I am a legal scholar working at the intersection of law, technology, and the environment.

My research examines how international legal frameworks respond to technological transformation in environmental governance. I am particularly interested in cases where emerging technologies outpace the legal instruments designed to regulate them, creating gaps between what law demands and what technology makes possible. Marine genetic resources and the BBNJ Agreement serve as the primary case study for this work: as artificial intelligence reshapes bioprospecting from physical collection to computational prediction, the legal architecture governing access and benefit-sharing faces questions it was not built to answer.

I trained as a legal theorist. My doctoral work (Maastricht University and the University of São Paulo, 2019–2023) addressed consistency and fragmentation in international law, and I have published on the philosophy of customary law, conflicts between humanitarian and human rights regimes, and legal responses to the climate crisis. This theoretical background informs how I approach questions of technology governance: I try to bring conceptual precision and attention to the structure of legal reasoning to an area that sometimes lacks both.

In 2025, I received an Early Career Grant from the Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) Academy to lead a project on AI and Marine Environmental Policy. The project investigates how AI methods for bioprospecting interact with international environmental law, with a focus on the BBNJ Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Nagoya Protocol, and the TRIPS Agreement. Alongside this, I develop computational approaches to legal reasoning with collaborators, including Hohfeldian mappings of treaty positions and tools for automated norm classification.

I also lead the Legal Rule Tagger project, funded by an EdLab Education Innovation Grant. The Legal Rule Tagger is a digital platform where students collaboratively unpack the elements of legal rules and visualise legal positions. Version 1.0 is already in use across first-year law courses at Maastricht; version 2.0, currently in development, integrates large language models to support student learning.

I serve as a UN Scientific Delegate and have contributed to the UN Ocean Conference (Nice, 2025), the UN-GEF BBNJ Implementation Project (Brasília, 2025), and the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI). I will present at the ASIL Annual Meeting in Washington DC in April 2026.

At Maastricht University, I teach at both LLB and LLM level. I supervise ‘Coding Nature: Law and Ethics in the Age of Algorithmic Bioprospecting,’ a Legal Challenge Project in which students investigate how international environmental law should respond to AI-driven bioprospecting. I also teach Foundations of Global Law, Introduction to Law, Thinking Like a Lawyer, and Legal Philosophy, and I hold the Dutch University Teaching Qualification (BKO).

Scroll down for news and updates. I am active on LinkedIn. You can reach me at h.jbmarcos {@} maastrichtuniversity.nl