Philipp Hacker

Since 2020, Professor Dr. Philipp Hacker, LL.M. (Yale), has held the Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He serves jointly at the Faculty of Law and at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). In 2021, Weizenbaum Institute Berlin hosted him for a Research Fellowship. Before joining Viadrina, Philipp was an AXA Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin's law department, where he led a project on Fairness in Machine Learning and EU Law. Prior to that, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and an A.SK Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. For his work, he received several academic prizes, most recently the Science Award of the German Foundation for Law and Computer Science.

Philipp studied law at the universities of Munich and Salamanca, and holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School. During his academic career, he benefitted from various scholarships, inter alia from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and the Stiftung Maximilianeum. Philipp obtained both his PhD (2016) and his Habilitation in Law (2020) from Humboldt University of Berlin.

His PhD thesis applies insights from behavioral law and economics to the disclosure paradigm in EU private law and develops alternatives to ubiquitous information disclosure as a regulatory tool. His more recent work in his Habilitation inquires into the relationship and tensions between EU data protection law, particularly the GDPR, and other areas of EU and national private law in the context of emerging technologies.

Currently, his research focuses on the regulation of digital technologies more broadly, particularly concerning artificial intelligence. He frequently advises national and EU institutions in these matters.