Chair Holder

Prof. Dr. Gerald Spindler (1960-2023), holder of a diploma in economy, born 1960 studied Law and Economy in Frankfurt a.M., Hagen, Genf and Lausanne. He completed both State Exams.
After a period as research fellow for Prof. Dr. Mertens in Frankfurt and at the Institute for International and Foreign Law of Economy in Frankfurt he conferred a comparative law doctorate in 1993 on “Law and Consolidated Companies”. He then in 1996 finished a work named “Organisational Duties of Companies”, for which he received his PhD for Civil Law, Commercial and Economic Law, International Private Law, Comparative Law and Labour Law. After teaching as an associate professor in Bielefeld and Dresden, Gerald Spindler joined the University of Göttingen in 1997.

Prof. Dr. Gerald Spindler was the Head of the Chair of Civil Law, Commercial and Economic Law, Comparative Law, Multimedia- and Telecommunication Law at the University of Göttingen, Germany. This Department was, among other topics, mainly occupied with legal questions regarding E-Commerce, i.e., Internet and Telecommunication Law.

Apart from teaching, various books, more than 100 articles in law reviews, as well as expert legal opinions are published by Professor Spindler. He was editor of one of the most renowned German law reviews covering the whole area of cyberspace law and telecommunication law. Prof. Spindler was the national and European reporter for E-Commerce during the XVIth International Conference of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Brisbane/Australia, 2002. He also acted as a speaker at the IST-Conference of the EEC on new developments in Information Society in Nice, 2000.

Prof. Spindler was Vice-Chairman of the German Society of Law and Information Science for several years and also advised the German, as well as the European legislator regarding various questions concerning the information society, such as the E-Commerce-Directive or the Information Society Directive.

As a member of the Faculty Prof. Spindler was Dean of the Law Faculty from 2000/2001 and Financial Dean of the Faculty from 2002-2004. Prof. Spindler was also a member of the Academy of Sciences and Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Publication Issues of the Union of German Academies of Sciences.

Furthermore, he acted as second member of the Göttingen Center for Digital Humanities (GCDH), second member of the CeGe (Center for European, Governance and Development Research) and is a member of the Center for Medical Law, Director of the Institute of Agricultural Law.

In addition, Prof. Spindler was a member of the EU High Level Expert Group on Legal Issues of New Technologies, in particular Artificial Intelligence (since 2018/2019).

Since 2021 Prof. Spindler was a member of the so-called DEAL working group, which is to advance the DEAL project of open access publishing and open access with scientific publishers.