Merane, Jakob

Biography

Jakob is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich and at the Faculty of Law at the external page University of Lausanne. He holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and earned both his Bachelor and Master of Law (summa cum laude) from the external page University of Basel, with study visits at external page Humboldt-University of Berlin and external page University of Zurich. He concluded the Zurich bar exam with the highest honors and holds a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Applied Statistics from ETH Zurich. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the external page Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and was a Visiting Researcher at external page Harvard Law School in 2023.

In addition, Jakob is a member of the external page Swiss Study Foundation and received the Young Scholar Prize from the external page German Law and Economics Association in 2024. Before academia, he worked at external page Homburger, co-founded external page Open Auditorium supporting refugee students in Switzerland, and was a board member of external page Amnesty International.

Research Overview

Jakob's research focuses on new innovative approaches to enforce small claims. As part of his doctoral research, he develops automated tools to detect and enforce privacy violations on the internet. Furthermore, he researches regulatory responses to emerging digital technologies. He is particularly interested in the following areas:

• Antitrust & Competition Law
• Computational Law
• Empirical Legal Research
• Privacy Law
• Private Law: Remedies and Procedures

Publications

• external page SwiLTra-Bench: The Swiss Legal Translation Benchmark (with Joel Niklaus, Luka Nenadic, Sina Ahmadi, Yingqiang Gao, Cyrill A. H. Chevalley, Claude Humbel, Christophe Gösken, Lorenzo Tanzi, Thomas Lüthi, Stefan Palombo, Spencer Poff, Boling Yang, Nan Wu, Matthew Guillod, Robin Mamié, Daniel Brunner, Julio Pereyra & Niko Grupen), arXiv preprint, arXiv:2503.01372, March 2025.
• AI & Law: Automated Private Enforcement of Small Claims, Doctoral Thesis (2024).
• external page Automating Website Registration for Studying GDPR Compliance (with Karel Kubíček, Ahmed Bouhoula & David Basin), The Web Conference (WWW 2024).
  
• external page Enforcement Bots im Strafrecht: automatisierte Verdachtsbegründung und Beweissammlung durch Softwareagenten im Netz (with Sylvia Meyer), Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Strafrecht 4/2023, 425-445.
  
• external page Bundesgerichtsurteile nutzen: Das Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD) (with Florian Geering), Jusletter, 18 September 2023.
  
• external page Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD) (with Florian Geering), Zenodo, 2023.
  
• external page Checking Websites’ GDPR Consent Compliance for Marketing Emails (with Karel Kubíček, Carlos Cotrini, Alexander Stremitzer, Stefan Bechtold & David Basin), Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2022(2), 282-303.
  
• external page Computergestützte Ermittlung der Geschlechterverteilung im bundesgerichtlichen Verfahren, Schweizerische Juristen-Zeitung, 10/2021, 511. 
• external page Der Presserat zieht klare Trennlinien im digitalen Zeitalter, medialex, 08/2020, 7.
• external page Künstliche Intelligenz – Rechtliche Leitplanken und neue Haftungsrisiken (with Alexander Stremitzer), Recht relevant. für Verwaltungsräte, 6/2020.