The Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich is part of the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences. The Center brings together three professors (Elliott Ash, Stefan Bechtold and Alexander Stremitzer) and includes a diverse range of postdocs, Ph.D. students, scientific assistants and research assistants. Its research focuses on intellectual property law, contract law, experimental law & economics, political economy, law & tech, and legal applications of machine learning. Together with various Swiss university partners, the Center co-organizes regular Workshop & Lecture Series on Law & Economics and the Law & Economics of Innovation. Both series bring leading internationally well-known experts from all over the world to Zurich on a regular basis. The Center collaborates with leading academic institutions in Asia, Europe and the U.S., in particular through joint research projects, conferences and teaching activities.
Beat Weibel, Head of ETH transfer at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as "Professor of Practice" in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS). Together with Prof. Stefan Bechtold from the CLE, he will develop and implement training and awareness initiatives for ETH students in the area of intellectual property.
On September 2, EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus, the first large-scale, open, multilingual language model. Prof. Elliott Ash, Jingwei Ni and Dr. Alexander Hoyle from the ETH Center for Law & Economics (CLE) are among the co-authors of Apertus.
Margaritha Windisch, Ph.D. candidate at ETH’s Center for Law & Economics (CLE), reached 2nd place in the Young Scholar Recognition at the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies (ESELS) Conference 2025 in Toulouse.
