Dr Morshed Mannan

Lecturer in Global Law and Digital Technology
LLB (Hons.) (Warwick); LLM (Adv.) (Leiden) (cum laude); PhD (Leiden)
Email: morshed.mannan@ed.ac.uk
View my publicationsMorshed Mannan joined Edinburgh Law School on 1 November 2024 as a Lecturer in Global Law and Digital Technology. He was previously a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, where he was part of the ‘BlockchainGov’ ERC project led by Dr. Primavera de Filippi. His research focuses on blockchain governance and cooperative governance. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden Law School, Leiden University in 2022 for his dissertation entitled: The Emergence of Democratic Firms in the Platform Economy: Drivers, Obstacles and the Path Ahead. During that time, he was attached to the Company Law department, and taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on comparative corporate governance, freedom of establishment, and workers’ participation in companies. He was also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School, and a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge under the LERU PhD Exchange Programme.
In addition to his new co-authored book on Blockchain Governance (MIT Press), he has several published and forthcoming articles in leading refereed journals such as the Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, New Technology Work and Employment, Policy & Society, Ondernemingsrecht, Georgetown Law Technology Review, George Washington Law Review, Technology and Society, Topoi, Erasmus Law Review, and International Insolvency Review as well as book chapters in volumes published by Brill, Edward Elgar, Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Springer on blockchain governance and democratic firms respectively.
Morshed is an Affiliate Faculty of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy based at The New School in New York City, and is a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. He has been enrolled as an Advocate by the Bangladesh Bar Council and has been called to the Bar of England & Wales. He has acted as a consultant on matters of cooperative law, labour law, and (digital) governance for the International Cooperative Alliance, NCBA Clusa International, and BRAC University, and an expert for the European Commission, the OECD, UNIDROIT, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the Dhaka Ride-Sharing Drivers’ Union.
He is currently a Member of the Working Group of Experts on the Project on Collaborative Legal Structures for Agricultural Enterprises, jointly developed by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
He is also a member of the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (COALA) and was one of the authors of the COALA DAO Model Law (2022), which was in large part transposed into state legislation on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in Utah and New Hampshire, and discussed in the Senate of Australia, in a recent England & Wales Law Commission Consultation on DAOs, and covered widely in the financial and crypto press
Twitter: @MannanMorshed
LinkedIn: Dr Morshed Mannan