Lee Andrew BYGRAVE

Education

Professor Lee A. Bygrave was awarded a Doctorate of Laws (dr. juris) at the University of Oslo in 2000. Prior to this, he was awarded the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 1985 and Bachelor of Laws (Honours) in 1989 – both from the Australian National University, Canberra. He is currently Professor at the Department of Private Law, University of Oslo.

Professional Appointments

Professor Lee A. Bygrave is a full professor at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law (NRCCL), attached to the Department of Private Law, University of Oslo. 

He is additionally an honorary professor at the College of Law, Australian National University, an academic affiliate of the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at the University of Oxford, and research associate (formerly founding co-director) of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre (now ‘Community’) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

His teaching appointments range across numerous institutions, including the universities of Vienna, Stockholm, Tilburg, Tartu, Tel Aviv, New South Wales and Oslo. At the latter, Lee is one of the principal teachers of the LL.M. program in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Law. He is also in charge of teaching English law of contract.

Research Areas

For the past three decades, Professor Lee has been engaged in researching and developing regulatory policy for information and communications technology. He has functioned as expert advisor on technology regulation for numerous organisations, including the European Commission, Nordic Council of Ministers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and Norwegian government.

He currently heads two major research projects at the NRCCL: VIROS (‘Vulnerability in the Robot Society’), which canvasses legal and ethical implications of AI-empowered robotics; and SIGNAL (‘Security in Internet Governance and Networks: Analysing the Law’), which studies transnational changes in the legal frameworks for security of critical internet infrastructure and cloud computing.

Professor Lee has published extensively within the field of data protection law where his two principal books on the subject – Data Protection Law: Approaching Its Rationale, Logic and Limits (Kluwer 2002) and Data Privacy Law: An International Perspective (Oxford University Press 2014) – are widely acknowledged as standard international texts.

He has just completed co-editing and co-authoring a comprehensive article-by-article analysis of the EU General Data Protection Regulation – The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A Commentary (Oxford University Press 2019). His other major publications concern the ways in which information concepts are (mis)understood and (mis)used in law (‘Information Concepts in Law: Generic Dreams and Definitional Daylight’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2015)), the use of contract as a tool for governing internet infrastructure (Internet Governance by Contract (Oxford University Press 2015)), and the emergence of ‘design-based’ regulatory techniques for integrating legal values into information systems architecture (‘Hardwiring Privacy’ in Brownsword et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation, and Technology (2017)).