Margarita Amaxopoulou is Lecturer in Digital Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. She has a background in socio-legal and regulation studies and is interested in the ethical, legal and societal aspects of new and emerging technologies. Her work focuses on the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), technology law, and socio-legal studies of technology governance.

Before joining King's, she was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. During her fellowship, she studied the emerging credibility contests between different professional communities (like legal and computer science experts) in the AI regulation space and what shifts of influence between them mean for policy making processes and outcomes. During her Leverhulme Fellowship, she was also contributing to the work of the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI as a discussant in the AI regulation group, organised by Professor Ignacio Cofone.

At Oxford, before her Leverhulme Fellowship, Margarita was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. There, she successfully co-created and delivered (under the supervision of Professor Nicole Stremlau) the curriculum of ‘InfoLead’, an Executive Education Programme on information and technology literacy for judges, legal professionals and policymakers. She also worked on the Horizon programme 'Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age' (ReMeD). Before Oxford, she worked as a Researcher in the Cloud Legal Project, at Queen Mary University of London, where she studied legal and regulatory issues triggered by generative AI.

Her PhD, which she obtained from The Dickson Poon School of Law, examined how AI regulation processes trigger institutional changes in the UK and the EU, involving interviews with AI regulation participants (viva: no revisions). Her doctoral work was supported by the ‘Anthony Guest PhD Scholarship’, the only 3-year generic scholarship offered to prospective PhD students in 2018, on the basis of the best research proposal in the year's cohort. Her writing-up year was supported by two competitive scholarships from the Onassis Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. During her PhD studies, Margarita was a Visiting Lecturer at The Dickson Poon School of Law, a Summer Research Fellow in the 'Legal Priorities Project' (now 'Institute for Law and AI') and a Research Associate at the University of Surrey.

Margarita has experience working with interdisciplinary teams and is passionate about policy engagement. At the University of Surrey, she researched hate speech against MPs with computer scientists and political scientists, in collaboration with the UK House of Commons Library. She has completed professional training on the workings of Whitehall and the key players in the UK policymaking process, and works to strengthen the channels through which academic research reaches the policy world and broader public audiences.

She has written on the GDPR, Digital Markets Act-related and consumer protection law implications of pay or consent approaches for generative AI, and has contributed to commentaries on the EU Digital Services Act and the Platform-to-Business Regulation. In addition, she has written on the legal challenges that online crowdfunding platforms pose for consumer protection, on different regulatory approaches that local transport regulators in the UK take towards platform companies like Uber and on hate speech in political discourse. She has presented her research in several conferences, including the Law and Society Association (LSA) Annual Meeting, the Socio-legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference, and the Information Law & Policy Centre (ILPC) Annual Conference (IALS), and Tashkent Law Spring.

Margarita has taught various postgraduate and undergraduate modules: Cloud Computing Law at Queen Mary University of London, Consumer Protection Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, and Business Law at Keele University and has been offering guest lectures on technology law. She has also taught in the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights and Technology, whose participants come from across disciplines and professions, and lectures on AI harms, responsibility and regulation in the ProEd Education summer programme, reaching students aged 13 to 17 exploring legal and entrepreneurial career pathways. Her teaching extends deliberately beyond specialist legal audiences to the interdisciplinary and pre-university cohorts who will shape the next generation of responsible technology practice.

Margarita holds an LLM in Transnational Law (Distinction) from King's College London, which was fully funded by the prestigious Yeoh Tiong Lay Scholarship. She holds an LLB from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, graduating as Valedictorian (9,13/10).

Research interests

• Law and Technology
• AI Regulation and Governance
• Platform Regulation and Governance
• Social Media and Information Disorder
• Democratic Accountability
• Consumer Protection Law
• Transnational Law
• Socio-Legal Studies
• Sociology of Law
• Regulation studies

Teaching interests 

• Responsible AI
• Digital Law
• Technology and Policy
• EU Law