Background:

J: What made you decide to leave Portugal?

SR: Well, I always wanted to study and work abroad. It was a childhood dream. At some point, I found this LLM in Law and Economics in the Netherlands and it sounded very appealing. I always wanted to be an academic actually and here I had the chance to. I was hired for a PhD position at Tilburg University while I was still doing my LLM so I stayed. Then, from there, when I was finishing my Ph.D., I got accepted to do a fellowship in the U.S. at Yale where I stayed for about two years. I returned to the Netherlands in 2016 after receiving a tenure-track offer from Leiden University.

 

J: Were you always interested in public law from the beginning?

SR: I wouldn’t say from the beginning, but I must say that I always had better grades in public law than private law. So, at some point during my LLB, it became clear that my preference was going into Public Law. However, I was always more interested in Economic Law, so that’s how I started studying Public Law. I really love European Competition Law. It was sort of my first love and why I started working as an antitrust lawyer after graduating. I still like it a lot, but when I was hired to do my Ph.D., it concerned more regulation. So, now I don’t do as much European Competition Law as I would like to.

 

J: How did you end up co-founding the Law and Tech Network?

SR: I actually did it with a good friend of mine who is also an academic. There was a professor of mine that told me that if you want to shape a field, you have to know the people that inhabit it. Then, I just realized there was no network for law and technology. For example, in Public law, you have this large association with a couple of journals called I.CON where you can present at the annual conference and engage with your peers. In law and technology, scholars attend different conferences and publish in a wide variety of journals so it’s very difficult to keep track of who is doing what. The European Law & Tech network provides information on new scholarships, conferences, and vacancies. I would like to believe that we are starting to create a community.

 

J: Why did you choose to come to Groningen?

SR:  I saw this vacancy for a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship at the University of Groningen and I had decided to apply for it. I knew it would be very competitive but I didn’t have much to lose. I visited Groningen for the first time in February 2017 before I had heard that I was selected for the interview and I just had a very strong feeling that I would come back to this charming city. And I did.

 

J: How does your experience here compare to that in Leiden?

SR: I really liked teaching at Leiden as you get to work with ambitious students that aspire to become partners of law firms in Amsterdam. However, teaching at Groningen has also been thus far an excellent experience. The international LLB students are amazing and I always have the feeling that they can teach me more than I can teach them. I only just started teaching two courses to Dutch students so I can’t say much about them for now, but so far it has been great.

 

Academia and Practice

J: Would you say you prefer practice or lecturing?

SR: I also enjoyed working as a lawyer but I prefer doing research. I also enjoy lecturing and engaging with students very much.

 

J: After having been a visiting scholar at George Washington Law School and a fellow at Yale, have you noticed large scale differences between the approaches of academics in the U.S. in comparison to those in Europe? I’m sure you would have.

SR: Absolutely, but I would say that the differences can also be explained by broader differences in culture and mentality and the fact that US scholars at law schools do not experience any pressure to obtain research grants to carry out their research.

 

J; What advice do you have for anyone who isn’t sure whether to take a path to academia or practice?

SR: I’d suggest applying for internships at both law firms and as a researcher. It is important to also ask yourself what you value the most in life. You’ll never become very wealthy from academic research but you do have some flexibility and that is, at least to me, priceless.

 

A Closer Glimpse

J: You mentioned that you would have studied Literature if it were feasible, so what’s your favourite book?

SR: That’s difficult. I would say that right now it’s American Pastoral by Philip Roth. It’s about a Jewish family that appears to be the perfect family. At the end of the day, they weren’t one happy American family like everyone thought. The daughter of this couple becomes a terrorist during the Vietnam war, against the war, and the marriage begins to fall apart. You can see the struggle of the father trying to keep the family together, along with the struggle of the daughter. It won the Pulitzer Prize many years ago and I think it’s the perfect example of the Pulitzer Prize, which should be given to a book that is about the American way of life. That’s the definition of the award criteria. I think this book is really about this, the American way of life, and how superficial people actually are when they want to comply with this American way.

 

J: I noticed on the European Law and Tech Network website that you’re from Portugal, but you also have Indian roots?

SR: My family from my father’s side is Northern Indian (Gujarat). My grandparent migrated to Mozambique (a former Portuguese colony), which is where my father was born.

J: So, you have a really international family.

SR: Yes *laughs* a very international family. I have family in the US, UK, Portugal…and my sister is currently living in Paris.

J: Do you like Bollywood movies? Most people when I ask either hate them or love them. I really love them.

S: I watch them sometimes, especially those with Priyanka Chopra.

 

J: Every time I ask this, I always get the response, ‘I don’t go on vacations’…

SR: I definitely go on vacation.

J: Great! So, where has been your favorite spot and where would you like to visit that you haven’t?

SR: I was recently in Indonesia last year and I really loved it. I was in three different islands. I was in Bali, of course, like most people… Bali, Flores and Java. Flores was amazing. I went to see the Komodo Dragons. *laughs* It was an amazing part of the trip. You could take pictures behind them, but I thought that wasn’t very respectful. I took pictures of them but at some point, we accidentally left the track and got chased by one. So, that was not very pleasant but definitely exciting.  

J: But it’s a story to tell.

SR: Yeah, you get a story to tell. They’re very efficient animals. They always bite once, so they will bite the slowest person in the group.  It was a very nice trip.

Where I would like to go…. In October I am going on vacation to Nepal and Chengdu in China. My next short trip is to NYC for a few days but I have a number of business trips planned for the next months (Hong Kong, Japan, Valencia, Lausanne…)

The place that I’d love to visit the most and which ranks the highest on “my bucket list” would be Easter Island. I don’t know when but one day I would like to visit it.

 

J: Do you have anything to add before we end, like an interesting fact?

SR: I don’t know what students would be interested in… My favorite Netflix series is The Bridge which is a Scandinavian thriller about a murder that’s committed at the border between Denmark and Sweden. The Bridge is the border between the two countries. Last year, my partner and I even went to the bridge and some parts of Copenhagen and Malmo where the series was filmed. I think that’s my “geeky” side.

​

~ End of Interview ~