Dr. Linda Kuschel, LL.M. (Harvard) will join the Bucerius Law School faculty on June 1, 2019 as a junior professor in the area of law and digitalization. The tenure track professorship will be fully funded through 2021 by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, a German foundation.
Spanning all areas of life, digitalization is radically changing society. With such rapid and far-reaching shifts comes an acute need for forethought and control mechanisms - to this end, the Law plays a decisive regulatory function.
Assuming the role of junior professor, Dr. Kuschel will record, analyze and educate others about the social transformations stemming from digitalization. Her efforts will focus on effects of the transformative phenomenon on both Law and the legal services industry. Working together with her, aspiring lawyers in the Bucerius community will address challenges of digitalization across various fields of practice and gain opportunities to actively influence the forces shaping the legal profession.
Dr. Kuschel studied law from 2005 to 2010 at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. She passed the first state examination in 2010 and, following a legal clerkship at the Berlin Court of Appeals, passed the second state exam in 2012. Kuschel earned an LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2014 and, in 2018, received her doctorate summa cum laude from Humboldt University of Berlin - her thesis treated the acquisition of digital copies of a work for private use.
From July 2012 to June 2013 and July 2014 to March 2018, Dr. Kuschel served as a research assistant with Professor Dr. Katharina de la Durantaye, LL.M. (Yale), Junior Professor of Civil Law (focusing on International Private Law and Comparative Law) at Humboldt University of Berlin.
From April 2018 until her appointment to Bucerius, she was a research assistant at the Humboldt Law Clinic dedicated to Internet Law where she worked under the direction of Professor Dr. Axel Metzger, LL.M. (Harvard).
Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Katharina Boele-Woelki, President of Bucerius Law School, welcomed the news: "We have gained a highly qualified legal scientist in Linda Kuschel and look forward to her contributions in teaching and research. She will strengthen our Center for Transnational IP, Media and Technology Law and Policy and enable us to break new ground in the field of Legal Technology and Operations."
Beate Spiegel, Managing Director of the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, notes that digitalization has permeated not only our economy and society but also gained a direct influence over our private and professional lives. "Our laws must be further developed," she says, using Dr. Kuschel’s acceptance to reflect on the situation, "so that they take into account new technical possibilities. This junior professorship should provide an important contribution—both in shaping new law and policy and educating others about it."
