Cody Rei-Anderson

Copyright and Speculation: How Do We Value Creative Work?

Dates of Stay: May - June 2023 

Cody Rei-Anderson researches the roles copyright law plays in structuring contemporary creative economies, focusing particularly on its impacts on smaller creators who work on and through digital platforms. His work brings a Marxian commodity analysis to copyright law. This novel perspective helps to break through the author's rights-users' rights stalemate in copyright discourse by emphasising the common interests of creators and users as against platform and publisher intermediaries. He will be investigating the relationships between copyright law and different conceptions of value, including market value, social value, and artistic value, and how these can inform copyright law’s response to artistic works generated by artificial intelligence.

Cody studied at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he received his JD and LLM, and as doctoral student at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand. His PhD thesis, titled "Copyright, Commodification, and the Structure of Digital Media Economies: Independent Podcasting in Context", is currently under examination.

Péter Techet

The Pure Theory of Law as Reaction and Reflection: A Historical Contextualisation of Hans Kelsen’s Work as Constitutional Judge

Dates of Stay: September - November 2023

Péter Techet is lawyer and historian. In his PhD in Modern European History, he deconstructed the narrative of “nationality conflicts” of the Late Habsburg monarchy by focusing on the Upper Adriatic region. For this work, he won the Award of the German Fritz and Helga Exner Foundation and the Italian Carolus L. Cergoly Prize. In his PhD in Legal Theory, he analysed the anti-positivist legal traditions of German legal thinking. He has been researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (in Regensburg) and at the Leibniz Institute of European History (in Mainz), as well Visiting Fellow at the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, at the New York University and at the University of Genoa. He is actually postdoctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg (in Germany) and at the University of Zurich.

His current research is on the historical contextualization of Hans Kelsen's “Pure Theory of Law”, especially on how the (post-) imperial legacies and Kelsen´s experiences as constitutional judge in Austria (between 1919 and 1930) shaped the theory. From a historical perspective, Kelsen's turn to a non-cognitivist theory of law-application can be re-read as reflection of his own work at the Constitutional Court as well as reaction to the political attacks he was facing in the interwar period. By using the historical example of Austria and the development of Kelsen's legal theory, the research project also deals with the general question of whether judicial review is political.