Prof. Dr. Silja Voeneky is a Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law, and Ethics of Law at the University of Freiburg (Germany). She was a member of the German Ethics Council until 2016, and a Fellow at the 2015-2016 Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.
Contact:
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albertstraße 19
79104 Freiburg i.B (Germany)
Phone: 49 (0)761 203 -2189 / -2206 (PA) or -97337 (FRIAS)
E-Mail: or
(PA)
Biography and Areas of Research
Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky (Voeneky) is a (Co-)Director of the Institute for Public Law, Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law and Ethics of Law and an associated member of the Institute for Philosophy of Law. Since October 2019, she is the Vice Dean of the Freiburg Law Faculty.
Her research focuses on international law and legal ethics, especially the interdependence of Ethics and Law, and the Governance of Scientific and Technological Innovations.
Silja Vöneky studied law and philosophy of law at the Universities of Freiburg, Bonn, Edinburgh (UK) and Heidelberg. In 2005, the Max Planck Society appointed her as a Director of the independent research group “Legitimation of Ethical Decisions”. After writing her second book (Habilitation, University of Heidelberg) about the risks of an ethicalisation of law (“Recht, Moral und Ethik”), she is Full Professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. In 2015-2016, she was a fellow at Harvard Law School (Human Rights Program) and started working on questions of risk governance on the basis of international law. Currently, she is continuing this work, esp. in the fields of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, at Freiburg University and FRIAS.
Since 2018, she has been a fellow of the interdisciplinary research group Responsible Artificial Intelligence at FRIAS. She is a head of the “Human Rights, Science and Technology” working group of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC).
She is also a member of various national and international research programs and different federal commissions. Since 2019, she is a Senior Advisor of the CSER project “A Science of Global Risk” (University of Cambridge, UK). Until 2016, she had been a member of the German Ethics Council.
