This was the fascinating question posed by our Visiting Scholar Mr. Tomás Gabriel García-Micó. On September 24, the Mingfa lecture hall filled with students and faculty for the first China-EU School of Law Open Lecture of this semester. It was organized by CESL Assistant Professor Monika Prusinowska. 

Mr. Tomás Gabriel has spent the whole month of September at CESL in Beijing, conducting research into the topic of liability for surgical robots, which is the subject of his PhD dissertation at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona. 

It is a timely topic, as legal systems struggle to keep pace with rapid advancements in medical technology. Everyone was engaged and asked many questions about how robots are increasingly being used to conduct different kinds of operations. The legal issues, when injury or death results from the use of a medical robot, are complex and potentially draw in multiple parties such as the doctors, hospital, insurance company, state administration, manufacturer of the robot, or even the robots themselves. Mr. Tomás Gabriel explained the various problems, and offered a number of solutions for how the law could deal with these now and into the future. It was a very interesting lecture!