Anıl Öztürk

A teaching portfolio.

Teaching philosophy, courses, invited lectures, and MOOC contributions.

I.

Teaching philosophy

STATEMENT

Teaching law is not the transfer of technical knowledge about current legislation. It is the formation of people who can locate a rule within its logical context, hold a sense of justice and social responsibility, and look at material with the analytical and critical mind the profession demands. Two long-standing tendencies in legal education make this harder than it should be: the neglect of the ideals of justice that the law fitfully serves1, and the neglect of the practical demands of the profession students are about to enter2. My teaching refuses both drifts at once, and aims at three outcomes for every group I teach.

  • Depth Knowledge that is integrated, not memorised: students who can place a rule inside its system and history.
  • Critical thinking Analytical and critical skills sharpened against real materials, until they are second nature.
  • Confidence The confidence to use what they have learned, in academic and non-academic settings alike.

Realising these outcomes asks more than a fixed lesson plan. It requires me to take seriously the diversity of experience and learning style in any given room, and to teach in a way that responds to the actual composition of the class, to the fact that each cohort is different, and a method that worked one year may not reach this one. My practice rests on three pillars.

I. Preparedness and diligence

The visible part of teaching is the seminar or lecture itself; the more important part is the work that happens before the room fills. Instructional materials are chosen and shaped in advance, primary and secondary sources curated to the day’s theme rather than handed off whole, and methods varied across text, image, moving image, and dramatisation when the material calls for it. A class plan that does not account for how differently students learn ends up reaching only part of the class.

II. Practical experience

Black-letter knowledge of the law is necessary but never sufficient. Students need guided exposure to how the law actually meets problems, in two phases: first, working through the relevant case law and demonstrating the analytical method on a worked example; second, asking them to solve original problems on their own, with feedback, until the methods become second nature.

III. Stimulating interest

Education, in a phrase Harvard’s then-president James Bryant Conant put in print in 1943, is concerned with that which is left after all that has been learned has been forgotten3. In legal education, where law touches every part of economic, social, and political life, stimulated interest is what carries the technical knowledge across the gap between assignments and the professional life that follows. A student who finds the law interesting will keep reading after the course ends; one who has only memorised it will not.

II.

Courses
JAEN72

Technology, Energy and Climate Justice

CURRENT CO-CONVENOR

Faculty of Law, Lund University  ·  With Olena Bokareva  ·  2026

The course examines the law of two simultaneous transitions (green and digital) and the climate-justice questions running through both. EU energy law and policy comes first: the Emissions Trading System and ETS2, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the WTO disputes it has provoked, the Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) and the sectoral instruments running alongside it: FuelEU Maritime, ReFuelEU Aviation, the Net-Zero Industry Act, and the CCS Directive, set against the 2030 and 2050 targets in the EU Climate Law. Autonomous systems and AI follow, in their intersection with energy and transport: the EU AI Act and its risk classification, the IMO MASS Code, multi-party liability allocation, COLREGs for unmanned vessels, insurance for autonomous operations, the application of the AI Act in safety-critical transport, and the GDPR questions raised by sensor data. The final block is cross-border climate law: the Paris Agreement and Nationally Determined Contributions, the CBAM-WTO clash under Article XX GATT, the three waves of climate litigation: Urgenda, KlimaSeniorinnen, the ITLOS Climate Advisory Opinion of 2024, and the just-transition and loss-and-damage frameworks that run alongside the litigation.

JUFN24

Maritime and Transportation Law

CURRENT CO-CONVENOR

Faculty of Law, Lund University  ·  With Olena Bokareva  ·  2026

The course opens on the law of the ship itself: the framework of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ship registration and nationality, and the legal mechanics of ownership, sale and purchase, and turns from there to the law shaping the modern maritime industry: sustainability and decarbonisation of shipping, autonomous shipping and the IMO MASS Code, and marine pollution. The substantive middle of the course is commercial maritime law: charterparties, bills of lading, the Hague-Visby and Rotterdam Rules on the carriage of goods by sea, and the digitalisation of those instruments. From there it covers arbitration and conflict of laws in shipping disputes; EU transport law and EU maritime competition law; marine insurance; and the alternatives to sea carriage: air law, carriage of goods by land, and multimodal transport. It closes on the specialised areas of wet maritime law, arrest of ships, maritime labour law, and carriage of passengers, with a methodology session on legal research and the ILAC framework.

HUKY317 / LAWG317

Artificial Intelligence and Law

PAST CONVENOR

Faculty of Law, Başkent University  ·  2025

This was the first artificial-intelligence-and-law course offered at Başkent University’s Faculty of Law. It began with the relationship between AI and the social functions of law, and with how AI is transforming the fundamental concepts of the legal order. From there it worked through liability: fault-based liability for AI-generated damages, then strict liability, and into AI’s impact on contract law. Criminal law followed: the effects of AI on the objective and subjective elements of criminal liability, and the question of whether an AI system can be a perpetrator or a victim. The course then turned to intellectual property and the status of AI-generated works, to personal data protection in AI systems, and to AI’s effects on fundamental rights and freedoms. It closed on regulation: the EU AI Act and its risk-based approach, comparative national and international approaches to AI regulation, and the standing debate about legal personhood for AI.

TBY216 / TBS416

Bilişim Hukuku ve Etiği · Information Technology Law and Ethics

PAST CONVENOR
TAUGHT IN TURKISH

Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences and Faculty of Commercial Sciences, Başkent University  ·  2025

This course covered Turkish information technology law and ethics in working detail. It included electronic instruments (the law of electronic signatures and notifications, the National Judicial Network Project (UYAP), and the Audio-Visual IT System (SEGBİS)) and the substantive areas of digital commercial life: e-consumer and e-commerce law, internet banking, electronic money, central-bank digital currency, and the law of cryptocurrencies. The cybercrime block ran through crimes against honour, private life, and general morality committed in digital environments, IT crimes and offences against property carried out through information systems, and virtual gambling and betting, alongside the law of intellectual property on the internet and in software, copyright, trademark, and domain names. From there the course turned to internet broadcasting law, forensic IT and digital evidence, the law of personal data protection under KVKK, telecommunications and cybersecurity law, technology development zones, digital tax law, and electronic procurement law. The closing block was on blockchain and AI law, with a practical session on dispute resolution in IT-law disputes.

BUST302

Corporate Law

PAST LECTURER

Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Başkent University  ·  2025

This course took up the fundamental institutions of company law in the Turkish legal system. The first block laid out the broader commercial-law concepts that company law presupposes: the scope and application of the Turkish Commercial Code, the commercial enterprise, the legal status of merchants, the trade registry, commercial books and current accounts, trade names, and trademark law and unfair competition. The corporate-law block then moved through the basic framework of commercial companies and the partnership forms before turning to capital companies: first the general provisions, then the limited liability company, and then the joint stock company in detail, with particular attention to formation, corporate organs, operation, and shareholders’ rights. The course closed on structural changes in capital companies: mergers, divisions, and conversions.

İŞLE303

Ticaret Hukuku · Commercial Law

PAST LECTURER
TAUGHT IN TURKISH

Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Başkent University  ·  2025

This course traced the fundamental institutions of Turkish commercial law. It started with the basic concepts: commercial law itself, the commercial enterprise and the meaning of commercial affairs, merchant status and its legal consequences, commercial auxiliaries and commercial representation, trade names and business names, trademark, the trade registry, the current account, unfair competition, commercial books, and commercial jurisdiction. The partnership block then set out the concept and elements of partnership, the establishment, operation, and termination of ordinary partnerships, general and limited partnerships, and the two principal capital companies: the joint stock company (establishment, operation, general assembly, board of directors, auditors, securities, shareholders’ rights and obligations, and termination) and the limited liability company. Negotiable instruments closed the course: their definition and elements, the bill of exchange, the promissory note, and the cheque.

LW685

Information Technology Law

PAST CONVENOR

Department of Law, Maynooth University  ·  2023 · 2024

The course was built without a textbook. Information technology law moves too quickly for any single book to track, so the reading list was assembled across academic monographs, journal articles, and current online commentary, with students expected to follow specialist blogs and mainstream coverage alongside the primary materials. Eight thematic blocks were covered in turn: the foundations of IT law; digital rights and freedoms; data protection and privacy; cybersecurity and cybercrime; e-commerce and digital marketplaces; intellectual property in the digital world; robotics, AI, and legal ethics; and the broader question of technology, society, and future legal challenges. Throughout, the running question was whether the law is keeping pace with the technology it tries to govern.

LW360

Media Law

PAST CONVENOR

Department of Law, Maynooth University  ·  2023 · 2024

The course ran through Irish media law across eight thematic blocks. The foundations came first: the role of the media in democratic society, the public-interest concept that anchors the rest of the syllabus, and freedom of expression as the constitutional baseline against which the rest of the law is read. From there it covered the regulation of the press and broadcast regulation as parallel regulatory regimes, the relationship between the media and the courts, and the doctrinal core: defamation, privacy, and data protection as it applies to journalistic activity. The thematic question throughout was how Irish law balances the public interest in expression against the competing interests of reputation, privacy, and dignity.

LW251X / LW291X

EU Law II

PAST LECTURER

Department of Law, Maynooth University  ·  With Charles O’Sullivan  ·  2024

The course continued the EU Law sequence into the substantive law and policies of the Union, building on the institutional and constitutional groundwork of EU Law I. It worked across three main areas. The first was the free movement of goods: the Treaty provisions, secondary legislation, and case law on customs duties, charges having equivalent effect, internal taxation, quantitative restrictions and measures having equivalent effect, and the exceptions and justifications that have grown up around them. The second was the free movement of persons and services: freedom of establishment, freedom to provide services, the free movement of workers and their families, and the development of EU citizenship as a free-standing legal status. The third was competition law and State aid: the meaning of ‘undertaking’, the scope and application of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU on cartels and abuse of dominance, and the EU’s State aid regime.

LW358

Jurisprudence II

PAST LECTURER

Department of Law, Maynooth University  ·  2022

Jurisprudence II turned legal theory toward its social and political stakes, building on the legal-positivism-and-natural-law foundations of Jurisprudence I. The opening block covered the social-contract tradition: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, read for what they say about the source and limits of legal authority. From there the course took up the obligation to obey the law and the legal enforcement of morality, working through the Hart-Devlin debate as the touchstone for the second question. Punishment came next, in two halves: consequentialist justifications and the retributivist tradition that has been re-asserted in modern criminal-law theory. The course closed on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union read as a jurisprudential question: where competing accounts of law’s authority meet a system that does not fit the standard models.

LW162

Law of Torts II

PAST LECTURER

Department of Law, Maynooth University  ·  2022

Law of Torts II shifted from the general principles of liability covered in Law of Torts I to specific torts protecting personal and proprietary interests. The trespass torts came first (trespass to the person and trespass to land), followed by the property and economic torts: nuisance, the rule in Rylands v Fletcher, and passing off. Reputation torts came next: defamation, deceit, and malicious falsehood, each read for the elements that mark out one cause of action from another. The course closed on vicarious liability, the doctrine that places the law of torts in its institutional context by asking when one party answers for another’s wrongdoing.

III.

Invited lectures

The Human Rights of Robots

FORTHCOMING
Code
JAMR46
Course
Human Rights and New Technologies
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Alberto Rinaldi
Date
23 October 2026 (lecture) and 26 October 2026 (seminar)

The lecture takes up the title’s provocation (can robots, in any meaningful sense, be the bearers of human rights?) and works through the doctrinal architecture that makes the question hard. The opening block reads the main human-rights instruments (the Universal Declaration, the ICCPR and ICESCR, the ECHR) as anthropocentric by design: the human is the explicit subject, and the dignity-based grounding presupposes capacities (sentience, agency, vulnerability) that machines do not possess. The substantive middle puts that anthropocentrism under pressure through three comparative cases: the long historical expansion of who counts as a rights-bearer (from male propertied citizens outward to women, children, minorities, refugees, and people with disabilities); the campaigns for non-human personhood that have been pursued around great apes, cetaceans, and natural objects such as rivers; and corporate personhood as a counter-example of legal personhood unanchored from biological consciousness. The closing block sets out the almost people framework developed in doctoral research at Maynooth University, which approaches social robots not as candidates for personhood but as participants in a structured balancing of the legal interests at stake when robots enter human social spaces, and asks whether that frame can be re-tooled to do work in human-rights doctrine, or whether a parallel category of protection, neither rights nor property, better fits the case.

The follow-up seminar is planned around two anchor moments. The first is the European Parliament’s 2017 Resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics, the proposal of ‘electronic personhood’ it floated, and the 2018 Open Letter from 156 AI and law experts that pushed back against any such category. The second is the figure of Sophia, the Hanson Robotics humanoid granted Saudi Arabian citizenship in 2017, read as a study in the gap between symbolic gesture and legal substance. Students will work through both against the framework the lecture sets out.

The Social Robot Question: Legal and Human Dimensions

FORTHCOMING
Code
JAEN67
Course
EU Law and Policy on AI, Big Data and Digitalization
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Ana Nordberg
Date
21 September 2026

Second invitation to deliver the lecture in Ana Nordberg’s JAEN67. The lecture takes up the question of how the law should approach social robots (robots designed for sustained human interaction), beginning with the definitional problem itself. Dictionary, ISO, and engineering definitions all fail to capture what makes a robot ‘social’ rather than functional, and the lecture argues that no clean line is available. The substantive middle traces the intellectual genealogy of the social robot through three traditions: the creation-myth tradition (Genesis, the Golem), the Greek tradition (Pygmalion’s Galatea, Heron’s automata), and the modern science-fictional tradition that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein opened. From there the lecture turns to anthropomorphism as a structural feature of human-machine interaction rather than a category mistake, and works through the consequences for consent, responsibility, and dignity. The closing block reads the EU AI Act’s recitals on social robots as a partial answer to a harder problem the law has not yet framed clearly.

Between Legal Security and Economic Freedom: Trust as Legal Object in European Legal Cultures

Code
JUXJ04
Course
Swedish Legal System from a Comparative Perspective
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Sacharias Votinius
Date
21 January 2026

The lecture took up Jhering’s 1861 doctrine of culpa in contrahendo as an analytical lens for comparing how five legal systems (Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Sweden) balance legal security against economic freedom in the pre-contractual phase. The German position came first: from the narrow tort scope of §823 BGB, through the judge-made Vertrauenshaftung, to the 2002 codification at §§311(2) and 241(2). France’s broad fault-based liability under the Code Napoléon followed, then Switzerland’s pre-contractual jurisprudence (from 1901), then the common-law approach that polices broken negotiations through misrepresentation, estoppel, and restitution rather than a general duty of good faith. Sweden closed the lecture as the comparator that sits between the two traditions. Throughout, trust was treated as a legal object in its own right rather than a residual of contract or tort, and the negative-interest measure of damages was introduced as the standard civil-law remedy.

Technological Boundaries

Code
JAEN69
Course
Borders and Boundaries in the EU Internal Market
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Marja-Liisa Öberg
Date
24 November 2025

The lecture read the EU’s digital regulatory architecture as the latest chapter in internal-market boundary-drawing. The opening block set out the Digital Single Market strategy launched by the Juncker Commission in 2015 and the instruments built around it (the Geo-Blocking Regulation, the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, and the harmonised e-commerce framework), as moves to extend the four freedoms into the digital realm. The substantive middle worked through the legal nature of data in EU law and the use of Article 114 TFEU as the harmonising basis for the AI Act, the Data Act, and the Digital Services Act, with attention to how the CJEU has policed the limits of competence and the protection of fundamental rights. The closing block discussed the EU’s drive for technological sovereignty and the external reach of internal-market rules.

Energy Boundaries

Code
JAEN69
Course
Borders and Boundaries in the EU Internal Market
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Marja-Liisa Öberg
Date
21 November 2025

The lecture worked through the EU’s internal energy market in three layers. The first traced the liberalisation journey from the First Energy Package (1996–98) through the Fifth (‘Fit for 55’, 2024), with attention to ACER, the ENTSO networks, and the constitutional shift that came with Article 194 TFEU in the Lisbon Treaty. The second turned to the security-centred energy transition: how the post-2022 emphasis on supply security has pulled EU energy law back toward member-state competence and away from the harmonisation logic of Article 114 TFEU. The third read the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Net Zero Industry Act as instruments that reframe the boundary between Union and member-state authority, creating new internal-market frictions even as they pursue decarbonisation.

The Social Robot Question: Legal and Human Dimensions

Code
JAEN67
Course
EU Law and Policy on AI, Big Data and Digitalization
Institution
Faculty of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Convenor
Ana Nordberg
Date
24 September 2025

The lecture took up the question of how the law should approach social robots (robots designed for sustained human interaction), beginning with the definitional problem itself. Dictionary, ISO, and engineering definitions all fail to capture what makes a robot ‘social’ rather than functional, and the lecture argued that no clean line is available. The substantive middle traced the intellectual genealogy of the social robot through three traditions: the creation-myth tradition (Genesis, the Golem), the Greek tradition (Pygmalion’s Galatea, Heron’s automata), and the modern science-fictional tradition that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein opened. From there the lecture turned to anthropomorphism as a structural feature of human-machine interaction rather than a category mistake, and worked through the consequences for consent, responsibility, and dignity. The closing block read the EU AI Act’s recitals on social robots as a partial answer to a harder problem the law has not yet framed clearly.

IV.

MOOC contributions

European Business Law

Platform
Coursera
Institution
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Year
2026

Four recorded video lectures opening the Making Business Transactions module of the Lund University European Business Law specialization on Coursera. The lectures form a connected sequence on European market entry for small and medium-sized enterprises, written for an international audience that includes non-lawyers.

Strategic Choices

The opening lecture sets out the strategic choices facing an SME entering the European market. A small German nail manufacturer carries the worked example through the module; from direct cross-border sales, to working through commercial agents, independent distributors, and licensees, to establishing a subsidiary. The lecture frames the legal consequences that follow from each choice and previews the instruments (contract law, agency law, competition law, intellectual property) that the rest of the module returns to in detail.

Contractual Arrangements in Europe

The lecture explains why contract law matters for cross-border business in Europe, why there is no uniform European contract law, and how parties manage the resulting uncertainty through Private International Law. It works through Article 81 TFEU on judicial cooperation in civil matters, the Rome I Regulation on the law applicable to contractual obligations, and the Brussels I bis Regulation on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments, with attention to the choice-of-law and choice-of-forum clauses that determine how a contract will be read and where a dispute will be heard.

General International Sales Conditions

The lecture introduces the three principal instruments that stand between purely national contract law and the trans-national lex mercatoria: the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), the Principles of European Contract Law (PECL), and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts in their 2016 edition. It explains how each instrument operates (by default, by opt-in, or by incorporation) and what choices a cross-border seller and buyer have when they select the law governing their international sale.

Operating through Middlemen

The closing lecture of the module returns to the strategic choice between commercial agents, independent distributors, and licensees, and works through the EU legal framework that shapes each relationship: the Commercial Agents Directive, the new Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (VBER), and the new Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (TTBER). It closes on six decades of CJEU judgments (from the early agency and distribution cases through the most recent VBER and TTBER decisions) that show how the Court has shaped the legal treatment of middlemen across the internal market.

AI and Law

Platform
Coursera
Institution
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Year
2026

Five recorded video lectures within the Lund University AI and Law specialization on Coursera. The lectures form a connected sequence on AI liability, written for an international audience that includes non-lawyers.

Contracts and Risk-Sharing in the AI Market

The lecture treats contracts as the principal practical mechanism through which AI risks are distributed between developers, deployers, and users. It works through the multiplayer accountability problem that AI supply chains create, walks through the standard contractual instruments of risk allocation: indemnity clauses, liability caps, warranties and disclaimers, and insurance requirements; and closes on the EU AI Act’s distinction between providers and deployers and the points at which statutory duties cannot be contracted around.

Culpability in AI Systems

The lecture examines the gap between cause and fault in AI-driven outcomes. It works through the moral logic of shared and diffuse responsibility when an autonomous system acts on its own, and explains why strict-liability regimes have begun to fill the space that fault-based liability leaves open.

Negligence and Fault in Automated Systems

The lecture applies the reasonable-person standard to systems where humans and machines share control. It distinguishes the negligence that may sit with developers (in design or testing), with deployers (in use or training), and with end users (in monitoring or intervening), and works the analysis through scenarios in medical AI diagnosis and semi-autonomous vehicles.

Product Liability and AI

The lecture takes up the question of whether AI systems should be treated as products subject to strict liability or as services where fault must be proven. It traces the historical line drawn between tangible products and software, and reads the revised EU Product Liability Directive as the European answer to the question of how product-liability doctrine (covering manufacturing, design, and warning defects) applies to AI systems.

When Robots Fail

The closing lecture of the sequence works through real-world failures of robots and AI systems, using the Swiss cheese model of accident causation to show how hardware issues, software bugs, human error, and environmental factors converge. Real cases (including the 2015 Volkswagen industrial-robot fatality) anchor a discussion of accountability gaps, the case for keeping humans in the loop, and why legal personhood is the wrong answer to most of the questions it is offered as a solution to.