Dr Abigail Rekas (she/her) is a Lecturer Above the Bar in Law and Innovation at University of Galway. Her research focuses on copyright law, the arts and access to culture. She currently has four active research streams: archiving and preserving video games; AI and copyright; technology and law; and access to culture for persons with disabilities. Dr Rekas co‐directs the LLM in Law and Digital Innovation at University of Galway.

Recently, Dr Rekas co‐organised the conference Game Changers: The Business of Games – A Legal Perspective, bringing together experts in the law and business of games from around the world alongside games industry professionals. At the conference, she presented research on the legal challenges of archiving and preserving video games. In 2023, she also served as an expert in a working group on this topic at the University of Glasgow CREATE Centre. Dr Rekas has spoken widely about the impact of generative AI on copyright law to diverse groups, including the World Conference of Screenwriters, the Irish Arts Council and the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway.

A Board member of the International Future of Law Association (IFLA), Dr Rekas has co‐organised IFLA conferences and has presented and chaired panels on legal tech and the future of the legal profession.

Dr Rekas lectures a range of modules, including Entertainment Law, Design Thinking for Lawyers and Access to Justice and Digital Transformation. She also serves as Director of Mooting for the School of Law. She is a member of the Technology and Rights and Commercial Law research clusters at University of Galway.

Prior to her current post, Dr Rekas taught at the School of Law at the Universität Augsburg and was a Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Early Career Research Fellow working on the Disability Rights Expanding Accessible Markets (DREAM) Project from 2011 to 2013.

Abigail was awarded a PhD in 2023 from University of Galway for a thesis titled Yes, And: Implementation of the Article 30 Guarantee of Access to Cultural Materials for Persons with Disabilities. She also holds a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law (2011). She is a member in good standing of the Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Abigail graduated summa cum laude with departmental honours from the University of Massachusetts, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in History (2007).

Abigail has current active research projects on:

1. Archiving and preservation of video games – definitions and enabling legal frameworks
2. Copyright and generative AI – authorship and creativity; non‐traditional authors
3. Legal tech – education and analytics

She also has inactive projects that she intends to return to:

1. Access to culture for persons with disabilities
2. Publicity and personality rights and data scraping