Biography
Professor Thomas Hoeren is a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and Professor of Civil Law, Intellectual Property and Internet Law at the University of Münster, where he also directs the Institute for Information, Telecommunications and Media Law (ITM). He is a leading scholar in the field of digital law, with research focusing on the intersection of private law, data governance, and emerging technologies.
At the University of Münster, Professor Hoeren has built one of Europe’s most prominent academic centres for IT and media law, combining legal doctrine with interdisciplinary perspectives from economics, ethics, and information theory. His research and teaching cover the European Data Act, the AI Act, data access and sharing regimes, copyright in the digital economy, and questions of algorithmic accountability.
Before joining Münster, he worked as a legal adviser to the European Commission (DG XIII, Information Society) and as a judge at the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf. He has been a long-standing member of numerous expert bodies and advisory councils, including those of the German Federal Ministry of Justice and the European Commission.
Professor Hoeren is editor-in-chief of the Handbuch Multimediarecht and co-editor of leading legal journals such as Multimedia und Recht (MMR). He has also lectured as a visiting professor at several international institutions and regularly advises governmental and academic bodies on issues of digital regulation and data ethics.
At the EUI, his current work explores the evolving European legal architecture for data and AI governance within the broader framework of the digital economy.