Matthias Leistner
Matthias Leistner is Professor of Private Law and Intellectual Property Law, with Information and IT-Law (German Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (GRUR) Chair) at Ludwig Maximilian Unversity (LMU) Munich. He studied law in Berlin, Brussels, Munich and Cambridge. Ph.D.-studies at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law Munich; Dr. iur. (s.c.l.), LMU Munich 1999. Master of Law (LL.M.), Trinity Hall College, University of Cambridge 2004. Habilitation (Post-doc thesis), LMU Munich 2006.
Matthias Leistner was Head of the Commonwealth Unit at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, Munich. From 2007-2016 he was Professor of Civil Law, Intellectual Property Law and Competition Law and Director of the Institute for Commercial and Economic Law at the University of Bonn. Apart from his Chair at LMU Munich, at present, he is a Member of the Faculty of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), and was a guest professor for European Intellectual Property Law at the University of Xiamen, China, and at the Tongji University, Shanghai. He was a Short Term International Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, New York City, in the Spring Term 2020 and a Visiting Scholar at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law School in the Spring Term 2023.
His specialties are intellectual property law (in particular copyright and patents), unfair competition law, internet law and data law. He has published seven books and numerous articles in these fields and has been consulted on IP matters by various government departments and non-governmental organisations as well as international institutions, such as the EU parliament and other. He has acted as an IP and civil law expert before various courts in Germany, England, the U.S. and Asia, including the German Federal Constitutional Court, the German Federal Court of Justice as well as the High Court of England and Wales. He is editor of the leading German IP journal Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht (GRUR) as well as a member of the Editorial Board of GRUR-Patent, co-editor of a commentary on German unfair competition law (Grosskommentar UWG, Berlin 2013), and the standard commentary on German copyright law (Schricker/Loewenheim/Leistner/Ohly, Urheberrecht, 6th edition 2020).
