Henrique Jerônimo Bezerra Marcos (H.)

Dr Henrique JB Marcos is a legal scholar working at the intersection of law, technology, and the environment. His research examines how legal rules written for a physical world hold up when the thing they govern moves into a database. Marine genetic resources and the 2023 BBNJ Agreement are the primary case study: as artificial intelligence moves bioprospecting from collection towards prediction, the rules on access and benefit-sharing face questions they were not built to answer.

In 2026 he was awarded an NWO Veni grant for ‘Analogue Rules in a Digital Ocean’, a three-year project on the interpretation of law for AI-enabled discovery of marine genetic resources. He is a member of the BBNJ Informal Expert Group convened by the European Commission (DG MARE) ahead of the first Conference of the Parties, a Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, and a member of the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative. In 2025 he served as a UN scientific delegate at the third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, and he has contributed to the UN-GEF BBNJ Implementation Project.

He trained as a legal theorist. His doctoral work, taken jointly at Maastricht University and the University of São Paulo (2019–2023), addressed consistency and fragmentation in international law, and appears as Ordering the Fragments: International Law under the Planetary Crisis (Springer, 2026). His second book, Algorithmic Bioprospecting, is under contract with Edward Elgar.

With Rohan Nanda he leads the Legal Rule Tagger, a platform where students unpack the elements of legal rules, funded by an EDLAB Education Innovation Grant, and BlueLab, an AI due diligence lab for the blue economy funded by a Comenius Teaching Fellowship. At Maastricht he teaches at LLB and LLM level, including the Legal Challenge ‘Coding Nature: Law and Ethics in the Age of Algorithmic Bioprospecting.’ He holds the Dutch University Teaching Qualification (BKO) and supervises LLB and LLM theses.