Stefan Bechtold

Term of Service: June 1, 2026 to May 31, 2029

Stefan Bechtold is Professor of Intellectual Property and Associate Vice President IP Policy at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include intellectual property, law & technology (including Internet law, AI & Law, privacy law, and telecommunications law), antitrust law, as well as law & economics. He was a Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law (2014 & 2022) and the University of Haifa, a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, and spent research visits in Amsterdam, Berkeley, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, and Stanford.

Stefan Bechtold is a member of the foundation board of the Study Center Gerzensee (a foundation of the Swiss National Bank), where he is involved in the organization of law & economics courses for doctoral students. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the ETH AI Center, a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, advising the ministry on all issues of economic policy, and a Fellow of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. From 2019 to 2025, he was an Advisor to the Copyright Project of the American Law Institute. From 2018 to 2021, he was Head of the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich.

Stefan Bechtold has published in journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law; Journal of Empirical Legal Studies; Journal of Legal Studies; Journal of Law, Economics & Organization; Southern California Law Review; Harvard Journal of Law & Technology; Marketing Science; Journal of Behavioral Decision Making; Communications of the ACM; HotNets, ICLR, IEEE S&P, USENIX & PETs; and various European law journals. He is a graduate of the University of Tübingen School of Law, Germany, and of Stanford Law School (JSM 2002). In his youth, Stefan Bechtold composed numerous orchestral and chamber music works which have been awarded several composition prizes and have been repeatedly performed and broadcast.

For an overview of the research of Stefan Bechtold’s research group at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich, please click here.