Bio
Dr. Katharina Kaesling, LL.M. Eur., is a Research Coordinator at the international and interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Study “Law as Culture” and habilitation candidate at the University of Bonn. A graduate of the renowned College of Europe, she holds an LL.M. in European Law with a specialization in Intellectual Property Protection. She successfully completed her First Examination in Law in February 2011 and the Second State Examination in July 2017, following her legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court Cologne, with secondments to the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, D.C., Bird&Bird LLP’s department for patent litigation and the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. Her comparative law doctoral thesis on post-marital responsibility in France and Germany, published 2017, was awarded three awards. As postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Kaesling’s combination of qualifications and research interests have led her to explore data protection, children’s rights as well as intellectual property rights in the process of digitization.
Contribution to Legal Tech
Katharina has impacted the academic world of law with her integrative approach to children’s rights, data protection and intellectual property. She specifically works on the impact of algorithmic decision making on children’s rights to participation. With her unique set of qualifications, she has brought family lawyers, privacy scholars and data protection and copyright experts as well as representatives of other disciplines including media studies, computer science and philosophy together.
In 2020, she organized an international and interdisciplinary conference on “Digital Transformation in Law&Society: Comparative Perspectives on Families and New Media with Professors Nina Dethloff and Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, University of Bonn. Students of their seminar “Family and Internet”, reflecting the high-level conference’s topics, were specifically invited to the Conference. With her research on children’s capacities and participatory rights in digital contexts, she makes valuable contributions at the interface between law, technology and innovation, which have prompted a number of international interventions in writing, a number of which will be published shortly, and in person, such as at the upcoming 2021 Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference.
