People

Yin Harn Lee is Co-Director of the Centre for Global Law and Innovation and a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School. Her research focuses on intellectual property law, and in particular copyright law. Her most recent projects deal with the status of videogame modifications under copyright law, and the challenges presented by copyright law for the preservation of videogames by cultural heritage institutions. She also has an interest in private law remedies, and in particular on the role of intellectual property disputes in remedial innovation.

Eva is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School. Her expertise lies in intellectual property law in which field she researches, teaches and worked in legal practice for several years. Her research focuses on IP and emerging technologies (artificial intelligence), intersection of IP and competition law and cyber security. Her monograph Copyright and Patent Laws for the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Authorship and Inventorship Revisited (Hart 2025) will be published in June 2025. She completed her DPhil at the EPSRC CDT in Cyber Security and the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford in 2023. Eva is a proud alumna of the LLM programme in Intellectual Property and Competition at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, University of Augsburg, Technische Universität München, and George Washington University Law School, Washington, D.C.).

Beril is a Lecturer in Law, Innovation and Technology at the University of Bristol Law School. She specialises in law and digital technologies. She particularly works on data protection law; legal theories (on privacy, the public/private divide, and autonomy); and regulation of emerging digital technologies and services. Before joining the Bristol Law School, she was a Lecturer in Digital Technology and Law at UCL STEaPP, and earlier she practiced law as a litigator and consultant (on data protection law, content regulations, commercial disputes, administrative law, and contracts).

Andrew Charlesworth is Professor of Law, Innovation and Society in the Law School and Computer Science Department, and a member of the Management Board of the University’s UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence. His research interests centre around information technology and e-commerce regulation, and encompass data protection and privacy, business and research ethics, intellectual property, and cybercrime. He is co-author of Rowland, Kohl & Charlesworth, Information Technology Law (Routledge), now in its 5th edition, and a member of the International Panel of Experts of the EuroPrivacy certification scheme.

Dr Tania Cheng-Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Law, with research interests in copyright law and moral rights. Her recent research projects include empirical research on the arts and moral rights in Singapore (funded by Society of Legal Scholars), and research on the history of print technology and knowledge dissemination (supported by Washington College of Law). Her research for 2024/2025, funded by the British Academy, examines copyright and moral rights issues affecting classical music, including among others, the impact of AI generative music on the development and practice of classical music. She has published in leading generalist and IP specialist journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Intellectual Property Quarterly, for which she has won prizes, including the John McLaren Emmerson QC Prize awarded by the Intellectual Property Society of Australia and New Zealand. Prior to joining academia, Tania practised law for several years, specialising in IP litigation and IT corporate work.

Jennifer Collins is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Bristol and has been a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Her research expertise is in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. She has research interests in criminal law and emerging technologies.

Colin Gavaghan is Professor of Digital Futures at Bristol Law School and the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. His research focuses on regulatory challenges posed by emerging technologies. His recent work looks at legal and regulatory issues around artificial intelligence and the internet. Prior to moving to Bristol, Colion lived in New Zealand, where he held various advisory and regulatory roles, including serving as inaugural chair of New Zealand Police’s Expert Panel on Emerging Technologies, and legal expert and deputy chair of the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Paula Giliker holds the Chair in Comparative Law and her work covers comparative private law, with particular emphasis on contract and tort law. She is interested in global comparative law, engaging in common and civil law comparisons and examination of the tensions within the common law legal family. Her work further engages with attempts at harmonisation in the European Union and beyond. Her most recent publications address EU directives on digital contracts and contracts for the sale of goods and she is currently engaged in a study of vicarious liability in tort across the common law world.

Eleanore Hickman is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. Eleanore’s research interests focus on the governance of corporations and financial institutions. As part of this, Eleanore is exploring the risks and opportunities associated with innovation and developing technologies in governance, particularly Artficial Intelligence. Much of her research can be found on ssrn. Prior to joining Bristol, Eleanore was a research associate at the University of Cambridge and a practising solicitor.

Ilias is a Lecturer in Law, Innovation and Technology at the University of Bristol Law School. His research combines doctrinal, theoretical and empirical methods and focuses on the legal, economic and governance implications surrounding the adoption of emerging technologies via platforms. Previously, he was a researcher at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) in Rome, a visiting lecturer at the School of Law, King’s College London and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Maritime Law at the National University of Singapore. Much of his research can be found on SSRN.

Lala is a Teaching Associate in Law and a Research Associate in African Policies at the University of Bristol. With a background in legal research and development economics, she examined legal and policy transplantations in West Africa. She is interested in competition law and exploring the trade dynamics between EU/UK and ACP states. She also reviewed the experiences of EU as well as Global South countries in introducing competition in the electricity markets. Lala is currently working on an ESRC-funded project exploring development issues in West Africa. Outside academia, Lala was a project manager on an EU-funded project for the development of a pipeline integrity monitoring system using machine learning.

Václav is a private law scholar. His work focuses on legal remedies and various issues at the interface of law, philosophy, and computer science. Václav is the LLM in Law, Innovation and Technology programme director. Outside Bristol, he co-directs the Oxford LawTech Education Programme.

Catherine Kelly is Professor of Law and History, and Head of School. Her research focuses on the law’s interaction with science and medicine in historical and contemporary contexts. In her historical work, she examines the ways in which laws relating to medicine and scientific innovation were made, applied and changed. Catherine is currently researching rewards and prizes for inventions in 18th and 19th century Britain. She has published widely in leading journals including: The Modern Law Review, The Cambridge Law Journal, The Law Quarterly Review, The Lancet, Legal History and Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Many of her recent papers can be found on SSRN.

Asma Vranaki is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School. She specialises in all aspects of Information Law and Regulation. Her research engages with various disciplines including regulation, Internet studies, science & technology studies (including actor-network theory) and socio-legal studies. She is particularly interested in the data protection, privacy, IP, defamation, freedom of expression and contract law issues raised by innovative digital technologies such as social media, cloud computing, AI and the Internet of Things.

Dr Katarzyna Kryla-Cudna is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School. Her research focuses on international sales law (in particular, the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods), EU consumer sales law, comparative contract law, contract law theory, liability for a breach of contract, and the role of contract law in the context of environmental sustainability. Her PhD thesis on 'Damages for Non-Pecuniary Loss Caused by a Breach of Contract' was awarded a national prize for the best PhD thesis in private law by the C.H. Beck publishing house. Prior to her appointment at Bristol, she was an Assistant Professor of Global and Comparative Private Law at Tilburg University, the Netherlands and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Rem Noormohamed is a partner in the Tech & Data Law group at Fieldfisher LLP, Industrial Professor at the University of Bristol Law School and past Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship. His expertise and research interests centre on the intersection of law and regulation with 'tech' and data driven innovation, new business models and monetisation of IP rights. He is a part-time, industry sponsored, PhD candidate at Bristol Law School - researching 'the legal, regulatory and engineering design challenges presented by digital autonomous safety critical systems'. Rem is a solicitor and an IT/telecoms consultant engineer; technical expert on ISO/IEC, CEN/CENELEC and BSI's standards development committees for Artifical Intelligence, Blockchain, ICT, IoT/digital twin, digital identity, privacy and cybersecurity; and editorial board member of the 'Communications Law Journal' (Bloomsbury Publishing).

Tonia Novitz is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses predominantly on labour law, international and EU trade, migration, sustainability and the protection of human rights. Her research maps global trends and emerging challenges, such as trade union engagement with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She is currently a vice-president of the UK Institute of Employment Rights, on the advisory board of International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) and chair of the steering committee of the international Labour Law Research Network (LLRN).

Ken Oliphant is Professor of Tort Law at the University of Bristol. Previously, while on extended leave from Bristol, he was Director of the Institute for European Tort Law in Vienna (2009-2013) and before that he held faculty positions at Cardiff University and King's College London. He has wide-ranging research interests in English, European and comparative tort law, including such topics as liability for autonomous vehicles, liability in respect of the use of AI in health care (black-box medicine) and the influence of technological innovation on the law of tort in general.

Aurora Plomer is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual Property and Human Rights at the University of Bristol. She holds degrees in Philosophy (BA, MA, PhD) and Law (LLB) from the University of Manchester. She has held awards and acted as a consultant for the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the ESRC, the Welcome Trust, British Academy, UNESCO and EUI. She has numerous publications on technological innovation, human rights and intellectual property. From September 2020 until August 2022, she will be a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow. The project will lead to a monograph on the history and rationale of the extension of human rights to companies in the ECHR and will be published by CUP.

Caoimhe researches intellectual property, law and political economy, and science and technology studies. Her research focuses on climate change, intellectual property, and innovation in times of crisis. She has completed qualitative research on inventors of UK renewable energy technologies and on access to knowledge and technology in climate extremes. Her current work focuses on the figure of the inventor throughout the history of patent law and on emerging challenges posed by intellectual property protection with regard to climate change.

Elen Stokes is a Professor in Environmental Law and Co-Director of the Law School's Centre for Environmental Law and Sustainability. Her research interests are in the regulation of new technologies, and the relationship between law and the future. She is a founder member of the Future Matters Collective, an interdisciplinary network of academics and arts-practitioners established to investigate society's relationship to the future and enable creative future-making in contexts of energy and environment, urban regeneration, and health and well-being.

Clare is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol Law School. She specialises in policing and police regulation, with an increasing interest on evidence-based policing and police use of emerging technologies. In particular, she is interested in the interface between the structures for police accountability, police occupational culture, evidence-based policing and data bias in police procurement and use of technology (including AI). Prior to joining academia Clare practiced as a senior solicitor for a policing body and she currently sits on the Independent Office for Police Conduct External Stakeholder Group.

Kit Fotheringham is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol Law School. His doctoral thesis is on administrative law, specifically relating to the use of algorithms, machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies by public bodies in automated decision-making procedures. Kit’s research maps out the existing legal frameworks and aims to synthesise the law from a regulatory perspective so that regulators can better co-ordinate their efforts.

Andrii Koshman is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol Law School. Andrii’s doctoral thesis explores the impact of court data and its quality on public understanding of the justice system. Andrii's research also aims to explore the role of quality court data in enhancing judicial accountability and how judicial accountability should evolve in the digital age.

Conor Francis Macis is a PhD student whose thesis has the working title: "Law and Governance: The Global Political Economy of Antimicrobial Resistance". Conor's research broadly encompasses global health law, Marxist jurisprudence, and the wider global political economy of health. Their thesis intends to address capitalistic preanalytical assumptions that pervade the global approach to resolve antimicrobial resistance. He is supervised by Professor Keith Syrett, Professor Terrell Carver, and Dr Jacopo Martire. They are funded on a 1+3 scholarship by the ESRC and recently completed an MSc in Socio-Legal Studies at Bristol. They also achieved their LLM in Health, Law, and Society at Bristol, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust through CHLS, having attained his BSocSc in Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton.

Katie McCay is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol Law School. Her research considers what private law remedies are available for interference with intangibles. Digitalisation has changed ownership and control of personal assets, something which English law has struggled to properly address. Problems arise because English law relies extensively on possession as a proxy for ownership and intangibles cannot be possessed under English law. There are also questions about whether certain types of digital assets are property in the first place. Her research considers the extent to which intangibles can be accommodated by existing private law remedies. It asks if the focus of remedies on property and possession is practically and theoretically defensible. This is because some types of commercially valuable intangible assets fall outside the scope of one or both of those criteria. It considers what changes, if any, would be desirable if current remedies do not adequately protect intangibles.

Haoyu Wang is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol Law School. His doctoral thesis focuses on the regulation of cross-border data transfer under General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), specialising in analysing whether regulatory controls on cross-border data transfer premised on the ‘adequacy’ requirement under the EU data protection framework can effectively against intrusive state processing when personal data is transferred to third countries. His research also explores the impact of the rapid advancement of technology and the emergence of new social phenomena on the regulation of cross-border data transfer.

Annaliese is the Centre for Global Law and Innovation's intern and a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol Law School. Her doctoral thesis is on artistic copyright law. Her research aims to shed light on the closed-list categorisation approach within UK artistic copyright, and how this may risk marginalising certain groups of creative individuals, such as those creating in contemporary or novel artistic mediums. Her project uses tactile artistic works as a key case study to demonstrate the limitations of the current approach in the UK, and contrasts this to the stance taken within EU Law. It aims to answer the overarching question; Is UK copyright law flexible enough, in both its theoretical underpinnings and legal provisions, to protect artistic works which are experienced via touch rather than by sight? This research is being carried out via doctrinal, socio-legal and empirical methodologies.