Dr. Sümeyye Elif Biber is a legal scholar in European public law and digitalisation at the University of Luxembourg Faculty of Law. She holds a PhD degree (cum laude, highest distinction) from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, with her dissertation, “A Rights-Based Inter-Legal Approach to the Fundamental and Human Rights Challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence Systems”, supervised by Prof. Gianluigi Palombella. Currently, she is writing a book, “A Rights-Based Inter-Legal Approach to Artificial Intelligence”, which is under contract with Hart Publishing.
Prior to joining the University of Luxembourg, she participated in several programs to develop her research at the European University Institute in Florence and Harvard Law School. In her academic career, she is recognised as one of the prominent early scholars all around the globe (by the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism) and is the best-ranked candidate in the competitive selection for admission to the PhD programme in 2018 (83/100) (winner of a three-year research scholarship funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research). She obtained her LLB from Istanbul University Law School with “high honour” and received her LLM degree with distinction from Koc University with her LLM thesis, “Concretisation of Constitutional Norms Referring to the Protection of Private Life in the Individual Application Case-Law”. Her published work and presentations so far have focused on,
(i) the interpretation of fundamental and human rights in the context of new technologies by the ECtHR, CJEU, and the BVerfG: (ii) the complex and composite character of law interlocking state, regional, international, and global legality through the theory of inter-legality; (iii) transnational approaches to AI and the regulatory dialogue between the US and the EU; (iv) privatisation of the enforcement of fundamental rights in the algorithmic society; and (v) “online states” with a focus on the regulation of social platforms.
She presented her papers at well-respected international conferences organised by ICON-S, Tilburg University (“Regulating in Times of Crises”), International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism, Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP-Brussels), EUI (Florence), and the United Nations International Federation for Information Processing (Switzerland).
In addition to her lectures on “AI Law and Fundamental Rights” at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and the University of Luxembourg, she has also taught the main course in “Comparative Administrative Law” at the Bachelor’s program in the Law Faculty of the University of Luxembourg. Her teaching experience spans both emerging areas of law, such as AI and fundamental rights, and core legal disciplines, reflecting her comprehensive expertise and influence in shaping the academic landscape of these fields.
Since 2023 February, she is the Head of Digital Rights of the Digital Constitutionalist in Florence (EUI).
