Lucia M. Sommerer, Ph.D., LL.M. (Yale)
Assistant Professor for Criminology and Criminal Law
Green Crime | Financial Crime | AI
Lucia M. Sommerer, Ph.D., LL.M. (Yale)
Short Profile
Lucia Sommerer is a German-American legal scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of white-collar crime, environmental harm, and emerging technology. She has studied law at Munich, Göttingen, Oxford, and Yale University.
Green Crime
She is the founder of Germany’s first research institute for Green Criminology, member of the Anti-Financial Crime Alliance's (AFCA) working group on environmental crime, and member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy .
During her studies in Munich and Oxford, she focused inter alia on the legal regulation of climate engineering technologies (such as carbon capture and storage) as well as climate change litigation. Her past roles include internships at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies (Nanjing, China), where she worked on energy law. She is also the co-founder of the young scholars’ conference “Junges Nachhaltigkeitsrecht ” (Young Sustainability Law). In 2023, she was a member of Halle University’s Climate Change Council.
Financial Crime
Her latest research, “Anti-Leviathan,” analyzes the state-eroding force of lawyers, bankers, and advisors in offshore financial centers and the Cum-Ex scandal. Together with the Fraunhofer Institute, she is developing an AI-based Anti-Money Laundering system (MaLeFiz project ).
AI
Her PhD thesis critically examined predictive policing and algorithmic decision-making in criminal justice, analyzing the risks of automating law enforcement and conceptualizing a “self-imposed algorithmic thoughtlessness” of the justice system (based on Hannah Arendt). She received the Körber Prize (1st place) , the German Foundation for Law and Informatics Scholarship Award, and the Young Scholar Award of the German Criminological Society. An English translation of her dissertation was published in 2022. During her LL.M. studies at Yale she was editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology .
Artistic Research
Since 2021, she has been a member of the interdisciplinary KollektivimFenster, developing theater projects at the intersection of law and science. She co-hosts the Beyond-Law-Salon series in Berlin, exploring the intersection of legal theory, environmental justice, and artistic expression. She has also advised the Staatstheater Mainz on its production of the Wirecard play “Villa Alfons ”.