Dr. Pascal T. Sierek

Main Fields of Research

Civil law; law of the digital economy, with a focus on data and AI; legal theory; interdisciplinary legal research; intellectual property law

Vita

Pascal T. Sierek was born in 1995 and studied law from 2013 to 2018 at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

He was a doctoral student at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn from 2020 until 2024. His dissertation, “Datenaustausch durch Datentreuhand” [Data sharing through data trustees], was supervised by Professor Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider and was conceived and written within the framework of the cross-university research training group “Recht der Informationsgesellschaft” [Law of the information society]. It addresses the question of how data trustees can be set up under private law to promote a sovereign exchange of data between market participants. The dissertation was awarded the TELEKOM Prize by the Department of Law at the University of Bonn as well as the GRUR Dissertation Prize in the category of data and information law.

He sat for the second state law exam in September 2024. Since February 2025, he has been a research fellow at the Institute in the group led by Professor Anne Röthel. His research focuses on the law of the digital economy, in particular the private-law concept of voluntariness in digital environments, as well as on data law, the law of artificial intelligence, and related fields. He also studies how insights from other academic disciplines (e.g., economics, the social sciences, and computer science) can be integrated into legal reasoning in private law from the perspective of legal theory.