Adrian Kuenzler

Adrian Kuenzler is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project, Yale Law School. His research focuses on technology, innovation policy and competition, and examines problems in antitrust, intellectual property and consumer law from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Adrian graduated from the University of Zürich (M.A., Ph.D.) and from Yale Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.). He has served as a Professor in the Faculty of Law at Zürich University and has held visiting academic positions at New York University School of Law, the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Yale Law School, ETH Zürich, the European University Institute, the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and Oxford University. Adrian has held visiting professorship positions at Universidad de San Andrés (Buenos Aires) and the University of Münster. He has also been a Robert S. Campbell Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

His book Efficiency or Freedom to Compete – On the Goals of the Law Against Private Restraints on Competition (Mohr Siebeck 2008) had a formative influence on the debate around the goals of European competition law and was awarded the Empiris Prize and the Issekutz Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of business law. It has been quoted numerous times by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court and by several Appeals and District Courts. His most recent book Restoring Consumer Sovereignty – How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It (Oxford University Press 2017) was the first account to integrate insights from dual-process theories of reasoning into market regulatory theory, combining decades of theoretical writing on what advertising means for notions of consumer choice with new empirical findings on how attention has come to carry economic value. Leading authorities described it as “a subtle, idea-packed book uniting key strains of modern antitrust and intellectual property thinking” that “signal[s] the beginning of a new and vital conversation for legal theory” and “offer[s] a new perspective on the role of antitrust and intellectual property law in our modern digital economy”.

Additional co-authored books include the Berne Commentary on the Law of Agency – Articles 32-40 of the Swiss Code of Obligations, a Casebook on General Provisions of the Swiss Civil Code, a Casebook on Tort Law and a Commentary on the Law of Price Controls.

Adrian’s research on technology and digital markets is regularly relied on by governments and international organizations in debates around the interplay of competition law and data privacy and his work on how the design of online platforms shapes users’ behavior has been drawn upon by policymakers, think tanks and news outlets in different jurisdictions.