Serge Gutwirth

Biography

Serge Gutwirth (1960) professor of Human Rights, Comparative law, Legal Theory and Methodology at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he studied law, criminology and also obtained a post-graduate degree in technology and science studies. He defended his PhD in law on the relationships between law and sciences on December 15, 1992. From 1994 until 2009 he also held a part-time position of lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the Erasmus University Rotterdam where he was in charge of the coordination of research and taught 'Philosophy of law'. He is currently Vice-Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law and Criminology. From 2003 to 2013 Gutwirth was the holder of a ten-year research fellowship in the framework of the VUB Research Contingent for his project Sciences and the democratic constitutional state: a mutual transformation process. At the beginning of this fellowship he founded LSTS, which he still leads. Therefore, he had already founded and directed the VUB Research group on human rights (now FRC).

Research Interest

His interests include privacy and data protection and more generically, the role of law amongst other practices such as science, technology, politics and ethics. In addition Gutwirth does research in the field of theory of criminal law and in human rights. Recently he started to focus his interest upon issues related to the practice of sciences, especially taking into account their detrimental (forced) conversion to a 'knowledge economy', both from a legal and “sciences studies” perspective. Pursuing this track, he is leading the participation of LSTS into the H2020 project PRINTEGER (Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research).