, and specifically the use of data analytics in sports (on which she is publishing a study in the Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology).

Rostam Josef NEUWIRTH is Professor of Law and Head of the Department of Global Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau. Previously, he taught at the West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) in Kolkata and the Hidayatullah National Law University (HNLU) in Raipur (India), and worked as a legal adviser in the Department of European Law of the International Law Bureau of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He received his PhD degree from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy), and also holds a Master’s degree in Law (LL.M.) from the Faculty of Law of McGill University in Montreal (Canada). As an undergraduate he studied at the University of Graz (Austria) and the Université d’Auvergne (France). He has recently published the monographs The EU Artificial Intelligence Act: Regulating Subliminal AI Systems (Routledge 2023) and Law in the Time of Oxymora: A Synaesthesia of Language, Logic and Law (Routledge 2018) as well as numerous other publications that focus on contemporary global legal problems aiming to explore the intrinsic linkages between law, on the one hand, and language, cognition, art, culture, society and technology, on the other.

Jeannie Marie Paterson is Co-Director of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne and a Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School. Her research focuses on themes of support for vulnerable consumers; the regulation of new technologies in consumer and financial markets; and regulatory design for protecting consumer rights and promoting safe, fair and accountable technologies. Her recent and current books include Misleading Silence (ed with Elise Bant, 2020); and Data Rights and Private Law (ed with Damian Clifford, Kwan Ho Lau, forthcoming 2023).

Cristina Poncibò is a Professor of Comparative Private Law at the Law Department of the University of Turin, Italy, and a Faculty Member at the Georgetown Law Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London (CTLS). She is also a Fellow of the Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (Stanford Law School and Vienna School of Law). Cristina co-edited ‘Contracting and Contract Law in the Age of AI’ (Hart, 2022, with M. Ebers and M. Zou); ‘Artificial Intelligence: Global Perspectives on Law and Ethics’ (Cambridge University Press, 2022, with L. Matteo and M. Cannarsa); ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Smart Contracts, Blockchain Technology and Digital Platforms’ (Cambridge University Press, 2019, with L. Matteo and M. Cannarsa).

She has prepared the national / EU Report to be presented at the Smart Contracts session of the Conference of the International Association of Comparative Law (Paraguay, 2022). She is also a member of ELI, and SECOLA and Juris Diversitas. She regularly acts as an expert for European institutions and IOs, organises and speaks at international conferences/workshops, manages European research projects (recently a new Jean Monnet Module titled: ‘PlatformLaw’. She is also the scientific director of the Master in International Trade Law, co-organised with ITC-ILO, in cooperation with Unicitral and Unidroit. Cristina is a graduate of the University of Turin (MA) and Florence (PhD) and was an associate in a international UK law firm in London and an intern in the Italian Competition Authority. In her career, Cristina has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European Commission (Université Panthéon-Assas), a Lagrange Fellow, and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Piotr Tereszkiewicz, Ph.D. (Jagiellonian University in Kraków), M.Jur (Oxford) is a professor at the Jagiellonian University’s Private Law Department and a senior affiliated researcher at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). His research interests include consumer law and financial services in a comparative and international perspective. His research has been published in English, German and Polish, and includes the forthcoming edited volume “Protecting the Financial Consumers in Europe: Comparative Perspectives and Policy Choices” (Brill 2023).

Christian Twigg-Flesner LL.B. PCHE Ph.D. (Sheffield) is Professor of International Commercial Law at the University of Warwick. Previously, he was Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Hull, having joined there as Lecturer in 2004, and he has also taught at the University of Sheffield and Nottingham Trent University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Commercial, Consumer and Contract Law, with a particular focus on the implications of digitalisation. His research covers English, European and International dimensions. He is a Fellow of the European Law Institute, an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and one of the Law editors for the Journal of Consumer Policy.  His publications include many journal articles and book contributions in his fields of expertise. His books include Foundations of International Commercial Law (Routledge, 2021) and Rethinking EU Consumer Law, with Geraint Howells and Thomas Wilhelmsson (Routledge, 2017).

Lydia Velliscig is Associate Professor of Comparative Law at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia (Italy), where she is also member of the Academic Senate and coordinator of Placement activities. She is member of the Faculty Board of the PhD Course in Comparative, Private, Civil Procedure and Business Law, University of Milan (Italy).

She holds a law degree cum laude (2004) and a PhD in Comparative Law (2010) from the University of Milan Law School.

She is member of the Società Italiana per la Ricerca nel Diritto Comparato (SIRD) and of AIDA (International Association for Insurance Law) – Lombardy section, where she is also member of the Scientific Committee.

She spoke at numerous national and international conferences. She regularly conducts visiting research activities in qualified research centres and universities abroad. She has also participated in numerous funded research projects.

She is an author of publications in comparative and European law, especially in the field of insurance law, torts law, contract law, consumer law and law and policy of risk management, transfer and financing.

Normann Witzleb joined CUHK Law in 2021. He was previously an Associate Professor and Associate Dean (International and Engagement) in the Faculty of Law of Monash University Australia.

His research focus is on privacy and data protection law, the law of torts and remedies, as well as comparative law. His recent book publications include Big Data, Political Campaigning and the Law: Democracy and Privacy in the Age of Micro-Targeting (Routledge, 2020), with M Paterson & J Richardson (eds) and Remedies: Commentary and Materials, 7th ed (Thomson Reuters, 2020), with E Bant, S Degeling & K Barker. 

Prof. Witzleb maintains an adjunct position at Monash Law, where he teaches an LLM course on Privacy and Surveillance in the age of AI. He is admitted to practice in the Australian Capital Territory, a barrister of the High Court of Australia and a fully qualified German lawyer. In 2019 and 2020, he consulted with the Australian Attorney-General’s Department and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on law reform projects in privacy and information law.

Prof. Witzleb is an experienced PhD supervisor, who welcomes expressions of interest from higher degree research students in his areas of expertise.

Lutz-Christian Wolff is Wei Lun Professor of Law and Dean of the Faculty of Law at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After several years of studying, doing research and working in Shanghai, Taipei, Düsseldorf, Beijing, New York and Frankfurt he has been based in Hong Kong since 1999. Prof. WOLFF specializes in Chinese and international business law, private international law and comparative law. His work includes: Mergers & Acquisitions in China – Law and Practice, 5^th ed. (2015); The Law of Cross-border Business Transactions – Concepts, Principles, Skills – 2^nd ed. (2017); Flipped Classrooms for Legal Education (with Jenny Chan, 2016); The Art of Law Teaching (2021); From a ‘Small Phrase with Big Ambitions’ to a Powerful Driver of Contract Law Unification? – China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the CISG -, 34 Journal of Contract Law (2017), p. 50; AI ante portas: The End of Comparative Law?, 7 The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (2019), p. 484; The History of a Mystery: the Evolution of the Law of Unjust Enrichment in Germany, England and China (with Steve Gallagher and Lin Siyi), 3 International Comparative, Policy & Ethics Law Review (2020) p. 337; The Relationship between Contract Law and Property Law, 49 Common Law World Review (2020), p. 31; Legal Responses to China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative: Necessary, Possible or Pointless Exercise?, 29 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems Journal (2020), p. 249.