Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker

Holder of the Chair and Director of the Institute for Digitalization at University of Cologne

Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann, LL.M. (Georgetown Univ.) has headed the Chair for the Law of Digitization and the Institute for Digitization at the University of Cologne since 2024. Prior to this, she held the W3 professorship for Public Law, Information Law, Environmental Law and Administrative Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt a.M. since 2013. Between 2008 and 2013, she was W3 Professor of Public Law, Telecommunications and Data Protection Law at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). She completed her habilitation in 2007 on “State Decisions under Uncertainty” at the University of Osnabrück and while working at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. She completed her doctorate in 2000 at the University of Bonn on the “Legal Effects of Foreign Judgments”.

Prof. Spiecker researches and publishes on all aspects of constitutional and administrative law, incorporating interdisciplinary findings from economics, behavioral sciences and technology. She deals with all aspects of the legal aspects of digitalization, such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic transparency, robotics, cloud computing, profiling, online marketing, governance, acceptance, user orientation, data sovereignty and trust. Her focus is on information, IT security and data protection law, but also on technology regulation, risk, environmental and health law.

In 2016, she was the first lawyer to be admitted to the Academy of Science and Engineering acatech. In 2019-2021, she was a member of the expert commission for the preparation of the German government’s Third Gender Equality Report and co-author of the Leopoldina National Academy statement on “Democracy and Digitalization” and the discussion papers on “Generative AI” and “Social Media and the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents”. Since 2018, she has been Director of Esys (Energy Systems of the Future), the initiative of the science academies for a sustainable, secure and affordable energy supply. Visiting professorships and research stays regularly take her abroad, most recently to the USA, China, Taiwan, Brazil, Austria and Japan.

She is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards and committees. She regularly advises the federal government, federal states, local authorities, NGOs and companies on a wide range of issues, in particular the information society, and represents clients before the Federal Constitutional Court. She is co-editor and editor-in-chief of the journals “Computer und Recht“, “Verwaltungsarchiv“, “Zeitschrift für Digitalisierung und Recht“, “European Data Protection Law Review” and “Artificial Intelligence Law Review”, among others. Finally, Prof. Spiecker is co-editor of the major commentary on the GDPR(Simitis/Hornung/Spiecker gen. Döhmann) as well as the first major commentary on the GDPR in English(Spiecker called Döhmann/Papakonstantinou/te Hert/Hornung, GDPR article-by-article Commentary).

Recent research work deals with democracy and digitalization, the conflict between freedom of research and data protection, a possible data access regime for Europe and the structures of information management law.