Professors of BSC

Vanessa Franssen is Associate Professor (chargée de cours) at the Faculty of Law, Political Science and Criminology of the University of Liège (Belgium) and an Affiliated Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminal Law of the KU Leuven (Belgium). She is also a guest lecturer at the University of Luxembourg and a member of the Brussels bar. She studied Law and Romance Languages at the KU Leuven and at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University of Paris 1. Previously, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School (USA, 2011-2012) and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. She obtained her PhD degree at the KU Leuven (2013).

Prof. Franssen specialises in cybercrime, EU criminal law, economic and financial criminal law, national and comparative criminal law and criminal procedure. She has specific experience in comparative and interdisciplinary research (criminal law, criminology, IT law, law and economics, as well as EU competition law). She is particularly interested in the impact of new technologies (including AI) on criminal law and criminal procedure. Another prong of her research focuses on the interplay between criminal and quasi-criminal enforcement questioning, among other things, the objectives and effectiveness of different enforcement mechanisms.

Prof. Franssen is the author of a large number of publications and she gave several presentations at national and international conferences. She is currently preparing a handbook on digital evidence and cross-border access to data in criminal matters, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Furthermore, she is an editor of the European Law Blog (http://europeanlawblog.eu/), a widely read academic blog which provides a range of topical analyses of EU law, and the co-editor of the International Enclyclopaedia of Laws – Criminal Law (Kluwer Law International), an international series on criminal law and criminal procedure.