Herbert Burkert is currently the President of the Governing Board of the Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He has been a Professor of Public Law and Communication Law at that University, after serving as Senior Research Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, St. Augustin, Germany.
Burkert studied Law, Political Science, and History at the University of Cologne and the University College Dublin, was a Volkswagen Research Fellow at the University of Regensburg, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt at Main. His extraordinarily deep understanding of the interaction between law and technology—as well as his astonishingly deep body of knowledge across diverse disciplines such as architecture, arts, and ethnography—was importantly shaped during his time as a Senior Research Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS in St. Augustin, Germany, where he was confronted with cutting-edge developments in information and communication technology. Building upon this strong foundation in information technology matters and expertise in interdisciplinary research, Herbert Burkert served as advisor to many national and regional governments, as well as to international organizations. Perhaps most importantly, he served as chairman of the Legal Advisory Board to the European Commission’s DG “Information Society”, where he convened in the late 90’s and early 2000 a group of independent legal experts from the member states and Norway and Iceland to look at the interplay between law and the Information Society and explore regulatory issues at the transition point between old and new media. Pressing items on the agenda included access to public information, audiovisual policy, computer crime, consumer protection, data protection, digital signatures, domain names, e-commerce, IP, among other legal and regulatory issues.
Following his assignment at the Fraunhofer Institute, Herbert Burkert became a Professor of Public Law and Communication Law at the University of St. Gallen, where he was teaching telecommunications law, media law, and public law until his retirement in 2012. At the St. Gallen University, he continues to serve as the President of the Board of the Research Center for Information Law, which he co-founded with Jean Nicolas Druey, Rainer Schweizer, and Urs Gasser in 2001. In 2012, Burkert was appointed Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society; he is also an affiliate with the Information Society Program at Yale University. Previously, he taught at the New York Law School, USA, at the University of Namur, Belgium, and at the University of Duisburg, Germany.
He served on the editorial boards of Information Communication & Society, Journal of Law and Information Science, Multimedia and Law, Kluwer Law Information Series, Data protection and Data securing and Medialex. Formerly, Burkert served the European Commission’s DG “Information Society” as chairman of the Legal Advisory Board and the MIT AutoID-Project (now EPC Global) as European representative of the International Public Policy Advisory Council. Burkert held his valedictory lecture at the University of St. Gallen at October, 16th 2012 with the topic “Verfassungsrecht als Informationssrecht” (Constitutional Law as Information Law) and now he is Professor Emritus of Law.
References: http://www.herbert-burkert.net; http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/hburkert; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Burkert
List of publications: http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/Publikationen/Zitation/Herbert_Burkert