Keynote Speakers

Lady Hale retired as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in January 2020, after a varied career, as an academic lawyer at the University of Manchester (also qualifying and practising for a while as a barrister), then as the first woman member of the Law Commission leading the team promoting the reform of Family Law, and finally as a Judge, initially in the Family Division of the High Court. Family Law has always been her main interest. In retirement she has spent her time in good works, speaking and writing – Spider Woman, A Life (2021), With the Law on Our Side (2025), and Do We Have the Right to Die? (2026).

Professor Doctor İpek Sağlam is a faculty member at the Marmara University Faculty of Law, Department of Civil Law. Her professional focus lies predominantly in the sub-disciplines of civil law—specifically family law, the law of persons, the law of obligations (both general and special provisions), property law, and inheritance law. Alongside her scholarly research, she has contributed to the field with her English-language monograph, “Turkish Family Law”. In addition to her academic pursuits, she serves as a chief arbitrator at the Istanbul Arbitration Center.

Full Professor of Commercial Law at University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. She is the President of the European Law Institute (ELI). She is the Director of the Research Chair on AI Foundations and Frontiers. She was Sir Roy Goode Scholar at Unidroit in 2021–22 and she has been elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is a Delegate of the Kingdom of Spain at United Nations (for UNCITRAL) in Working Group VI on secured transactions, WG IV on e-commerce (AI Contracting), and WG I on Warehouse Receipts, and an Expert for UNCITRAL and Unidroit on digital economy projects – including the MLWR.

She is also member of the European Commission Expert Group on Liability and New Technologies, the EU Expert Group for the Observatory on Online Platform Economy, and the EU Expert Group on B2B Data Sharing and Cloud Computing. She is an arbitrator at the Spanish/Madrid Court of Arbitration and Vice President of the WG on Digital Economy of the CIAM-CIAR (Center of International and Latin American Arbitration of Madrid).

She is member of the European Law Institute (ELI) Executive Committee and Council and author of the ELI Guiding Principles on ADM. She was awarded a European Central Bank scholarship under the ECB Legal Program on Fintech Regulatory Challenges. Her past academic appointments include, inter alia, the James J Coleman Sr Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney, Associate Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, Marie Curie Fellow at Centre of European Law and Politics (Germany), and Chair of Excellence at Oxford University.