Vicky Breemen is a legal scholar who aims to combine her love for culture with law. Therefore, a central thread in Vicky’s interdisciplinary research is the interplay between law (from copyright to freedom of artistic expression), culture (ranging from cartoons and photography to libraries) and technology (think of digitization and artificial intelligence), utilizing both legal and non-legal concepts and sources.
Vicky holds a research master’s degree (cum laude) and a doctorate in information law, both from the University of Amsterdam. She wrote her PhD thesis on the future principles of a library privilege in copyright law at the Institute for Information Law (IViR). Her dissertation was awarded the Dutch Association of Information Professionals’ annual prize for best publication (Victorine van Schaickprijs KNVI).
In 2018, she received the Witteveen Memorial Fellowship in Law and Humanities from Tilburg University to further pursue her interdisciplinary research interests.
Since joining Utrecht University as an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER; Molengraaff Institute for Private Law) and the Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice, Vicky has been involved in various research projects, including:
- Co-authoring a case study on ‘Self-driving cars’ as part of a project on the legal aspects of algorithmic decision making (for WODC Research and Datacentre);
- Collecting data for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, contributing to an international study on AI, big data and fundamental rights;
- Doing law & humanities research for the interdisciplinary project ‘Cartoons in Court: Towards a Forensic Analysis of Visual Humor’, including a research stay at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. The co-authored article ‘Imagining interdisciplinary dialogue in the European Court of Justice’s Deckmyn decision: Conceptual challenges when law and technology regulate parody', 35(3), was awarded an honorable mention at the ÀÖÓãºǫ́ School of Law’s G.J. Wiarda Prize 2023 for excellent academic publications.
From August 2024-February 2025, Vicky is a Researcher in Residence at the National Library of the Netherlands, working with an interdisciplinary team of data scientists, collections specialists, AI researchers and the Cultural AI Lab on the topic of ‘bias’ in (digitized) cultural heritage collections.
She has presented her work for national and international legal and non-legal audiences.
Vicky teaches on intellectual property and human rights related topics. She is the program coordinator of the Dutch masters Intellectual Property Law, Innovation & Technology. She also shares her knowledge and research skills in supervising student theses.