Maren Woebbeking

Maren is a postdoctoral researcher at the European Legal Studies Institute at the University of Osnabrueck in Germany and has been a Visiting Fellow with the ISP since 2020. She studied law and earned her doctorate at Georg August University in Goettingen, Germany. She was a Resident Fellow at the ISP in 2019/2020 and a visiting researcher at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School in 2020. During her legal traineeship, she worked at the German Federal Ministry of Justice and served as a court clerk to a judge at the German Federal Constitutional Court.

Her doctoral research focused on the interpretation of formal languages—such as programming languages—as contractual languages. In this context, she explored smart contracts and computable contracts. Her current research interests lie primarily in AI regulation, including challenges of legitimacy in regulation through technical standards, explainability of AI, AI agents, and the impact of legal AI on methodological approaches in legal scholarship. She also investigates data as an economic good and the development of fair data markets, as well as intellectual property law, with a focus on open source and AI-related IP issues.