Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Speaker: Associate Professor Louise Damkjær Christensen, Department of Law, University of Southern Denmark
Abstract: The digitalization of payments offers unprecedented convenience, though digitalization has simultaneously birthed a "vulnerability gap." The paper will re-examine the definition of ‘vulnerable consumers’, moving beyond traditional demographics to include those suffering from digital exclusion and situational cognitive load. It then scrutinizes the legislative "safety net" provided by the new Payment Services Regulation, with a specific focus on measures to protect vulnerable consumers. The paper argues that regulatory intervention to protect vulnerable consumers also protect average consumers. This supports the paper’s argument that vulnerable consumers should be treated as a dynamic term which consumers can move in and out of over time.
Speaker Bio: Professor Lousi Damkjær Christensen is Associate Professor at the Department of Law, University of Southern Denmark. Her research is focused on financial regulation, particularly how to implement new innovative market actors into current regulation. She applies economic theory and market considerations to create a link between the market and current law. This is done to explain the state of current law, and to find solutions for optimising the regulatory framework.
3CL runs the 3CL Sullivan & Cromwell Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.
For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website:
http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

In today’s episode, we are joined by Samuel Soh, Qinglan Du, and Joyce Mau to discuss their experiences pursuing postgraduate law degrees.
Samuel completed the BCL at Oxford, Joyce pursued an LLM at Harvard, and Qinglan completed an LLM at Cambridge.
We discuss how to choose the right master’s programme, funding opportunities, the academic experience, key lessons learned, what sets each programme apart, social life, and much more.
A huge thank you to Samuel, Qinglan, and Joyce for taking the time to join us and share their experiences on the podcast!

Speaker: Dr Julia Möller-Klapperich, Freie Universität Berlin
Abstract: Art is, first and foremost, something deeply personal, yet at the same time a form of communication that is relevant to society. Copyright law therefore balances between the interests of the artist and those of society. If something has relevance within a market economy, it can in general be monetised. Whilst innovation is increasingly understood politically as the ability to capitalise a personal or societal need, the democratising effect that characterises art as a human phenomenon and as a space for societal resonance is visibly eroding, giving way to a digitalisation-driven centralisation of what is publicly perceptible and, with it, a concentration of power on an unprecedented scale. Legal science must counter this development, to develop meaningful concepts of innovation through interdisciplinary discourse, and to design legal rules that take appropriate account of the social functions of art and AI.
The issue of memorisation lies at the heart of this conflict and is therefore highly controversial. The European Commission has recently launched a consultation on the challenges and way forward regarding the impact of technology on copyright. While the legislature is assessing the situation, courts — including those in Germany — must decide on various cases based on current legislation. It remains unclear whether representing information extracted from copyright-protected works in an AI model constitutes a reproduction under copyright law. In two notable rulings, German courts have ruled in favour of a collecting society that initiated legal proceedings against AI providers. The decisions focus on establishing the facts and proving a physical reproduction as depicted in the model. However, the problem is that due to the technical functioning of the model, this physical reproduction cannot be identified within it. For this reason, the literature considers that, at least in a technical sense, no reproduction has taken place. This talk attempts to shift the discussion from establishing the facts to legal interpretation in cases where the facts cannot be sufficiently clarified. This approach is based on the balance of interests embodied in copyright law. Furthermore, the allocation of responsibilities between the courts and the legislature in addressing unclear technological issues is considered in the assessment.
Biography: Dr. Julia Möller-Klapperich, LL.M., is the Academic Director of the Master's programme in Business, Competition and Regulatory Law at Freie Universität Berlin, where she is also a Habilitandin. She holds a Master's degree from Dresden University of Technology and a PhD from the Technical University of Freiberg. Prior to joining FU Berlin, she was a research associate at the Scads.AI AI competency centre Dresden/Leipzig. Her main research focus is the regulation of emerging technology markets.
For more information see:
https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Dr Ana Bobić, Hertie School, Berlin
Abstract: The European Union exhibits a fundamental ambiguity: it strives to be a political community that delivers to its citizens freedom, equality, and other values in Article 2 TEU, but on closer inspection, the emancipation it promotes is grounded predominantly in market rationality. In other words, the EU seeks to build a socio-political community, but its means of doing so remain contingent upon their economic contribution of those living in its territory. The Member States too are an important part of this story: they contribute to the creation of such laws and insist on being the primary sites of reproducing political membership and identity. The aim of this talk is to uncover what the EU takes itself to be as a polity (a political community of values) and analysing the contradictions that arise from how it puts these claims into practice.
To do so, I use the concept of social pathology developed in social theory. A social pathology may be defined as a dysfunctionality that is the result of a social dynamic – a self-reproducing nexus of collective practices – that, apart from its connection to injustice, diminishes the good (or impedes the ends) of those who participate in those practices. A social pathology is more than just a breach of the law, an injustice to an individual, or even structural injustice: it is a self-perpetuating dynamic that is difficult to break from. The focus is thus not actions of individuals or specific judgments and decisions, but the relationship between law and broader social practices and institutions. This novel approach allows us to see how EU and national law jointly and over time stratify humans into hierarchies based on economic merit, contrary to its proclaimed values of freedom and equality. Juxtaposing the EU’s value claims with social reality will allow us to see the broader distribution of privileges and burdens among the people living in the EU’s territory.
Biography: Ana Bobić is a Senior Researcher at the Hertie School, member of the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review, and currently a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research is on the EU’s constitutional theory, judicial interactions in the EU, the constitutional implications of the EMU, and the philosophical aspects of belonging in the EU. Ana is the author of two books, The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict in the EU (OUP 2022) and The Individual in the Economic and Monetary Union. A Study of Legal Accountability (CUP 2024).
For more information see:
https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Chair: Professor Markus Gehring, CELS
This seminar and book discussion will focus on how artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding the supply of legal reasoning, but how it does not by itself produce justice. Superjustice asks what legal systems should look like when constraints of scarcity, delay, and inconsistency can increasingly be relaxed by computation. Rather than simply digitising existing institutions, Benjamin Alarie and Samuel Becher argue in their new OUP book with the same title for redesigning law as a more accessible, responsive, and adaptive framework for human flourishing. The talk and discussion will explore how AI could make legal guidance more broadly available, support more dynamic and personalized legal systems, and change the roles of judges, lawyers, educators, and policymakers. It will also confront the harder questions raised by this transformation, including bias, transparency, privacy, procedural justice, and institutional legitimacy.
Speaker:
Benjamin Alarie is the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Blue J, an AI platform for tax used at thousands of accounting and law firms. He has spent more than a decade applying artificial intelligence to tax and law and coined the term “legal singularity” in 2016. In addition to Superjustice (Oxford University Press, 2026) he is co-author of The Legal Singularity (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which won the 2024 AAP PROSE Award and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Louise Arbour.
Discussants:
Dr Emilija Leinarte, Deputy Director of CELS, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a fellow of Corpus Christi College
Professor Christoph Winter is Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), University of Cambridge

For more information see:
https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series