Professor Sylvia Papadopoulos is an expert in Law, Technology and AI. She is a full-time Associate Professor in the Department of Private Law at the University of Pretoria and also serves as the acting director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Law. She obtained a BLC, LLB, LLM (cum laude), and LLD from the University of Pretoria, where she wrote her thesis on “Selected Aspects of E-Commerce, Digital Content and Consumer Protection in South Africa.”
As an advocate of the High Court of South Africa, and academic at UP, Professor Papadopoulos has advised the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on aspects of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013. She is the current chair of the New Technologies and the Law Working Group for the prestigious Law Schools Global League (LSGL) and has participated (by invite) in sessions with the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group IV (Electronic Commerce) at its 51st session in New York in 2015. More recently she was appointed as a Member of The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) Consumer Advisory Panel (serving on the AI and Financial Services – sub-group).
Professor Papadopoulos has published numerous peer-reviewed national and international publications and presented at both national and international conferences. She has also made regular appearances on television and radio. She is an author and editor of a leading book on Cyber Law in South Africa, i.e. Cyberlaw@SA: The Law of the Internet in South Africa 4th ed (2022) published by Van Schaiks. (See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4989-4477 or LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sylvia-papadopoulos-27030a13).
In addition, Professor Papadopoulos has engaged in externally funded research projects on age ratings in online games and online content with the Films and Publications Board and collaborated with the Attorney General Alliance Africa on aspects of technology and law, privacy, and consumer protection, fintech and crypto assets, AI, and platform liability. She has recently returned from teaching a course on Sustainability and Emerging Technologies at an LLM Summer School at Kings College London and hosted 17 US State Attorneys General at a high-level workshop on AI and the Future of Law (Dec 2023). She also received an award from the Hellenic Society of South Africa for outstanding academic achievements in 2023.