LL.M. (UC Berkeley)

Professor Drexl is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich (since 2002), Honorary Professor at the University of Munich and Member of the Bavarian Academy of Science. As the Chair of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC) Cooperation Project, he is responsible for a globally leading master’s course on intellectual property and competition law (see www.miplc.de). He was acting as a visiting professor at Oxford University, Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) Guido Carli in Rome and New York University Law School. For more than ten years, Professor Drexl has also been teaching intellectual property law in a master’s programme in European Law at the Université Paris 2 Panthéon Assas.

Professor Drexl is an active member of many national and international law societies. In particular, he was the Founding Chair of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA) and he has been the Vice President of the Association Internationale de Droit Economique for many years.

Professor Drexl is an expert in both competition law and intellectual property law. The competition law aspects of intellectual property and international issues of both IP and competition law are among his major research interests. Inter alia, he conducted and authored a comparative study on the interface between competition law and copyright law on behalf of the World Intellectual Property Office and ran a project on competition law in developing countries. As a member of ILA Committee on International Private Law and Intellectual Property co-authored the so-called Kyoto Guidelines adopted by the International Law Association in 2020.

More recent work focuses on the regulation of the digital economy with a particular emphasis on the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. In 2018, Professor Drexl authored a study on “Data Control and Data Access in the Era of Connected Devices” on behalf of the European Consumer Organization BEUC. In 2021, Professor Drexl published an open access book under the title “Data Access, Consumer Interests and Public Welfare” with contributions of leading scholars in the field, seeking to inspire especially EU legislation on new data access regimes. The book, which can be freely downloaded from the Nomos publisher’s website, is the outcome of the Consumer Law Conference of the German Federal Ministry of Justice in 2019, for which Professor Drexl developed the academic program and took over the publication of the proceedings. He is currently co-leading a research project at the Max Planck Institute on the interface of AI and IP. A newly designed research project seeks to explore the future regulatory framework for the digital economy in emerging economies in the light of the Sustainable Development Goals; for this project Professor Drexl will also cooperate with colleagues from the National Law University of Delhi.