Anna Beckers (A.)

Dr Anna Beckers is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law.

She works part-time in the department of private law with a primary research and teaching profile in international commercial and business law and corporate social responsibility.

She is further appointed as part-time Associate Professor of Legal Methodology at the Faculty and focuses on methods of doctrinal, comparative and normative legal research. She has specific expertise in sociological approaches to legal research, in particular social and legal theory and comparative legal research.

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). Besides, she has published her research in internationally recognized journals, such as the Common Market Law Review, and the Yearbook of European Law, and in edited collections by prestigious publishers (chapters in collections by Oxford and Cambridge University Press and Edward Elgar). Her publications can be found on her SSRN Author page and in her publication list.

Expertise

Anna has expertise in the thematic areas of:

- legal dimension of corporate social responsibility, business & human rights and corporate sustainability

- digitalisation, artificial intelligence, liabiity

- transnational law

- legal methodology

Anna has been invited to serve as an expert for the European Parliament, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sociaal-Economische Raad in the context of the upcoming due diligence legislation. She has also been invited to sit on stakeholder panels as an expert for questions on digitalisation and the law.

Professional career history

Since January 2015 Anna Beckers is Assistant Professor of Private Law and Legal Methodology. She was tenured and promoted to senior-level Assistant Professor in 2018.

During the academic year 2015/2016, Anna was on leave from this position as a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Anna has two children and was thus also twice on pregnancy and maternity leave (2017 & 2018/2019).

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 will be published in 2021.

Anna graduated in law from the University of Frankfurt am Main 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 German bar exam in 2010.