University of Tennessee College of Law Professor Maurice E. Stucke will spend the next year working as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission.
In the position, Stucke is expected to use his expertise to help the largest consumer protection, privacy and antitrust agency set strategic direction while offering advice to leaders on legal issues concerning law enforcement activities that relate to these legal areas.
Stucke’s assignment agreement with the agency describes him as “a noted scholar in antitrust and consumer protection — specifically privacy – (who) will work to create … cross-agency collaboration and policy development to ensure that the agency is enforcing in a consistent and robust manner.”
“I am excited to help develop policies to cover unfair methods of competition and bridge the gap between privacy, competition and consumer protection policies,” Stucke said. “Now is the time to ensure that privacy and antitrust are complementary, where more competition will improve privacy protection, build trust in online markets and empower consumers to make more informed choices about how their data is processed.”
As an expert on the subject matter and the author and co-author of five books and more than 50 scholarly articles on consumer privacy, antitrust, and consumer protection, Stucke is particularly suited to bring his expertise to the agency. He has more than 25 years of experience handling a range of competition policy issues in both private practice and as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Stucke, the College of Law’s Douglas A. Blaze Distinguished Professor, has testified and provided expert reports for multiple governments and inter-governmental agencies, including the World Bank, European Commission, Congress, and House of Lords. In 2018, he addressed the United Nations, speaking about the implications of a data-driven economy. At the heart of his concerns are how large tech companies – or data-opolies – as he refers to them, whose collection and use of personal data can pose risks to the public.
Before his appointment to the Federal Trade Commission, Stucke also served on the advisory boards of the Open Markets Institute, Academic Society for Competition Law, American Antitrust Institute and the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies. He was also one of the United States’ non-governmental advisors to the International Competition Network.
Stucke received a Fulbright Scholar grant in 2010-2011 to teach at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. In 2012, he was a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 2015 and 2017, he visited University of Oxford, where he was an academic visitor at its Institute of European and Comparative Law, a fellow at its Centre for Competition Law and Policy and a senior associate at Pembroke College.
He has been quoted, and his research has been featured, in numerous media outlets.