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Staff profile

Overview

Mauricio Figueroa

Biography

Career Development Fellow

Mauricio Figueroa joined Durham Law School as a Career Development Fellow in the Michaelmas term of 2025, having submitted his PhD thesis at Newcastle Law School. At Durham, he teaches Intellectual Property Law on the LLM programme. His research centres on the regulation of digital technologies and the evolving technocultural configurations they bring about.

His publications can be found on SSRN, and he is a regular speaker at international conferences on law and technology. He is an active member of the Society for Computers and Law (SCL), where he also hosts the podcast Privacy and Technology Laws Around the World.

In what he likes to call his other selves, he worked as a public officer in the field of technology procurement and later in information management, both in Mexico City. Before that came a couple of years as a judicial clerk and a brief internship in a corporate law firm; chapters he looks back on with affection but considers, with quiet satisfaction, complete.

He earned an LLM at the Buchmann Faculty of Law in Tel Aviv and an LLB at UNAM in Mexico City, where he later found himself on the other side of the classroom, teaching part-time for seven years undergraduate courses in commercial contracts and legal theory.

Mauricio is open to interdisciplinary collaborations, public panels, and media enquiries. More on his work can be found on his website.

Esteem Indicators

  • 2025: The Laws of Artificial Companionship: In this talk, Mauricio analysed the legal and societal implications of AI companionship technologies. Drawing from a sociolegal perspective, the talk will examine the unique harms posed by affective human–AI interactions and argue for an expanded legal framework that better addresses these emerging relational dynamics, beyond data protection and AI regulation.

Publications

Journal Article