Thomas Hoffmann
| Thomas Hoffmann
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Prof. Thomas Hoffmann is Professor of Private Law at TalTech Law School. He graduated (2005) and also obtained his Ph.D in law at the University of Heidelberg (2006). After his admission to the German bar in 2008 and obtaining an LL.M. in Polish business law from Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2009), he worked as Associated Lawyer in the real estate department of Noerr LLP in their offices in Kyiv and Berlin. Consecutively he became research fellow at the Institute of East European Law in Kiel, Germany (2009), where he had a special research focus on international insolvency law.
In 2011, prof. Hoffmann relocated to the University of Tartu (Estonia) to be appointed DAAD Lecturer in Law. He became Associate Professor at TalTech Law School at Tallinn University of Technology in 2016 and was elected Professor of Private law at the same institute in 2019.
Prof. Hoffmann’s research focusses on comparative private law, here especially on insolvency law, private international law, contracts in digital environments and consumer law. He also researches the genesis of Livonian law in early modern times. He provided comprehensive research on Estonian, German and international law to various stakeholders within numerous EC tenders.
Prof. Hoffmann keeps track with forensic issues by serving as Of Counsel for the law firm bnt Attorneys in CEE in Tallinn.
Pawan Kumar Dutt
| Pawan Kumar Dutt
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Pawan Dutt is an Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at TalTech Law School. His educational background includes Bachelor´s degrees in Chemistry (from St. Xavier´s College, Mumbai) and in Law (from Government Law College, Mumbai), a Master of Arts in Law from Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) and a Ph.D in Management Sciences from Estonian Business School. He is an advocate and solicitor and is a member of various law associations in India. He is registered as a Patent Attorney in the Indian Patent Office. He has practiced law since 1998. His areas of research are intellectual property law, digital laws and competition law and he has various publications related to these topics. He has been involved in several international projects concerning the study of this field, funded by the European Union, USAID, etc, both within and outside Europe.
Katrin Nyman-Metcalf
| Katrin Nyman-Metcalf
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Prof. Katrin Nyman-Metcalf is adjunct professor of Law and Technology and and also a Head of Research of the Estonian e-Governance Academy. In addition she is active as an international consultant primarily in the area information and communication technology law including freedom of expression, as well as e-governance. Projects include regular legal analysis of media and communications legislation for e.g. the OSCE and the European Commission; work on setting up regulatory systems and professional training especially for post-conflict societies; and support to e-governance.
Prof. Nyman-Metcalf´s PhD (1999) in Public International Law (the law of outer space) and her Master (1986) are from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Her research interests include how law and technology meet with special emphasis on IT and communications as well as outer space; international – global and regional – decision-making and the changing structure of governance; implementation of human rights and the rule of law. She has published widely on all these as well as related topics. Professor Nyman-Metcalf speaks English, Estonian, French, German, Spanish and Swedish as well as basic Bosnian.
Ondrej Hamulak
| Ondrej Hamulak
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Ondrej Hamulak is a adjunct professor at Jean Monnet Chair of European Law, Tallinn Law School, TTU and senior lecturer in EU law at Faculty of Law, Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic) and researcher at Institute of EU Law, Faculty of Law, Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia). Ondrej is also guest lecturer at Paneuropean University in Bratislava, Faculty of Law (Slovakia) and Faculty of Law, PJS University in Košice (Slovakia).
Ondrej is a graduate of Faculty of Law, Palacký University Olomouc. He completed his master studies in law (M.A., 2006); his doctoral degree (JUDr., 2010) and his Ph.D. studies (Ph.D., 2013) there. In recent years he underwent research visits and internships at Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London University (March 2014), Institute of European Law, Košice, Slovakia (October and November 2014) and Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford (Februrary 2015). He has been teaching EU law since 2006, lecturing in the courses: Constitutional Law of the European Union, EU Internal Market, Human Rights protection in the EU, Human Rights LAB, EU Justice and Home Affairs Law etc.
Between 2013 and 2016 Ondrej served as a vice-dean for public relations and development, Faculty of Law, Palacký University Olomouc. During his term he established the stabile PR and communication department. Between 2010 and 2016 Ondrej held a position of editor-in-chief of academic journal Acta Iuridica Olomucensia. Nowadays he is responsible as an editor-in-charge for academic journal – International and Comparative Law Review.
Ondrej is a member of several scientific societies, e.g. Czech Society for European and Comparative Law - since 2008, Czech Society for International Law - since 2008 and Czech Association for European Studies - since 2009.
In his research Ondrej focuses on the relations and interactions between EU law and national law, the theoretical impacts of the membership in the EU on the state sovereignty, the legitimacy and rule of law within the EU, in particular system of protection of fundamental rights at supranational level. He worked on the several research and development projects with the relevant outcomes (2015: “The legal impacts of the financial crisis in the EU”, 2014: “The principle of tolerance in the functioning of the European Union – from a theoretical concept to practice”, 2012-2013: “EU Law before Czech Courts – Theory and Practice, 2011-2013: “Eastern Partnership and its prospects with a view of legal approximation, rule of law and human rights”).
Archil Chochia
| Archil Chochia
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Dr. Archil Chochiais a Senior Researcher at TalTech Law School of Tallinn University of Technology. Dr. Chochia obtained his doctoral degree from Tallinn University of Technology in 2013, while he has previously studied at Tbilisi State Medical University, as well as completed short study programmes at University of Scranton, University of California, Pepperdine University and Harvard University. He has more than 80 academic publications and he is a co-editor of the books“Political and Legal Perspectives of the EU Eastern Partnership Policy”(Springer, 2016),“Brexit: History, Reasoning and Perspectives” (Springer, 2018) and“Russian Federation in the Global Knowledge Warfare - Influence Operations in Europe and Its Neighborhood” (Springer, 2021). Archil is a managing editor ofTalTech Journal of European Studies. His research fields of interest are law and technology, ethical aspects of digitalization, alternative dispute resolution, EU integration, EU Neighbourhood Policy. Archil is a Senior Fellow of Weinstein International Foundation.
Holger Mölder
| Holger Mölder
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Holger Mölder joined the Tallinn University of Technology in 2015, and currently is Associated Professor in International Relations at the Department of Law. He defended his PhD on Political Sciences in 2010 at the University of Tartu and his dissertation examined cooperative security issues in the modern security environment. From 1995 to 2015, he served twenty years in the Estonian national defence system, first at the Ministry of Defence of Estonia, where he was involved in building-up process of the system and integration with NATO and afterwards at the Estonian National Defence College. He completed his MA degree in International Security and Civil-Military Relations at the US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA. He also graduated the Estonian School of Diplomacy in 1995. His research interests include international security issues, including Baltic security, Middle Eastern security, European security, but also security cultures and culture of fear in international relations and he has written on Latin American issues. Recently he has been involved in several projects related to strategic communication, information warfare and hybrid warfare. Since 2018, he is a member of international research network COST Action CA15101, Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories.
Abel Polese
| Abel Polese
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Abel Polese is a Senior Researcher at the TalTech Law School, who obtained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the Free University of Brussels in 2009.
His main research interests focus on informal economies, informal governance, and post-socialist transition dynamics
In addition to his academic work, Polese has worked as a policy analyst for the European Commission and has led numerous international research projects
He has supervised several doctoral dissertations to completion and was recognized with the Global Education Award by the Council of Europe
Ebru Metin
| Ebru Metin
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Dr. Ebru Metin is a legal design expert and researcher at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), where she also serves as Coordinator of the TalTech Legal Lab at TalTech Law School. Her interdisciplinary work sits at the intersection of legal design, regulatory complexity and corporate sustainability. Her doctoral research, "From Complexity to Clarity: Legal Design in Corporate Sustainability Governance", examines how legal design can help organisations navigate regulatory complexity and translate sustainability requirements into more understandable and actionable governance practices. She is also a graduate of King's College London (LLM, 2014), Istanbul Bilgi University (LLM, 2013) and Bilkent University (LLB, 2009).
She is the Main Proposer of the European Legal Design Action (ELDA – COST Action CA25133), a four-year COST Action and pan-European interdisciplinary research network that brings together researchers, legal and regulatory experts, designers, technologists, policymakers, businesses, and public institutions to advance legal design and develop more understandable, actionable, and effective laws, regulations, and contracts.
Ebru was also the founder of the award-winning social enterprise Legal Design Turkey, through which she has led legal information design and access-to-justice initiatives, including projects with UNDP Turkey and UN Women.
Her work and leadership have received international recognition from organisations including the UNDP Social Innovation Support Programme, the British Council, Euclid Network, the International Legal Technology Association, and the U.S. Department of State/Vital Voices.
Bringing together academic research, practice, design, and international collaboration, her work seeks to shape more human-centred, understandable, and effective legal and regulatory systems.
Artem Boyarchuk
| Artem Boyarchuk
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Artem Boyarchuk is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Law at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech). His research interests focus on the intersection of legal regulation, cybersecurity, and emerging digital technologies, including artificial intelligence and blockchain systems. In addition to his academic research, he serves as a council member for the Legal Aspects of Web3 programme, where he contributes to training on the legal and regulatory dimensions of decentralized technologies.
He is actively involved in multiple international and EU-funded research projects dedicated to digital transformation, automated decision-making, and educational innovation. Within TRACE4EU, part of the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) ecosystem, he works on the legal and governance dimensions of an "umbrella architecture" for cross-border traceability of goods, documents, and transactions. In EquiTech (2024–2026), he contributes to strengthening the capacity of public authorities in Estonia and Lithuania to identify and mitigate bias and discrimination risks in automated decision-making (ADM) systems, through legal-gap analysis, practical toolkits, and training materials. He has also been involved in the Movex project, an international collaboration launched in December 2022, and in earlier EU-funded capacity-building initiatives on digital transformation and staff training.
His scholarly output reflects this same applied, cross-disciplinary orientation: recent work includes a studies on privacy risk modeling in e-justice systems, examining how privacy-by-design principles can be operationalized in real-world judicial digital infrastructure. His research and project portfolio position him at the intersection of law, and distributed-ledger and AI governance, central areas to EU digital and financial regulation.
Peeter Müürsepp
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Peeter Müürsepp obtained his first academic degree (equivalent to MSc) from the University of Tartu in mathematics in 1984. In 1992 he received MPhil from the same university and defended the degree of Doctor of Humanities in Philosophy at Vilnius University in 2002. He has held numerous administrative positions at different private universities in Estonia as well as at Tallinn University of Technology, teaching and doing research at the same time. He has been teaching and doing research at different universities all over the world, including for instance London School of Economics & Political Science. Since 2011 he is the Chairperson of The Estonian Association of the History and Philosophy of Science and has served two terms as the President of the corresponding Baltic Association. In 2016 he was elected corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science. In addition to Associate Professorship at TalTech he has been an adjunct faculty member at the Estonian Art University and Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
As of 1 September 2026, Peeter Müürsepp holds the title of Professor Emeritus.