Anna Beckers (A.)
Anna Beckers is a Professor of Private Law and Social Theory at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University.
Anna has two main substantive fields of research. These are, on the one hand, corporate social responsibility, global value chains, business and human rights and corporate sustainability, and, on the other hand, the relation between digital technologies and private law, liability law in particular. Anna has published two monographs, one single-authored entitled Enforcing Corporate Social Responsibility Codes (Hart Publishing, Oxford 2015) and one co-authored entitled Three Liability Regimes for Artificial Intelligence (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2021).
Anna is the Principal Investigator of the Project CHAINLAW - Responsive Law for Global Value Chains (2023-2028), funded by the European Research Council as a Starting Grant.
As of 1 September 2023, Anna will hold a chair of Private Law and Social Theory at Maastricht University, Faculty of Law.
This appointment follows previous positions at the same Faculty, as an Associate (2022-2023) and Assistant (2015-2022) Professor and as a postdoctoral Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2015-2016).
Anna obtained her PhD from Maastricht University in 2014 (cum laude) with a thesis on the legal enforcement of corporate social responsibility codes. An updated and revised version of the thesis has been published as "Enforcing Corporate Social Responsibility Codes: On Global Self-Regulation and National Private Law" with Hart Publishing Oxford (now part of Bloomsbury). The thesis was awarded the German Dissertation Prize 2015 (Deutscher Studienpreis) by the Körber Foundation. Anna conducted the PhD research within the externally funded UM-HiiL-Chair on the Internationalisation of Law. Recenty, Anna has been working on a co-authored monograph entitled Three Liability Regimes for Artificial Intelligence that is published by Hart Publishing in 2021.
Anna graduated in law from the University of Frankfurt am Main with the First State Exam (law degree) in 2007 before working in Germany as a legal trainee (Referendarin) for a judge in commercial matters and a public prosecutor at the Regional Court Frankfurt am Main, the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, the international commercial law firm Mannheimer Swartling and the European Institute of Public Administration. She completed the Second German State Exam (bar exam) in 2010.
