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Faculty Spotlight

Throughout the year, WashULaw faculty travel around the 
world to teach and speak on various topics.  

Professor 

Rachel Sachs gave a talk in October 2018 at the 

University of Copenhagen as part of a seminar series entitled 
Legal Issues Arising from AI and Big Data in the Health and 
Life Sciences. Artificial intelligence, advanced machine 
learning, and big data have great potential to advance 
health and life sciences. However, these technologies raise 
a number of issues affecting intellectual property, liability, 
patient involvement, bias, discrimination, and competition, 
among other legal areas. 

Most innovation policy levers are not set up to consider 
whether intermediate technologies ought to be regulated 
differently than technologies which are further along in the 
development process. What is the role of industry in the 
innovation ecosystem and how does that fit in the European 
Science Cloud Declaration? How does the Nuremberg Code 
help us address the opportunities and challenges we face 
with the application of artificial intelligence and big data 
in the health and life science sector? Participants at the 
seminar series debated some of the crucial legal challenges 
arising from these issues, including how to regulate 
intermediate technology. 

In May 2019, Professor 

Leila Sadat spoke on Current 

Challenges to International Justice: Lean in or Leave? at 
the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, University of 
Oxford, United Kingdom.  The lecture highlighted recent 
trends that pose challenges to advancing international 
justice, such as States campaigning to "leave" the 
International Criminal Court (ICC), and why institutions 
such as the ICC remain important for maintaining peace 
and security and achieving justice for victims. The lecture 
was co-sponsored by Oxford Transitional Justice Research 
(OTJR) and was moderated by Federica D'Alessandra, the 
founding Executive Director of the Oxford Programme on 
International Peace and Security at the School's Institute 
for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC), and Ivo Gruev, 
Convenor of the OTJR network. 
 
Professor Sadat also presented her paper Heads of State 
and Other Government Officials Before the International 
Criminal Court: The Uneasy Revolution Continues before 
the International Criminal Law Interest Group at the 2019 
Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law 
and at the 2019 ICC Scholars Forum in The Hague.

Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Prof. Rachel Sachs (center) addresses issues related to regulating 

intermediate technologies

In spring 2019, Professor 
David Konig served as a 

Senior Fellow at Fudan 
University Law School in 
Shanghai, China. In March, 
he delivered a lecture on 
Understanding the Common 
Law at the same university.

The Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

Prof. David Konig