This term we have the pleasure of welcoming to the Department Dr Martin Husovec (@hutko), Assistant Professor of Law. In this Q&A interview, Martin talks to us about his research, his teaching, and his ideas for the year ahead.
Could you tell us about your education and career before joining the Department?
I studied law in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and then did my PhD in law in Munich at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition as part of an interdisciplinary programme for lawyers and economists. After my PhD I had visiting appointments in Japan and Stanford, as well as other places too. I have spent the last five years working in the Netherlands at Tilburg University’s law school, where I was a member of the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society and the Tilburg Institute for Law and Economics.
What is your key area of research expertise and what drew you to the field?
I primarily focus on intellectual property law and law and technology. I’ll give you the short version of how I ended up working in this field! When I was a student at law school, I founded a start-up providing a few services to students. At one point the start-up ran into trouble with copyright law, or at least there was the suggestion that it did. I started to study the area to find out if there really was an issue – it turned out that there wasn’t – but the funny thing is that a decade later the liability of platforms is still one of my core areas of research. Sometimes it is a total accident how you end up where you are.
Which piece of work are you most proud of so far?
The work that I enjoy the most has a societal impact and gives me an intellectual thrill! I am quite proud of my book, which came out in 2017 as a result of my PhD. It was impactful and fun to work on, and looks at platform regulation and liability. It’s called Injunctions against Intermediaries in the European Union: Accountable but Not Liable? (2017, Cambridge University Press) and it looks essentially at the specific relief that you can get against service providers, such as internet access providers, to block websites that might be facilitating copyright infringement. Strictly speaking, the book covers a very small area of law, but it is such a cross-cutting area that the work is very complex. In the book, I combine law and economics, and historical, empirical and doctrinal legal research – it’s fun when you discover that research from different angles all converges in the same solutions, which is what happened with the book.
When you’re not working, what do you like to do in your free time?
I have two small kids, so that keeps me pretty busy! I am also a passionate runner and hiker. I train for marathons when I can and I run weekly. I try to find a good hike every month or so to really feel refreshed.
How have you experienced online teaching and learning in the new educational environment? What lessons should universities take forward from this experience?
I finished last term teaching online at Tilburg University. We mostly did synchronous teaching over Zoom, and I have to say it worked pretty well. I was worried but I knew my students well as we had been able to get to know each other over the course before transitioning to online teaching and learning. I would say the challenge for universities this year is that new students will start with some in-person classes but we won’t know how the situation will evolve, so it will be important that tutors and students build good relationships and a sense of trust as early as possible. I think online classes are here to stay, and education in future will be delivered by a mixture of online and in-person classes, but face-to-face classes will always be very important because education is about much more than just a flow of information from teacher to student.
In the coming academic year, the focus will naturally be on delivering exceptional teaching and learning, but when you do have the time, what would your dream research project be?
I have to finish my outstanding projects first. One is a paper examining what Advocate Generals cite at the Court of Justice of the European Union when they use academic literature - what kind of literature and which languages, how they use the literature, and how Advocate Generals differ when citing works. This will get us a sense of how academic literature is important at the Court of Justice of the European Union.
I have a few other papers to finish too. But once I’ve worked through those, I hope to start thinking about a longer term project - a book about regulation of innovation in Europe - but that will take a while!
Finally, what is the best piece of advice you can give to incoming law students?
It’s always useful to realise that every problem is an opportunity - my story about how I ended up working in intellectual property law is a case in point! You never know where events will take you. It is possible to approach our current circumstances, such as the transition to online teaching and learning, as opportunities, even if we don’t yet know what exactly those opportunities will be.
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