Lucia Sommerer

Lucia Sommerer is a German-American legal scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of criminal law, criminology, emerging technology and white collar crime. She is an assistant professor at the University of Halle (Germany) as well as an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project.

She is currently working on white-collar crime in connection with offshore financial centres and cryptocurrencies.

She is an expert on the legal aspects of “predictive policing”, holds a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Law from Göttingen University. Her doctoral thesis won the Law Faculty Dissertation Award, the Körber Prize (1st place) and the Scholarship Award of the German Foundation for Law and Informatics. She was shortlisted for the Surveillance Studies Prize 2021.

In her dissertation, she argued for the development of minimum standards for the use of predictive algorithms in criminal justice and produced a critical examination of the new technological developments from a criminological, sociological and legal theory point of view, under the lens of an impending “self-imposed algorithmic thoughtlessness“ of the criminal justice system (conceptualization based on Hannah Arendt).

During her studies in Munich and Oxford, she focused inter alia on the legal regulation of climate engineering technologies (such as carbon capture and storage). Her past roles include Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology as well as research assistant with Hogan Lovells LLP and the Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies in Nanjing (China). She is co-founder of the young scholars conference "Junges Digitales Recht 2021" and “Junges Nachhaltigkeitsrecht 2022”. Her interests include "AI-art and intellectual property crime" as well as "white collar environmental crimes" and "law and political economy".