Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! I hope you had a lovely summer/winter break. Here, my significant otter and I have spent most of the last few months working out the details of our move to Madrid and settling up in this new town. So far, so good: the city is lovely (and speaks to my big city affections in a way that Luxembourg could not), and I'm enjoying my new work environment at CUNEF University. But now that I'm starting to settle into a routine, I guess it's time to come back to my beloved newsletter. What do I want to talk about today? Frankly, I still have no clue as I write these words, so this is one of those 'stream of consciousness' issues. First, I will share a brief rant about questions of method in legal research (and law and tech more specifically). Of course, that is followed up by the usual parts of the newsletter: some reading recommendations, job and event opportunities, and the usual cute otters. Hope you enjoy! ## Methods will not save us A distinctive trace of English-language legal scholarship is a certain anxiety towards method.[1] In certain circles — such as my usual communities of EU law and tech law — it is common to refer to dismiss doctrinal legal scholarship as being somehow beneath 'serious' academics. Even if not everybody goes as far as Geoffrey Samuel in viewing it as something akin to astrology, there is an expectation that anybody (especially early-career scholars) must bring something else to the table if they want to be innovative.[2] Given the increasingly competitive academic job markets, this creates a considerable incentive towards legal scholarship borrowing methods from elsewhere. I am not wholly opposed to this — hell, I am trying to build a career on precisely that development! Even so, my impression is that the obsession towards having methods that are acceptable to others has a very obvious failure mode: paint-by-the-numbers scholarship, in which legal scholars follow formulas devised elsewhere without having much of the conceptual framework needed for understanding that or criticizing what is going on.[3] This risk might be more evident when it comes to the use of quantitative methods in legal scholarship, as, let's face it, jokes about lawyer numeracy are not wholly ungrounded. But it is not absent when it comes to the use of qualitative methods in legal scholarship, which require a level of reflexity and methodological sophistication that go beyond the limited offers of training in most graduate programs in law. So, if we are going to borrow methods from other disciplines, we need to think carefully about what we are doing. Fortunately, we have more and more legal reflections about method. To stick with recent examples from law and technology scholarship, Ryan Calo has just published an entire book proposing a 'methodical approach' to law and technology, as did Ronald Leenes, among others. These articles are the tip of the iceberg of a much broader conversation, featuring articles on specific approaches to law and tech, such as recent papers by Margot Kaminski and Meg Leta Jones and Tiffany C Li and broader reflections such as Silvia de Conca's insightful piece on how the 'law of the horse' debate from US legal scholarship has shaped law and tech debates in Europe and led to considerable under-examination of European particularities. These are valuable contributions on how to engage with technology from a legal perspective. Still, most of them build on an assumption that I am quite sceptical of: that the embrace of methodological rigour will legitimize what we do and turn it into 'serious' scholarship. This is not to say that methodology cannot help us. At the very least, it provides us shared terms of reference to discuss developments and issues across different branches of the law that do not talk among themselves that often.[4] The embrace of techniques that are accepted in other disciplines also make it easier for legal scholars to pursue external funding sources, as applications are often evaluated by peers in social sciences (or, heaven forbid, physicists [5]) that might not be aware of what counts as good legal scholarship. Pressure towards a methodological turn in legal scholarship can also be a way to displace incumbents in legal academia, which, let's face it, is quite prone to ossification. At the end of the day, however, I believe we should (also) evaluate our turn to methodology in light of another question: is it helping us to learn things about the law that we would not learn otherwise? The answer to this question is potentially "yes". After all, these methods have been useful in other domains of inquiry about social phenomena. Yet, we should be aware of how this renewed emphasis on methods can backfire. One failure method relates to the opportunity cost of developing these skills: speaking for myself, my education as a computer scientist has surely come in handy in making sense of how to apply the law to digital technologies. However, we only have so much time in life to learn things, and so the time I spent in those studies has certainly come at the expense of depth in legal reasoning. Learning how to do things properly takes time, and if we expect research to be conducted by individuals or small groups, the result is likely to be a loss of depth in inquiry. A related issue emerges from how we train legal scholars. For all the emphasis on the idea that a PhD in law should not be 'mere' doctrine, doctoral programmes in law tend to be quite thin in providing knowledge about methods. This might be less of a problem in US legal academia, as the postgraduate model of training means that people come from other disciplines (often with PhDs in them), but legal education elsewhere cannot rely on that kind of outsourced training. Of course, self-learning and unstructured learning are important elements of the doctoral experience. But, without background training, the risk is that we end up producing third-rate sociology (or political science, or computer science, etc.) instead of actually advancing knowledge about law as a social and political phenomenon.[6] Something else we need to be aware of is that the effectiveness of methods as signs of deep thinking is dependent on a series of background conditions. These conditions have been strained for a while now, as developments such as widespread problems in the replication of scientific results across disciplines, predatory academic journals and conferences, and the onslaught of AI-generated content are all challenging overall trust in academic outputs. Perhaps legal scholarship has a role to play in finding out way out of these crises of scientific knowledge, but legal scholars would do well to look at the challenges facing adjacent disciplines as they try to emulate them. Once again, my goal is not to say that legal scholarship should be limited to good old-fashioned doctrinal works. It is, instead, to whine about reductionism. If we treat rigour as the product of individual choices --- especially if we delegate those choices to disciplines with different concerns and cultures --- we risk overlooking not only the social factors that make those standards of rigour work (or break down), but the more fundamental question of whether those standards are actually helping us on our goals. In the end, what we probably need is more experimentation with method, but one that keeps an ongoing conversation rather than trying to find a royal road for legal knowledge production. * * * 1. To be more precise, what is unique about Anglophone scholarship is not the anxiety in itself, but the reaction in trying to emulate methods. In Civil Law cultures, the same anxiety has been traditionally repressed through other claims, such as the preposterous arguments that one can speak of a 'legal science' in the narrower sense of science (as opposed to 'merely' in the broader extension of terms such as the German Wissenschaft). Disciplinary impostor syndrome can take various forms. ↩︎ 2. See, e.g., the inaugural editorial for European Law Open. ↩︎ 3. Richard Feynman popularized the term "cargo cult science" as a shorthand for this kind of mindless following of rituals that are associated with scientific practice. The term is derived from an analogy with the practices of so-called cargo cults in Melanesian cultures, but the original framing of these cultures is nowaday contested by anthropologists as an inadequate analytical tool for understanding the social dynamics at play here. In addition to these problems with its origin, the cargo cult science metaphor has also been criticized as leading to counter-productive ways of engaging with bad practices. So, I decided against continuing my use of the term, and share these notes here as an aside to anybody who is familiar with it. ↩︎ 4. Heck, sometimes it can be easy to find collaborators in other disciplines than to reach across the public/private law divide (or even more narrowly defined fiefdoms within legal scholarship). But that is a topic in which I'm not committing my opinions in writing, given my Bialystock & Bloom levels of moral fortitude. ↩︎ 5. I have nothing against physicists. In fact, some of my best friends are spheric cows rolling on frictionless planes. ↩︎ 6. If you are going to make a claim that quantitative analysis is the future of law, please make sure that you can at least define a p-value properly. ↩︎ ## Recommendations The summer's greatest hit was UCL Massively Crossreferenced Digital Laws, in which a team led by Michael Veale compiled a cross-referenced version of some of the key EU and UK digital law instruments, connecting them with relevant case law, implementing acts, and administrative acts at the Member State level. A valuable asset for anyone working on the EU digital _acquis_. For those of you who get more hands-on with law and computational methods, Timo Seidl has provided command-line tools for building datasets from EUR-Lex and from the European Commission's Press Corner. The TAPED team at Lucerne has released a new version of their dataset on Digital Trade Provisions, which covers more than 465 Preferential Trade Agreements concluded since 2000. In addition to the sources mentioned above, here are some things that might interest y'all: * Madalina Busuioc and Martino Maggetti, ‘Worthy of Trust? AI Governance and the Role of (Dis)Trust’ [2026] Perspectives on Public Management and Governance gvag007. * Alexis Galán and Yane Svetiev, ‘Peer Review in Networked Financial Supervision: The Evolution of ESMA’s Collegial Panopticon’ [2025] Yearbook of European Law yeaf008. * Jia’an Liu, ‘Engineering and Governing the Agent Harness: A Technology and Policy Framework for the Runtime Layer of Agentic AI’ (United Nations University Institute in Macau 2026). * Samuela Marchiori, ‘Conceptual Engineering in the Philosophy of Technology’ (PhD dissertation, Delft University of Technology 2026). * Alexandra Molitorisová and Kai Purnhagen, ‘Regulatory Sandboxes for Novel Foods’ (2025) 16 European Journal of Risk Regulation 1063. * Jan Orbie, ‘Another Europe Was Thinkable: Unearthing and Unmasking Early EU Integration Theories’ (2026) 91 Politique européenne 12. * Claudio M Radaelli and Bernardo Rangoni, ‘Regulation and Its Metrics: Three Views of the Cathedral’ (2026) 33 Journal of European Public Policy 2415. * Francisco Velasco Caballero and M Mercè Darnaculleta Gardella, Manual de Derecho administrativo (4th edn, Marcial Pons 2026). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ We are hiring! The Department of Law at CUNEF University invites applications for one or more Assistant Professor tenure-track positions, for a starting date of 1 September 2027. This position is open to applicants working in any domain of the law, but we have particular interest in experts in Public Law, International and/or European Tax Law, International Commercial Law, International Company Law, Banking and Financial Regulation, and Labour law. Applications are open until **15 October**. KU Leuven's early career Research Colloquium on Law and Emerging Technologies invites applications until **20 September** , with the colloquium taking place on 11 December. The Brussels Privacy Hub invites applications for its Research Fellows Programme until **30 September**. Excellent opportunity for those working on privacy and data protection all over the world, from a variety of approaches. The ELFA invites submissions to its yearly doctoral award for thesis on EU law. If you have defended your PhD in this area from 1 October 2025 onwards, make sure to submit your application by **10 October**. LUISS Guido Carli in Rome invites applications for Visiting Professors for the 2027/2028 Academic Year. If you are interested in a visit between 4 and 12 weeks, apply by **23 October**. My former boss at the University of Luxembourg, Niovi Vavoula, is hiring a PhD candidate and a 24-month Postdoc for a project on the legal framework for ethical hacking. Applications are accepted and evaluated on a rolling basis. Call for papers for the JURIX conference's Doctoral Workshop, with deadline **1 November**. ## And now, the otter Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Photo by Mateusz Bajdak / Unsplash Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! I hope you have been doing well since the last issue, a few weeks ago. Summer was never my favourite time of the year, and moving countries during a heatwave wasn't a particularly pleasant experience, either. Other than that, however, I have little to complain about, and hopefully future issues of this newsletter will have more exciting stuff to share. In the meantime, this issue follows the usual division into four main parts. First, I share some recent publications and works in progress, before highlighting the work of others. After that, you can find some opportunities (jobs, events, and the like), before the newsletter ends with a cute otter. Hope you enjoy! ## Taking stock of the semester My final semester in Luxembourg was not very productive in terms of outputs. Over the last few months, I have wrapped up a few projects (including some material still under review) and sowed the seeds for some future work. I gained a lot from that time—not just in the weight department—but that has not always led to tangible outputs. So, allow me to gather together a few things that you can actually see. The most relevant of those are, perhaps, the publications I was involved in. As a sole author, I focused on my monograph (which is not close to the shelves yet), as well as two submitted articles: * One on common specifications; and * Another that argues that a comprehensive legal framework for quantum computing is neither feasible nor desirable at this point. * Also, my book chapter on how the AI Act's diffusion as a global standard for AI governance is limited both by its regulatory architecture and the current geopolitical context is now out. Much of my output this semester has come from collaborations. This is not necessarily optimal from a career perspective, as law hiring panels and evaluation boards do not always see such collaborations as a possibility of writing something bigger than the sum of their parts. Still, I find that a good collaboration can not only lead to better research, but can be a fun experience, too (although this is not inherent to joint work). And I quite enjoyed the ones that got published this year: * An article in Digital Society, with Blazej Kuzniacki. on the interconnection between digital sovereignty and tax sovereignty in the context of digitalized public adimistrations; * An article in European Law Open, with Niovi Vavoula and Giacomo Zampieri, on the interplay between securitization and fundamental rights as horizontal concerns that reshape the market-based approach of EU digital regulation; and * A book chapter with Giovanni de Gregorio on the structural implications of the AI Act's peculiar mix of product safety and fundamental rights. For the next semester, I plan to spend some time focusing on my research on technology-neutral regulation, both for revising the book manuscript and for producing spin-off publication(s). Since I will be adjusting to a new job, with a somewhat greater teaching load, I do not want to commit to more than that. But let's see what the next four months or so will bring. ## Recommendations Today's recommendations are a bit more discursive than usual. This is not only a way to compensate for the self-promotion above, but also a way to highlight a few things that might be particularly interesting for some of you. As I refreshed my Bluesky timeline today, I came across a post by Steffen Hope about Serendipity as method, or - The case for reading broadly. Not knowing the author, or his field of work, I nonetheless found it a useful read for, well, everyone. To the extent that I have something interesting to say about law and technology, I owe that to filtering my legal and computer-science educations through an accumulation of readings on random topics. There is, of course, a trade-off between breadth and depth, and the neophilia that characterizes technology law scholarship means that we have our plates full with keeping up with recent legal, societal, and technical developments. Still, this blogpost argues (and I wholeheartedly agree) that one should make the effort to read in a less immediately instrumental way, at least some of the time. Otherwise, we run the risk of reading the same texts and saying the same things when we write. This is, in fact, one of my main gripes with 'law and technology' as a scholarly community. For all the diversity of societal sectors touched by the law, and of ways of framing them, scholarship on legal issues connected to technology tends to gravitate towards certain formulas, topics, and approaches. This is not to say that everything is always the same: some scholars give voice to groups and concerns that are underrepresented in the literature, others draw our attention to new problems or borrow techniques from other disciplines to make sense of what we are looking at, and so on. But, if we fail to regularly engage with things other than the scholarship produced by the law and tech community, our debates can quickly become stale and self-referential. As tempting as it is to blame staleness on a lack of interdisciplinarity, or the rejection of history that leads law and tech scholars (myself included) to rewrite the same papers every 10 years or so, that is not the only thing we should be concerned about. A recent blogpost by Lee Vinsel pushes back against the idea that we should look at 'technology' as something that can be analysed as a coherent target of critique. Vinsel makes a good case that the term has little value as an analytical category and that we should focus instead on concrete problems and their causes. So, I would recommend this blogpost to people trying to pin down what we are studying when we study law and technology, even if I have some reservations about a reductionist materialism. From a legal perspective, Vinsel's arguments about the problems with 'technology' as a focus for scholarship create a problem for the ongoing methodological turn in law and tech. Methods are expected to offer guidance and rigour to our studies but they cannot, in itself, solve the problem of shoddy foundations. As Geoffrey Samuel reminds us poor lawyers, astrology's systematic character does not make it any less awful as a guide for life. If technology turns out to be a useless or even harmful concept for understanding how particular technical arrangements become relevant to the law, building a complex and coherent field of 'law and technology' might likewise be problematic. Perhaps we would do well to consider alternative ways to frame these challenges to the law. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The European Public Law Organization (EPLO) is looking for resident teaching staff for their campuses in Legraina (Greece), Rome (Italy) and Cascais (Portugal). Applications are due by **31 July**. Eva van der Zee at the University of Hamburg is recruiting two research associates (PhD candidates) to explore sustainable development/climate change through the lens of international/EU law. Command of the German language is desired but not required. Applications close by **17 August**. Erasmus University Rotterdam is recruiting an Assistant Professor in the Governance of Complex Societal Transformations. Applications are due by **21 August**. Leiden University is recruiting an Assistant Professor in Security Studies. Applications are due by **28 August**. The folks at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law are looking for an associate professor in international and European law, with a focus on either EU digital regulation or international law. Applications are due by **29 August** , with an envisaged starting date of 1 January 2027. UC Berkeley Law is looking for a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Inequality, and Society. Applications are due by **4 September**. Singapore Management University is recruiting professors at all ranks in a variety of areas, including FinTech and Law and Technology. Applications are due by **25 September**. TalTech (Tallinn, Estonia) is looking to hire a tenured professor in European Legal Policy and Technology Law. Applications are due by **1 October**. The Open Institute for Digital Transformations at SciencesPo invites applications for visiting faculty working on the transformative role of AI in society and its potential impacts on democracy. Applications are due by **15 November** , but candidates should contact the relevant department/research centre at least 6 weeks prior to this deadline. ## And now, the otters Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Photo by Andres Molina / UnsplashPhoto by Ruiqi Kong / Unsplash Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! It has been over a month since my last newsletter, and quite a bit has happened since then. I am finally done (for the time being) with the manuscript for my monograph on technology-neutral regulation. On slightly less important news, the European Commission issued on 3 June its Tech Sovereignty Package, which features proposals for regulations and other initiatives meant to mitigate dependence on US- and China-based providers. Also, World Otter Day 2026 was a success, with events in over 50 countries. In short, we had news in all fronts for _AI, Law, and Otter Things_. In today's issue, I'd like to share a bit of what I've been up to. First, I'll share some words about my draft monograph, as well as information about panels at the ICON-S annual conference next week. After that, the usual recommendations of writings by others and opportunities that might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. And a cute otter, of course! ## On _Delegating the Laws of Tomorrow_ Yesterday, I finally sent to Oxford University Press a full manuscript for _Delegating the Laws of Tomorrow: The Hidden Costs of Technology-Neutral Regulation_ , a book loosely based on my PhD thesis. I say "loosely" because of some design choices made by Past Marco that, while fully justified, created a considerable amount of work. The ensuing manuscript has ten chapters, three of which have been substantially revised from my thesis. The remaining seven chapters were written from scratch, as I sought to broaden my scope (from AI regulation to technology regulation more broadly) and further develop the methodology I introduced in the thesis. Doing so took a lot of work, ~~and even more procrastination~~ but I believe the result will be of interest to anyone working on the interfaces between technology and the law. What is that book about? In short, it deals with the question concerning technology in regulation: _how should we deal with that, after all?_ A popular response to that question is the idea of "technology-neutral regulation", according to which policymakers should be indifferent about the technical details of the technologies they regulate. Although there are strong critiques of the idea that regulation should always be technology-neutral (see, e.g., Paul Ohm, Michael Birnhack, and Constanța Roșca), it is largely seen as a positive thing in policy. As such, some form of technology neutrality can be seen as the default instance in the WTO trade regime, the EU's Better Regulation Toolbox, and many other sources worldwide. The idea of technology-neutral regulation introduced above might sound pretty straightforward; intuitive, even. Just like Augustine's definition of time, however, that apparent clarity vanishes once we look more closely. There are _a lot_ of ways to understand "neutrality" and "technology" (and "regulation", for that matter), which do not always fit in nicely with one another. For example, Recital 15 of the GDPR defines technology neutrality as a form of ensuring that regulated actors cannot avoid their obligations by a clever choice of technical means, while the European Electronic Communications Code frames technology neutrality as a matter of not using technical considerations as a reason to pick winners and losers in technological markets. One potential solution to this polysemy, adopted (among others) by Maria Grazia Porcedda, is to try and live with it, acknowledging that the term can mean different things according to the policy context. I propose an alternative reading. At the heart of my proposal lies the idea of _delegation_. As I argue in the book, technology-neutral regulation can take many forms, from principle-based regulation to the legal bindingness of technical standards elaborated by market entities. All of those forms, however, share one aspect: they always allow the policymaker to turn questions about technologies into somebody else's problem. The identity of that somebody else might vary. In regulation by design, the regulated actors are the ones who are expected to fill in the gaps, while the EU AI Act has plenty of provisions in which technical detail must be supplied by follow-up instruments such as implementing acts adopted by the European Commission or harmonized technical standards produced by European Standardization Organizations. In my book, I argue that, if we view technology-neutral regulation as a form of delegation, we can use that as a starting point for analysing the practices that bring technology regulation to life (or fail to do so). My book is divided into three parts, plus a concluding chapter: * In the first three parts, I make the case that viewing technology-neutral regulation as a form of delegation is compatible both with how the term is used in policy discourse and in technology regulation scholarship. * The second part offers questions that we can use to map the impact of delegation throughout as we design, implement, and evaluate regulation (or critique those acts). * Finally, the third part applies those tools to the study of three issues in EU digital regulation: the recent developments in cybersecurity law; the growth of digital sovereignty as a European ambition; and the determination of which technical measures meet legal standards for 'meaningful information' about automated decisions. These cases are meant as an illustration of the potential of the method, while offering a way to make sense of the developments under analysis and identify parallels between them. As for the next steps, the manuscript will now undergo external review. After that, the publisher will decide the next steps (which are likely to involve some corrections and adjustments, as well as indexing). The book should not come out before the end of the year, but I will keep you posted as more news appear. In the meantime, if you want to know more, this recording from a lecture I gave at ALTI last week might be of interest, as well as my participation in Alba Ribera's The Binary Agora. And, of course, please don't hesitate to reach out! ## Next week, at ICON-S 2026 Over the last few weeks, I had very little time to come up with something interesting to say in this newsletter. Between the monograph discussed above, wrapping up my activities in Luxembourg, and participating in a few events, I could not write anything beyond _yet another_ filler issue. Now, instead, I am happy to plug in some of the events in which I will be involved as part of the big ICON-S conference that will take place in Dublin from 29 June to 1 July. ### Security in the Digital Age First of all, I am happy to share that, with some colleagues, I am trying to set up an ICON-S Interest Group on Security in the Digital Age. The inaugural meeting of the Interest Group will take place on Tuesday (30 June) at 14:30, at Sutherland · L247. Sarah Tas and I will facilitate this meeting, to which we welcome anybody interested in topics related to public law, security (broadly conceived), and digitalization. We want to explore potential avenues for collaboration and see how to consolidate the interest group. In addition to the group meeting, we have organized two panels to showcase work within its scope. * On Monday (29 June), at 9:45, **Niovi Vavoula** will chair the panel "National and European Security in the Digital Age I: New vistas of security". * This panel will feature talks by **Pier Giorgio Chiara, Ph.D.** , **Plixavra Vogiatzoglou** , and myself * These talks cover different facets of law and policy that are touched by security claims in the digital age * It will take place at Sutherland · L249. * On Tuesday (30 June), at 11:30, I will chair the panel "National and European Security in the Digital Age II: Changing security practices". * This panel will feature talks by **Deirdre Curtin** , **Gavin Robinson** , and **Sarah Tas** * They**** will present works on how digitalization affects established security practices * The panel will take place at O'Connor · L2.17, with comments by Niovi Vavoula. ### Other panels In addition to the interest group, I will have the pleasure of contributing to two other panels: * On Tuesday (30 June), I will speak at the panel "Standardising fundamental rights: a quest for power and compliance" (Panel 8.20, at 16:15), chaired by Irene Kamara. * On Wednesday (1 July), I will discuss Elaine Fahey's book "Big Tech and EU law: Transatlantic lawyering, lobbying, litigating" (Panel 12.18, at 14:00) ## Recommendations Recently, I read qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division. It is not my usual kind of reading (I like science fiction, but have no interest whatsoever for horror), but it was an engrossing read. On a very different vibe, but still within the large tent of sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky's _Final Architecture_ trilogy is very interesting. As for professional reading, here are a few recommendations: * Marta Cantero Gamito, ‘Harmonising Consensus: The (Geo)Political Economy of Standardisation in the AI Act’ (2026) 17 JIPITEC – Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law. * Ira Chadha-Sridhar, ‘Bad Care’ [2026] Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. * Haiyun Damon-Feng, ‘Agency Fact-Making’ (2026) 135 The Yale Law Journal 2525. * Benjamin Daßler and Moritz Weiss, ‘Taking the EU Seriously: Dual Security Management in the New Geopolitics’ (2026) 6 Global Studies Quarterly ksag075. * Donato Di Carlo, Kathleen R McNamara and Manuela Moschella, ‘The New Politics of EU Industrial Policy: From the Regulatory State to a Transformational State’ (2026) 39 Governance e70133. * Kevin J Elliott, ‘Participatory Democracy and Its Limits’ (2026) 29 Annual Review of Political Science 329. * Annika Frosch, Navigating the Souring Seas: The Global Experimentalist Governance of Ocean Acidification (Cambridge University Press 2026). * Orla Hennessy and Daniel Mügge, ‘European Standardization in Flux: Navigating Delegation and Control in AI Governance’ (2026) 5 Journal of Standardisation. * Bart Anthony Kamphorst and others, ‘Opaque Procurement: How Transparency Deficits Compromise Democratic Digital Sovereignty’ (2026) 26 Journal of Responsible Technology 100178. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ ### Calls for papers The workshop The Governor’s Dilemma – Law, Courts, and Rules will take place on 12 and 13 November 2026, at Berlin's Hertie School. Abstracts are due by **1 August**. On 10–11 May 2027, the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences, will host the conference Enforcing the Rules of the Game: Competition, Regulation, and the Evolving Architecture of EU Law Enforcement. Abstracts are due by **15 October**. ### Job openings Cristiana Santos at Utrecht University is hiring a PhD researcher in law for her NWO Vidi project "With greater power must come great responsibility". Applications are due by **16 July**. Liane Colonna at Stockholm University is hiring a post-doc in Law and Information Technology. Applications are due by **3 August**. Thibault Schrepel at VU Amsterdam is hiring three PhD researchers in Competition Law and AI as part of his ATLANTIS project, funded by an ERC Consolidator grant. Applications are due by **15 September**. Copenhagen Business School is looking for an Assistant Professor in IT law and Internet law. Applications are due by **31 August**. The IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs (Madrid) is recruiting three tenure-track Assistant Professors, one each in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Economy. Applications are due by **5 October**. ### ## And now, the otter Photo by Jonny Gios / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! This is a bit late in the month for my first newsletter of May, but there was quite a bit going on. I am making progress towards my book manuscript (but it's not done yet) and started to plan my move away from Luxembourg (more on that soon). In the meantime, we had all that kerfuffle surrounding the AI Omnibus, the Worst Poster Ever lost his latest lawsuit against OpenAI, and the Commission has released guidelines on the AI Act's high-risk classification and delayed yet again__ its digital sovereignty package. All in all, I imagine you've had enough to read in my absence. So, what led me to share this post? Well, I'd say equal parts procrastination, self-promotion, and reaching out for interactions. Starting with the latter, this week the CPDP conference is taking place in Brussels. That yearly event reunites many of the people working on technology law and, although I do not see myself in that way, many good friends are there. It would have been nice to catch up with people, but I could not find the time to travel there. Still, if you are going to TILTing Perspectives or the ICON-S conference next month, please say "hi"! As for the other two points, they will appear in the rest of the newsletter, as usual. I will write down some thoughts on the AI Omnibus and its potential global impact, and then share stuff I think you'd might be interested in: readings, academic events, opportunities. Some of these, but not all, will have to do with me. And, finally, there will be a cute otter for your appreciation. Hope you enjoy! ## Notes on the AI Omnibus Earlier this week, I joined a roundtable on the Digital Omnibus, organized by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. It reunited many practitioners, as well as some academics, and some information about the discussions will be shared by the organizers. Since the debate took place under the Chatham House Rule, my goal here is not to add more detail or a different perspective on the discussion. I will, instead, take my preparation for it as a starting point for ~~another rant~~ some tangentially related comments. In a forthcoming book chapter in the _Elgar Handbook on the Global Governance of AI_ , I make the case that the EU AI Act's influence falls short of the kind of Brussels Effect expected by the Commission and other actors. To a large extent, this is because today's world is different in critical aspects from the one in which the GDPR came into force, not least because of the US's more overt embrace of neo-royalism. This changed geopolitical context means that the diffusion of EU-inspired regulatory models is not always welcome by other polities, which sometimes even push back against it. And, although the EU has relied on other instruments to promote its regulatory model, such as trade agreements, these instruments too are subject to competition with other political actors. The Omnibus cannot really change this broader context, and some other EU measures (such as the push for digital sovereignty) will likely exacerbate it in the long run. Another factor that matters is that the AI Act is not the only game in town: there are alternative regulatory templates, both more light-handed and more stringent. Given that stringency is one of the key elements of the Brussels Effect, this reduces quite a bit the incentive for actors to comply with the AI Act beyond European borders. The Omnibus does not really strengthen the EU's position as an AI regulator in this regard, for a few reasons: 1. There is little actual 'simplification' going on in it: the changes proposed to the legal text do not really tackle any of the main regulatory burdens faced by companies (and, as Anu Bradford points out, technology-specific regulation is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of European hostility to innovation). 2. For all their lip service to small mid-caps and SMEs, the reforms favour big interests: not just the usual suspects in Silicon Valley, but major European industries that were actively involved in pursuing carve-outs and exceptions for their own sectors. 3. Given that the reforms are framed as 'technical' changes to the AI Act, they never had the ambition to tackle any of the structural issues that many critiques of this regulation raised. Any economic boosts will therefore be localized at best. 4. Although the final agreement on the AI Omnibus trimmed some of the excesses of the Commission's proposal, and introduced new measures such as prohibiting certain kinds of AI systems, the final text does not do much to strengthen fundamental rights protection, and arguably dilutes it in certain points. As such, even a charitable reading of the post-Omnibus AI Act cannot really say that it will become a stronger protector of fundamental rights. And, if we are being particularly honest, my money is on it having a limited economic effect, except for a handful of special interests. But then again, there is so much going on that it will be difficult to even measure the causal effect of these changes. Beyond the potential for global emulation of the AI Act, the mere existence of a European law for AI had a symbolic effect. As Renan Gadoni Canaan and Thales Bueno show, sometimes lawmakers elsewhere referred to EU law not as a template to be emulated, but as a tool to push back against claims that regulation would be impossible or kill the regulated sector: "If you can comply with detailed laws in Europe, why not here?" And this aspect is what is most weakened by the Omnibus. Because the rhetoric surrounding the Omnibus is that Europe has gone too far in regulation and must now simplify things for the sake of innovation, promoters of legislation that offer extensive protection to fundamental rights and other public values will now have to cope with the counter-argument "Europe tried that and regretted it, why should we commit the same mistake?" It does not matter that these changes have taken place before most of the more stringent rules came into force. It does not matter that other regulations (except in China and maybe in the US if something ever takes place there) are unlikely to be as dependent on specific technical knowledge than Europe's bureaucratic approach to the internal market. The change in European posture is a symbol of the way the wind blows, and this new direction is not necessarily sympathetic to rights. It remains to be seen how that will matter in practice. ## Recommendations Good news, everyone! An article I wrote with Niovi Vavoula and Giacomo Zampieri, titled 'The triple helix: markets, fundamental rights, and security in EU digital law', has been accepted for publication at _European Law Open_. We have already submitted the proofs back to the publisher, so the article should be available in open access at this link some time soon (but not as of today, yet). Hart Publishing just released 'The EU Artificial Intelligence Act: A Theamtic Commentary', edited by Gianclaudio Malgieri, Gloria Gonzalez Fuster, Alessandro Mantelero, and Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna. Among other contributions, it features a chapter I wrote with Giovanni De Gregorio on the mixed nature of the AI Act as _both_ a product safety law and a fundamental rights instrument. Now, for the stuff written by ~~otter~~ other people: * Charlotte O’Brien, ‘Write with Fire, Edit with Ice (and Come up for Air)’ (2026) 77 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 29. * Eveline H van Beem, ‘Explainable throughout the AI Lifecycle: The Evolution of the Explainability Provisions in the EU AI Act’ [2026] International Review of Law, Computers & Technology. * Nadezhda Purtova and Bryce Clayton Newell, ‘Against Data Fixation: Why “Data” Fails as a Regulatory Target for Data Protection Law and What to Do About It’ (2026) 46 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 171. * Mauro Santaniello, ‘Attributes of Digital Sovereignty: A Conceptual Framework’ (2026) 31 Geopolitics 788. * Timothée Schmude and others, ‘Better Together? On the Design and Use of Explanations to Support Novices in Individual and Collective Deliberations About AI’ [2026] International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. * Tsampika Taralli, ‘Re-Imagining Conceptual Analysis’ [2026] Law and Philosophy. * Eddy Wax and Nicoletta Ionta, ‘Who Killed the Directive?’ (_Euractiv_ , 28 April 2026). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ Next Friday (29 May), the Chair in Cyber Policy will host Ambassador Luc Dockendorf for a talk on 'Cyber Diplomacy in Times of Turmoil'. Join us at the Weicker building (or online), with the talk starting at 12:30, preceded by lunch at 12:00 for those joining in person. Dear friends and readers in the Netherlands, on the third week of June you'll have enough of me for a while: * On 18 June, I will present my manuscript 'Delegating the Laws of Tomorrow: The Hidden Costs of Technology-Neutral Regulation' at ALTI.amsterdam, from 12:00 to 13:00. * On 19 June, I will participate in two panels at TILTing Perspectives 2026: * At 11:50 in 'Digital sovereignty compared and contrasted' (chaired by Panos Delimatsos), I will talk about the legal scaffolding behind the EU's push for digital sovereignty * At 14:40 in the session 'Fundamental Rights in the Digital Age' (chaired by Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius), I will present the forthcoming paper with Niovi and Giacomo that I linked above It would be lovely to see some of you there! * * * The European University Institute (EUI) is seeking its next Chair in 'Private Law, Power, and the Economy'. Applications are due by **3 June**. The Business and Law Research Group at the University of Antwerp invites contributions to the Legal Ecosystems Conference (LECO 2026). Extended abstracts are due by **30 June** , with the event taking place from 12 to 14 October. My colleagues at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law will host a PhD workshop on “Green and Digital Transitions in the Single Market”. Send your abstract by **1 July** , and the event itself will take place on 11 and 12 November. On 8 and 9 July, the Academy of European Law (ERA) will host a webinar on cybersecurity. I will be one of the speakers in this webinar, talking about the Cybersecurity Act and the ongoing legislative debates on its replacement. The Copenhagen Business School is hiring two PhD students in law. Applications are due by **15 July**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Ray Hennessy / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! In today's issue, I share a note that ended being a bit longer than originally foreseen, about the notions of 'essentially contested concepts' and 'magic concepts'. After that, we have the usual: reading recommendations, opportunities, and some cute otters. Hope you enjoy! ## Two kinds of concepts There are two kinds of scholars: those who think in terms of binary oppositions, those who don't, and those who can't count. I, for one, consider myself a member of the second group. To the extent that I have added something to scholarly debates, my contribution has come from stretching concepts to their breaking point and from finding the points where seemingly sharp distinctions become blurry. As a legal scholar, the value of any such contributions must always be assessed in terms of the 'so what?' question, and so I have spent much time showing why these blurred lines and collapsed constructs matter in practice. Still, at the end of the day, I am most comfortable when working at a certain level of abstraction, an as such concepts tend to be my main object of interest. One side-effect of this focus is that I am very curious about how we form concepts and operationalize them. This is how, for instance, I get sidetracked into metaphors and representational models. As I make some progress with my monograph, a different type of question pops up quite often: why do certain concepts, such as technology neutrality, become so salient in scholarly debates? Today I want to briefly distinguish between two mechanisms that are well-known in some circles and less so in others. Legal scholars might have heard somewhere about the idea of an 'essentially contested concept'. This term, originally coined by the Scottish philosopher W B Gallie, refers to concepts that are inherently evaluative in their use, but where the evaluation can be disputed by others, For example, debates on whether something (let's say, videogames) is 'art' depends on how one defines what is art, and there are multiple definitions that can be rationally defended. Acknowledging the potential divergences does not mean that no action is possible: for example, a government might decide to include (or exclude) videogame auteurs within a Universal Basic Income scheme for the arts. However, any decision on how the concept is to be construed does not follow from any internal logic of the concept, stemming instead from external considerations. That is, contestation is an unavoidable part of using the concept itself. Essentially contested concepts are part and parcel of work in some regions of legal scholarship. In constitutional law, for example, Jeremy Waldron has drawn on the disputes surrounding the 2000 US elections to argue that the Rule of Law was invoked as an essentially contested concept, and that the ensuing contestation advanced our understanding of it. When it comes to the EU, Zenon Bankowski and Emilios Christodoulidis have proposed that European integration itself is essentially contested. In international law, the notion of sovereignty has also been framed as such, for example by Paul W Kahn. These and other invocations of contestation can play various roles. They can be used for invoking the need for more spaces for contestation, casting doubts on established frameworks, or showing strategies that are deployed for defusing political debates, among other uses. But, whenever something is framed as 'essentially contested', the spectre of politicization is always close by. If some concepts are almost always surrounded by deep controversy, others tend to be accompanied by widespread agreement. Very few political actors will position themselves against the rights of children, or in favour of cancer — at least if debates are framed in such terms. As such, actors with very different commitments might agree that _something_ must be done, and even on the general direction of action, even if substantial disagreement remains on how to proceed. In my book, I argue that 'technology neutrality' is one such concept: stakeholders seem to believe it is desirable but don't really agree on what it requires and how to achieve that. One way to understand such concepts has been proposed by Christopher Pollitt and Peter Hupe. According to these authors, a 'magic concept' is very attractive to policy stakeholders due to a combination of four properties: 1. Magic concepts are _highly abstract_ ; 2. They have a _strongly positive_ normative charge; (though the cancer example above suggests the margin for negative polarization) 3. They appear to _dissolve_ dilemmas and binary oppositions, thus offering an apparent way out of current controversies; and 4. They _move across domains_ , thus becoming widespread. This flexibility makes it easier to build political agreement around certain policies. If everyone agrees transparency is good and desirable, one can encode it into law—or administrative rules, or the object of your interest–in sufficiently abstract terms and sort out conflicts later on. But, as Pollitt and Hupe warn, this flexibility creates some big risks. Let's illustrate with three examples. First, a magic concept can be applied to domains in which it does not fit well, as Madalina Busuioc, Deirdre Curtin and I showed to be the case in attemts to substitute technical notions of transparency for actual disclosure. Second, using a magic concept can disguise incompatibilities between policies that are very different in implementation but can be reduced to a similar description, as Winston Maxwell and Marc Bourreau illustrate in the multiple meanings given to the concept in EU internet, telecommunications, and data protection law. Last but not least, the use of magic concepts affects the role of the actors responsible for sorting out incompatible interpretations at the moment of implementing policies. As is all too often the case, magic concepts do not eliminate policy problems, but can make them vanish with a sleight of hand. Keeping in mind those two roles of concepts in policy controversies can be useful as a starting point for dealing with the 'so what?' question. If you are faced with something that looks like an essentially controversial concept, it might be worthwhile to spend some time with the question of whether the controversy is indeed essential to the concept, and if so, how policy and law take place nonetheless. Contrastingly, an approach to a magic concept in legal scholarship will often be an archeological work, in which you will need to excavate the elements of controversy from beneath the apparent layer of agreement. Either way, these notions can be useful for finding out whether and how the way we frame certain abstract debates can have implications for practical questions of the law. ## Recommendations No out-of-work recommendations this time, as most of my free time nowadays is being used to channel grief into preparations for move away from Luxembourg...or to ensure my Pokémon have flourishing lives. As for work stuff, here are some picks from the stuff I've been engagin with more recently: * Kenneth W Abbott and others, ‘Two Logics of Indirect Governance: Delegation and Orchestration’ (2016) 46 British Journal of Political Science 719. * Mateo Aboy, Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci and Timo Minssen (eds), Quantum Technology Governance I: Law and Regulation (Springer Nature 2026). * Alexis Galán and Yane Svetiev, ‘Peer Review in Networked Financial Supervision: The Evolution of ESMA’s Collegial Panopticon’ [2025] Yearbook of European Law yeaf008. * Paul De Hert and Onntje Hinrichs, ‘The EU Twin Transition: Comparing Form and Substance of the Regulatory Approaches’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation FirstView. * Giandomenico Majone, ‘Two Logics of Delegation: Agency and Fiduciary Relations in EU Governance’ (2001) 2 European Union Politics 103. * ‘German Conservatives Pile Pressure on von Der Leyen to Dismantle Brussels “Machine”’ (_POLITICO_ , 27 April 2026). * Luca Tangi and others, Advancing AI Adoption in EU Public Administrations (European Commission Joint Research Centre 2026). * Eva Thomann, R Kent Weaver and Tiziano Zgaga, Policy Dynamics in the European Union (_Elements in European Politics_ , Cambridge University Press 2026). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ If you are interested in migration and asylum, the Odysseus Network will hold its annual summer school from 29 June to 10 July 2026. The programme can be followed in person or online, and the in-person modality also has the option of following courses in French. Apply by **15 May**! For my more senior readers, Maastricht University is looking for a Professor of Law in AI, Data Governance and Fundamental Rights. If that could be you, apply by **5 May**. At the University of Groningen, Leeuwarden campus, Oskar J Gstrein and Lukas Linsi are hiring for a PhD position on empirical legal studies of AI regulation and governance. Apply by **29 May**. Leiden University College and the Erasmus Center of Law and Digitalization will host a workshop on ‘Digital and AI Governance at a Time of Geopolitical Upheaval’ on 15-16 October 2026. Their call for abstracts is open until **12 June**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Thomas Lipke / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! Last week, I had shared some events I was going to attend, and I was working on a more substantive issue of this newsletter for today. All of that was, in military parlance, overcome by events. While I did manage to present my book in Tilburg (gaining valuable feedback in the process), I had to rush back home on Wednesday morning, because my dog's health took a turn for the worse. Despite some delayed trains in Belgium, I made it home in time to spend Winnie's last moments with her. Needless to say, I have not managed to get much creative work done since. Winnie was a lovely mixed-breed dog, who we adopted from a Sicilian kennel in 2022. Her arrival was the source of many anecdotes, and she arrived with so many traumas that it took her a while to open up to us (and to me in particular). Even so, she soon became an integral part of our lives, and repaid us with so much love and adorable things. She was not particularly open to other humans or dogs, as eventual visitors to our home tended to find out, but the four-and-something years she spent with us were very joyful. Now it is time to see what a post-Winnie world looks like. For now, I still don't feel like any substantive essay I could write for this newsletter would be interesting. Still, there are a few reading recommendations and opportunities that I'd like to share with you folks. And, as usual, there's a cute otter by the end of this email. ## Recommendations David Colaço, ‘The Problem of Explaining Shifting Targets’ (2026) 16 European Journal for Philosophy of Science 29. Fabrizio De Francesco and Jale Tosun, ‘The Enactment of Public Participation in Rulemaking: A Comparative Analysis’ (2023) 29 Swiss Political Science Review 21. Giovanni De Gregorio and Anna Vicinanza, ‘The Enforcement of European Digital Regulation: Overlaps and Pathways’ [2026] Yearbook of European Law yeag002. Daniel Naurin, Jan Zglinski and Urška Šadl (eds), Empirical Legal Studies in EU Law__(Cambridge University Press 2026). Gaby Umbach, ‘Futures in EU Governance: Anticipatory Governance, Strategic Foresight and EU Better Regulation’ (2024) 30 European Law Journal 409. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The 21st IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management will take place from 10 to 14 August 2026 in Leuven (Belgium) with the working theme of 'Regulation and Innovation: Catalysts or Antagonists?'. This school has an interdisicplinary outlook, combining perspectives from computer science, the social sciences, and law. Submit your extended abstract by **30 April**! The folks at ALTI.amsterdam (Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute) are hiring an Assistant Professor in Law and Technology. Cybersecurity or digital sovereignty are areas of particular interest for them, but the call is open more broadly. Apply by **17 May**! If you are interested in these domains, another interesting opportunity would be to replace me as a Postdoctoral researcher for the Chair in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg, for an initial term of 12 months. Applications are taken on a rolling basis, so apply soon if that interests you! For my EU law readers, the Luxembourg Centre for European Law (LCEL) has two openings for postdocs, offering a two-year contract. Applications are also taken on a rolling basis. The Institute for Law & AI is looking for (Senior) Research Scholars with a focus on either EU or US law in the interface with artificial intelligence. Apply by **26 April**. Aston University in Birmingham is looking for a Professor of Law and AI. Apply by **15 May**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Steve Payne / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! In recent weeks, I have not had much to share, as I have been focused on my job search and my ongoing manuscript. One of these things is out of the way now, and I will hopefully make progress with the other in the upcoming weeks, so here's hoping I get back to my usual posting rhythm. In the meantime, here's another issue on the the short side of things. If you are somehow curious about technology-neutral regulation, next week I will give not one but two talks covering parts of my book-in-progress: * On **Tuesday** (14 April), I will be in Tilburg (and online) for a TILT Seminar. There, I will present the overall argument of the book, with a focus on how and why I believe we should emphasize the question of delegation when analysing technology neutrality. * On **Wednesday** (15 April), I will speak at the Amsterdam Law and Technology Institute (in-person only) about technology-neutral regulation, this time emphasizing its impact throughout the various moments of the policy process. In the meantime, today's issue starts with a bit of self-reflection about my job applications and the kind of scholarship I do. After that, there is a slightly-longer-than-usual section with reading recommendations, followed by some open calls and events. Then, of course, what everybody is here for–a cute otter. Hope you enjoy! ## Looking at my writing patterns One of the most awkward parts of job applications is having to sell myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a particularly self-effacing person (quite the contrary, actually), but I find it difficult to find a balance between 'stating the obvious' and 'bringing relevant information to the fore'. Still, I really like the idea of having a salary in the long run, so the last few monts have seen quite a bit of self-assessment in my part. What I'd see as the biggest challenge of my applications was how to position myself as a scholar. On the one hand, regular readers of this newsletter are probably tired of reading about how I am less and less interested in the direct engagement with technical matters. This does not mean I am no longer interested in the relationship between law and technology, but rather that I am looking at it from different perspectives. On the other hand, most of my publications until very recently deal with these 'under the hood' aspects of technology regulation, so moving too far away from that makes me less attractive as a candidate to hire. So, an important part of this application season has been to find a balance I can live with. And, although I am now comfortable with my answer, I failed miserably at conveying it in some of the interviews I took part on. This reflection about the road ahead also led me to examine how my future interests align with the kind of scholarship I produce. As of today, I believe most (if not all) of my publications can fit into one of the three following categories: * **Conceptual plumbing**(with apologies to Mary Midgley): in this kind of publication, I engage with a theoretical concept we use, show how it is being used in somewhat sloppy ways, and propose how and why we should be different. My monograph on technology-neutral regulation is an example of that approach, as well as my earlier work on automated decision-making. * **Interdisciplinary translation** : here, I try to articulate broad readings across disciplines for one of two purposes. * In the first, I make the case that something that is being discussed by a particular scholarly community is relevant for another. For example, a book chapter I'm currently working on tries to show that insights from the policy learning literature can be useful for the governance of innovation. * In the second, I argue that an apparent convergence in terminology disguises differences in concepts. This is, for example, the main takeaway of my various works on transparency: that what the law expects from AI technologies does not line up nicely with what technical disciplines expect or aim to provide with their methods. * **Doctrinal analysis** : my approach to doctrine is heavily informed by other disciplines, but ultimately seeks to read legal texts in light of the internal logic of the legal system in which they are deployed. Maybe the clearest example of that is my article with Nicolas Petit on the AI Act, where we mobilize a variety of sources but focus on presenting the legal framework and the ensuing interpretation challenges. As this breakdown suggests, I am pretty much interested in theory and methods of the law. I believe one cannot advance in such discussions without having a connection to what is actually going on, which is why I tend to collaborate with people from different perspectives and engage in my own doctrinal work. Even so, knowing my strengths and limitations can be useful when trying to figure out what I can bring to the table. So, doing this exercise has helped me quite a bit as I prepared for job interviews. ## Recommendations Another season of _For All Mankind_ is now being released in weekly installments on Apple TV. As the show moves into the future, it gets sillier and sillier, especially as some of the characters from the very first season are still central to the plot. Nonetheless, it offers a much more uplifting take on the future than the dystopias that now dominate the offer of sci-fi shows. As for professional stuff, you might want to take a look at: * Siraj Anand and others, ‘Digital Sovereignty and the Means to European Digital Security: Identification of the Goals Related to Digital Sovereignty from Legal Texts Published by the European Union’ [2026] European Security early access * Maha Rafi Atal and others, ‘Oligarchic Sovereignty: Technology and the Future of Global Order’ (2026) 52 Review of International Studies 1 * Deirdre Curtin and Tommaso Fia, ‘Cracking AI Secrecy: (Beyond) EU Migration Law and Governance’ [2026] European Law Open FirstView. * Stephen John, ‘Weber’s Elephant: Rethinking Science Advice’ [2025] The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science * Olia Kanevskaia Whitaker, ‘From National to European - And Back Again: Fixing the Flaws of the New Approach’ (Social Science Research Network, 30 March 2026) * Indira Latorre, ‘The Global Dimension of Domestic Regulatory Agencies: Why Do We Need a Networked Perspective of Political Legitimacy?’ (2025) 21 Journal of International Political Theory 32 * Joana Mendes, ‘Beyond Shared Foundations: General Principles of EU Law, EU Values and the Perils of Forward Leaps’ (2025) 4 European Law Open 613 * Horatia Muir Watt and Geoffrey Samuel, Producing Legal Knowledge: Comparative Methods, Models and Schemes (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026) * Alba Ribera Martínez, ‘The Slippery Slope of Data Rooms’ (Social Science Research Network, 8 April 2026) * Petros Terzis, Anushka Mittal and Joris van Hoboken, ‘The Many Shades of Clouds: How Law Fails (Us) in Seeing Power in the Digital Economy’ [2026] Regulation & Governance early access * Anna Tzanaki and Julian Nowag, ‘The Institutional Framework of the Digital Markets Act: A Novel but Thoughtful Experiment in Regulatory Design?’ [2026] Journal of European Competition Law & Practice lpag008 ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The 21st IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management will take place from 10 to 14 August 2026 in Leuven (Belgium) with the working theme of 'Regulation and Innovation: Catalysts or Antagonists?'. This school has an interdisicplinary outlook, combining perspectives from computer science, the social sciences, and law. Submit your extended abstract by **30 April**! The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (the Netherlands) is hiring two assistant or associate professors in Cybersecurity. Apply by **19 April**. The São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Regulatory Governance invites applications for a 10-day course (between 3 and 13 August) on regulation in Latin America. This is a fascinating programme, and applications are due by **30 April**. PLSC-Europe will take place in Leuven this year, from 29 to 30 October 2026. They invite abstracts until **15 May**. Back to Leiden, the ICON-S Benelux Conference 2026 will take place on 26 and 27 October, with the theme 'Trust in Transition: Public Law in a Changing World'. Submit your abstract by **29 May**. The editors of RSS: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence invite submissions for an upcoming Special Issue: 'Uncertainty in the Era of AI'. Submissions are due by **30 May**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Silvia H / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! Today's issue will be mercifully brief, as I want mostly to share some personal news. First of all, my time in Luxembourg is nearing an end: while I still have some months left in my contract, the hiring procedure for my replacement is already open — early career scholars interested in cybersecurity, especially on its international law perspective, might have a ball in this position. I still don't know what comes next for me, but for the time being I am still on the running for academic positions, so keep your fingers crossed! Other than this upcoming relocation, I have some additional good news to share. Just the other day, I have submitted revised proofs of my book chapter on the AI Act in a Global Perspective, which should be published as part of the _Elgar Handbook on the Global Governance of AI_ in the upcoming months. I am also making progress with my manuscript, and some of you have already received not-so-early drafts of chapters for feedback. The next weeks will also give me the opportunity to participate in some very interesting events, about which you can read more below. Last but certainly not least, Winnie seems to be reacting well to her treatment. Given all these updates, I will skip the usual essay on a substantive or 'meta' topic about my work. The other elements of an _AI, Law, and Otter Things_ will be here: some reading recommendations, some opportunities and events, and a cute otter by the end. Hope you enjoy! ## Recommendations * Fieke Jansen and others, ‘Infrastructural Anxiety and Digital Sovereignty: The Perceived Loss of Control in Dutch Communication Networks’ [2026] First Monday. * Stefan Larsson, Jockum Hildén and Kasia Söderlund, ‘Implications of Regulating a Moving Target: Between Fixity and Flexibility in the EU AI Act’ [2026] Law, Innovation and Technology early access. * Johannes Müller, ‘Piercing the Shield of the Second-Order Administration: Admissibility and (Rule of Law) Conditionality in Medel and Others v Council’ (_REALaw.blog_ , 13 March 2026). * Jennifer Orlando-Salling and Silvia Steininger, ‘Decolonising European Society’ [2026] European Law Open FirstView. * Michael L Smith, ‘Indefensibly Erroneous Scholarship’ (SSRN, 8 March 2026). * Shannon Vallor and Bhargavi Ganesh, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Imperative of Responsibility: Reconceiving AI Governance as Social Care’ _The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility_ (Routledge 2023). * Nora von Ingersleben-Seip and Daniel Mügge, ‘Global, Selective, or Both? The Case for Differentiated Cooperation in AI Governance’ [2026] Policy Sciences. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ As I mentioned above, the Chair in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg is looking for a postdoctoral researcher. I am in no way involved in the selection process, but I can say that it is a position where an early-career researcher in cybersecurity will find themselves well supported to grow as a cyber policy expert and as a professional more generally. Applications are rolling. There are a few months before I vacate my position, however, and in the meantime there is still quite a bit to be done. **Tomorrow**(18 March) I will present my work on learning pathologies and the governance of innovation at an online fireside chat at the EUI's Law, Rationalism, and Complexity Working Group. Participation is free but requires registration. On **25 March** , we will host in Luxembourg a roundtable on the futures of EU digital regulation. Amid so many Digital Omnibus proposals and other adjustments to the EU digital _acquis_ , we will reunite people from industry, administration, and academia to discuss the big picture of regulation for the coming years. Join us in person or online for this lunchtime discussion! King's College London is looking for a Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Law and Data Governance, who will be responsible, _inter alia_ , for designing and leading an experiential module in data governance integrated with KCL's Data Empowerment Clinic. Apply by **29 March**. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University is hiring an Assistant Professor in European Public Affairs. Apply by **30 March**. The Department of Public Law and Governance at Tilburg University is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Law & Complexity. Apply by **6 April**. On **9 April** , CAIDP will launch the 2026 edition of their Index on AI and Democratic Values, which has become a go-to resource on AI regulation. The University of Surrey is looking for a Lecturer B / Senior Lecturer in Law, open specialization. Applications are due by **13 April** , with interviews taking place on 1 May. ## And now, the otter Photo by Chandler Cruttenden / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! It has been about a week since I've last written to (most of) you. In the meantime, we keep being flooded with news about the Digital Omnishambles, academic job markets remain pretty uncertain, and the current US administration has started _yet another_ illegal war for regime change. On that, alas, I have little to offer beyond platitudes, anger, and my sympathies to those being harmed the most. On better news, we now have a new season of _Scrubs_ , which brought some much-needed heartwarming as my dog Winnie spent a few days in the hospital this week. For more literal warming, the sun has decided to come back to Luxembourg, improving local moods and Vitamin D levels. And Winnie seems to be responding well to treatment, so the world is only 98.73% awful at the moment. It's just a flesh wound! In today's issue, I want to share some brief reflections about the value of results that are not groundbreaking. After that, as usual, some recommendations, academic opportunities and cute otters. Hope you enjoy! ## ...plus c'est la même chose Technology law is an academic space where novelty commands a particularly high premium. Publishing a new piece in a timely way can open (or close) so many doors, which is funny when one considers how publication time depends considerably on editorial processes and a peer review process that is cracking at the seams even before one accounts for all the AI slop now present in articles and reviews alike. Much could be said about the current state of the publishing process in technology, in spite of the work of many good people in this space. But today I want to focus on how this neophilia affects our research agendas. My impression is that the emphasis on topical issues is particularly strong in technology law. In part, this is because this particular community of practice shares the general obsession of academia with a narrow conception of 'novelty' that is geared toward measurable dimensions of known outputs. But the issue is amplified by how technology lawyers tend to orient themselves around notions such as 'technological disruption', which tend to direct attention towards shiny new things to the detriment of the boring technologies that do most of the actual work. What does that mean for research in practice? Regarding the selection of objects, the passion for novelty tends to reward two strategies. The most established one is something of an industrial approach, in which a technology law article emerges once a technology becomes enough of an irritant in some legal domain that one can write an article about the new challenges posed by a given technology. Once an emerging technology is chosen as the subject of inquiry, there are various well-defined formulas for this kind analysis, such as mapping 'disruptions' or identifying 'ethical, legal, and social implications'. After this diagnostic stage, one is then expected to propose _de lege lata_ solutions for the issues at hand, or even legislative change in some cases. Bolder scholars might instead take a gamble and try to anticipate technological developments. By directing their attention to a technology that is not yet established but has the potential of somehow disrupting some domain of social life, a savvy scholar can have an in-depth analysis before or—if really lucky—at the time people realize that their particular technology is relevant. AI is the quintessential example, as my work and that of many others came at the right time to become salient, and now we have other candidates such as quantum computing. Between these two strategies, the second one has higher risks and higher rewards. If you play your cards well, your article can become a reference whenever somebody is talking about a particular kind of technological artefact or process, and people might even read it before citing. If you lose the timing, however, the result might be something that either arrives at a crowded field (and needs something _more_ in order to become relevant) or a perfectly good analysis of a technology that is no longer seen as interesting or, in some cases, relevant. More mundane topics, such as the legal questions surrounding infrastructures and legacy technologies, tends to be seen as niche material even when highly regarded by _conoisseurs_. In addition to this impact on the objects of study, the neophilia of technology law also shapes the criteria used to determine what makes a _good_ article. All too often, reviews of technology law articles (and my own reviews are not innocent here) tend to ask 'so, what is new?' The implied idea here is that technologies only matter for the law to the extent that they raise _new_ issues, or at the very last amplify tensions that were present but not particularly critical in analog times. However, I would argue that we need to pay more attention to another kind of legal article: the one that shows us that something that appears to be novel is in fact an instance of much older and more general issues. Of course, I am not an unbiased observer here. My PhD thesis (and ongoing book) operates by showing how a problem in technology law—that of technology-neutral regulation—should be understood in terms of the classical issue of delegation of powers. As such, there might be little that is _legally_ novel about technology-neutral regulation, but it still gives origin to complex legal problems that need to be solved by lawmakers, administrators, courts, and other actors. While there are situations in which technology-neutral regulation needs to new types of delegation problems (such as those related to regulation by design), many of the problems that emerge when legislators try to avoid distinctions between technical arrangements are in fact old wine in new bottles. For example, the EU's reliance on instruments such as common specifications and harmonized technical standards ultimately lead to problems with delegation of powers and the comitology process. The hardest questions in this context are often old ones, even if the novelty of the regulated technologies can obfuscate that a bit. More generally, the finding that something related to technology is not particularly novel from a legal perspective can be useful for a few reasons. From the perspective of technology lawyers, it means that one can resort to existing toolkits instead of having to reinvent the wheel. For example, one of the goals of my thesis was to show that, if we are going to understand whether technology neutrality makes any difference for the lawfulness and effects of digital regulation, we can tap into the toolkit and classical questions of administrative law. Some differences appear in light of the peculiarities of the regulatory context (such as the relevance of technology) but the fundamental questions remain there. As technology law becomes more and more of a specialized community, it is easy to lose sight of what is going on elsewhere in legal scholarship. On the one hand, this scenario can lead to a sociological version of Easterbrook's 'law of the horse' comment, where technology law's potential to illuminate questions in other fields is missed not for epistemic reasons but due to disciplinary dynamics. There is always the possibility that technology law insights will contribute to broader breakthroughs, but to do so they must reach other academic communities. On the other hand, and what concerns me the most, is that what appears novel to us might in fact be old news to other types of legal scholars. So, not only we might end up reinventing the wheel, but we can end up lionizing work that is not that novel after all (see also: all the jokes about economists reinventing classical social sciences from time to time). From a more systemic perspective, the reduction of a technology-related problem to a particular instance of broader legal questions does not give us a solution to the form. Instead, it can be seen as a reminder that things are even more complicated than we thought before, and that technological complexities and uncertainties coexist with broader legal challenges. Such problems usually do not leave room for elegant general solutions, but are instead negotiated through messy compromises and conceptual tools. If we as legal scholars better understand what is general and what is particular about a technology problem, we will be able to provide better input for those discussions. But, if the incentives steer good legal thinking towards problems that are new or exclusive to technology, we end up losing sight of questions that are not as attractive under current research priorities. This is not to say we should give up on pursuing the newest shiny thing that captures our attention; after all, curiosity is an essential feature of interesting work in any discipline. Still, we should reward curiosity about continuities as well as curiosity about disruption. ## Recommendations * Marta Cantero Gamito, ‘Harmonising Consensus: The (Geo)political Economy of Standardisation in the AI Act’ (SSRN, 9 January 2026). * Kuan-Wei Chen, ‘Institutional Sustainability in AI Governance: Comparing Paths in the EU, Japan, and Taiwan’ (2025) 18 Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies 9. * Eileen Murphy Maguire, ‘Security-as-Service in the Management of European Border Data Infrastructures’ (2024) 62 Journal of Common Market Studies 1379. * Ma Verónica Vargas and Giovanni De Gregorio, ‘The Transformation of European Risk Regulation: Managing Uncertainty and Powers in the Digital Age’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The University of Bristol is looking for a Lecturer in Law (Information Technology)! Applications are open until **29 March** , with an envisaged starting date of 3 August 2026 or shortly afterwards. _Thanks to Albert Sanchez-Graells for sharing this opening_. The DigiForce Summer School will take place from 21 to 30 July in Lisbon, at the NOVA Law School. In this summer school, you will have the opportunity to learn from experts (and myself) about the administrative enforcement of the Digital Services Act and the AI Act. To make things even better: the tuition is covered by the _DigiForce_ Jean Monnet Module. Apply by **17 April**! After last year's successful WeRobot Europe, the leading WeRobot conference will take place in Berlin this year. It will take place on 24 and 25 April, with a pre-conference workshop on the 23rd, and registrations are open here. _Thanks to Carolin Kemper for sharing info about the event_. In London, UCL is looking for a Lecturer in Law and Politics, who will conduct research at the Faculty of Laws and teach both there and within the European and International Social and Political Studies. Applications are due by **23 March** , with interviews expected to take place mid-May. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga's team at Leiden University is looking for a Postdoc on Law, Disability, Sexuality & Technology. Applications are due by **25 March**. The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) is looking for a Doctoral Candidate or Postdoctoral Researcher to head its Centre of Expertise on Latin America. Applications are due by **29 March**. Martino Maggetti at the University of Lausanne is hiring for a PhD & Teaching Assistant position in Public Policy / Regulation and Governance. Applications are due by **1 April**. Sorbonne Law School is looking for a _Maître de conférences_ (equivalent to Lecturer/Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor rank) with a profile on comparative law adn common law. Applications are due by **3 April**. The Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong is looking for a Tenure-Track Associate Professor/Assistant Professor in Data, AI and Law. Applications are due by **9 April**. The University of Amsterdam is hiring three PhD candidates in the ERC Project 'The Governance of Loss in the EU', led by Giacomo Tagiuri. Applications are due by **12 April**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Andreas Schantl / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! It feels like it has been a while since I've posted a substantive essay in this newsletter. I guess that is a bit due to my awkward position in terms of works in progress: I have some pieces under review (i.e. stuff I cannot really share yet), my book is in progress (and I will share more on that soon), and I haven't really had time to write down more of my still-immature thought on digital sovereignty. So, today I will share some reflections on a classic question of law and technology scholarship: _what is it that we are studying, after all?_ After that, you will find the usual: a few recommendations of stuff you might like to read, some academic opportunities, and a cute otter. Hope you enjoy! ## The law of the jockey A spectre haunts technology law scholarship—the spectre of the horse. Ever since Frank Easterbrook made the case that an autonomous field of cyberlaw would be ‘doomed to be shallow and miss unifying principles’, researchers have tried to come up with some way to justify the whole idea that 'law and technology' should be understood as a subject of legal scholarship. Some, like Lawrence Lessig, have tried to identify how the study of phenomena related to the law could cast light over general aspects of the legal enterprise. Other, like Michael Guihot, have proposed that technology law is better understood as a broad tent where scholars with disparate concerns can find common ground to deal with unknown phenomena, a tent that (if we go by Ira Steven Nathenson) might become unneccessary at some point. This existential angst can be found, in some way or another, in most theoretical discussions about how the law should approach technology. Yet, I am not sure it is the most fruitful approach to a disciplinary definition nowadays. In that view, I am not necessarily alone. Silvia de Conca, for one, has raised the alarm that, by importing this theoretical framing from US scholarship, European lawyers overlook a fundamental tension between approaching technology from a horizontal, regulatory perspective or from the vertical perspective of national and sectoral frameworks. Ultimately, I am not persuaded by her point that the way out of this conundrum is through rigourous methodology, given my critiques of a 'scientific' outlook towards law and of some of the methods expected to furnish rigour. Still, her article not only identifies this EU-specific factor that is not covered by US-centric methods talk, but hints at a deeper question: nowadays, what is _not_ technology law? To frame my answer to this question, I will step briefly away from horses and lawyers and go into the realm of football. One of the most successful football managers ever was Arrigo Sacchi, who won many national and international titles with Milan and got a silver medal for Italy in the 1994 World Cup.1] Unlike many other successful managers, Sacchi never had a career as a professional footballer. Why does that matter? Because, when asked about this gap in his CV, [his answer was something we should keep in mind when approaching technology as lawyers: 'I never realized that in order to become a jockey you should have been a horse first'. Taking it back to our context, I would suggest that we can only speak of 'law and technology' as an autonomous approach to the law if, in our technological society, there is a way of speaking of technology that is not covered by that label. Otherwise, Nathenson's prophecy has come to pass and we are all cyberlawyers now. After all, it is not difficult nowadays to find examples of legal research questions that now have a technological twist. My criminal law colleagues might have to deal with questions of liability for the use of automated systems, while evidence law scholars are now called to wonder about things such as digital chains of custody. In many such cases, we are talking about legal questions that were complicated way before some pesky new technology changed the underlying assumptions. So, the domain experts do not necessarily have the time or the inclination to become experts on the technological side of things in addition to everything. Yet, they cannot rely on the ostrich strategy of pretending those technologies simply do not matter. What is to be done? The bad news here is that some extent of familiarization with technical questions is necessary, for a few reasons. Even if you want to outsource the engagement with the technology to consultants and other expert nerds, there is a need to establish a common vocabulary, as seen by the constant difficulties programmers face when dealing with ‘technical’ branches of the law such as privacy and cybersecurity. In addition, discussions about technology are all-too-often captured by ungrounded claims about technological capabilities. For example, debates about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, and quantum are often captured by a considerable amount of over-enthusiastic extrapolation from current development trends. On slightly better news, there is a difference between the knowledge needed to become an expert in those technologies and the literacy that is needed to start fruitful legal inquiry. In fact, technology lawyers often produce handy explainers of technologies, including those seen as 'emerging' technologies (such as quantum information technologies), current ones (such as machine learning) and more established technologies (such as encryption). Beyond these academic materials, aimed at probing open research questions for law and tech, one might rely on materials for general literacy.[2] These materials allow legal scholars to understand the basics of technology, which should allow them to identify 'low-hanging fruits': things that are obviously problematic, or look enough like known technological challenges that one might need to dig deeper at that. Furthermore, learning about the basics also helps us to shape our _known unknowns_ : that is, they help us find out what we don't know about and might need to consult experts to ascertain. Therefore, some degree of literacy can help us understand whether, for a given technical question, technology will be a focal point for framing our questions of interest. Or, alternatively, whether technological details are important contour conditions of any solution to the legal problem at hand, but not particularly to its framing. In my understanding, what distinguishes 'law and technology' experts from other kinds of legal scholars is not the mere fact that they have to deal with technical factors in their work. After all, such a definition would make most of us technology lawyers, and Nathenson's prophecy would have come to pass already. If the distinction is to retain any meaning, one must view _law and technology_ as a question of framing. A law and technology expert is someone who frames and approaches legal questions in a way that centres technology and what it makes distinctive in social relations. Other scholars approach technology as a fact of life but do not make it central to their studies, for example because they are primarily interested in concepts such as legitimacy and accountability. From that perspective, I do not consider myself a law and technology scholar. Although my background as a data scientist allowed me to engage with technological specifics and see their relevance for some legal questions, those questions are not the ones that make my heart beat faster. In particular, I have little enthusiasm for the formula _find a new technology - > unpack its ethical and social implications -> propose regulatory interventions or interpretive change_ that has become standard practice in domain. Although this approach ensures that the scholarly community can soon have 'explainers' of whatever new technology that emerges, and it allows tech geeks to dig deep into things that genuinely interest them, it is not something that scratches my personal itches. That is not, of course, the only way to do law and technology; in fact, Przemek Palka and Bartosz Brozek have an interesting book chapter on 'How Not to Get Bored' with tech law, which is much more interesting than anything I could write on the subject. Yet, technology appears more and more as a part of the environment in which the questions that interest me emerge, rather than a focal interest. But how can one study technology without making it the star of one's paper? That is a question for future posts! In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on this demarcation issue and how you cope with it on your own research. * * * 1. Against Brazil, thanks to a missed penalty kick by Roberto Baggio. But I digress. ↩︎ 2. I myself have developed one such material, a training module published by the European Data Protection Board on data protection and AI, but alternatives abound. ↩︎ ## Recommendations Claudia Aradau and Georgios Glouftsios, ‘Making Security Public: Scandals, Controversies, Struggles’ [2026] Security Dialogue xhaf020. Antoine Bailleux, ‘Science in the Courtroom EU Courts Wisely Steer Clear of Judicial Passivism Joined Cases C-71/23 P and C-82/23 P, France and Commission/CWS Powder Coatings and Others [2025] ECLI:EU:C:2025:601’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation 1. Benjamin Farrand, _Geopolitical Union: Europe’s Attempt to Take Back Control of Technology Regulation_ (Cambridge University Press 2026). Signe Sophus Lai, Sofie Flensburg and Kristian Sick, ‘Currents of Control: Ownership Evolutions in the Submarine Data Cable Industry’ [2026] Media, Culture & Society 01634437251410061. Jo Lindsay Walton, ‘Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction’ (2024) 54 _SFRA Review_. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ This year, the Utrecht Summer School on standardization will feature a course on Global Power and Technology. The course will take place from 20 to 24 July, featuring academic and industry experts to cover topics such as AI, quantum, cybersecurity, and the role of China in ICT standardization. If you are not joining us in Lisbon, you should definitely go to Utrecht! Applications are due by **1 June**. My colleagues from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg are looking for a Research Scientist in Sociotechnical and Human Aspects in Cybersecurity. This is a permanent position that requires fluency in English and either French or German. Apply at your earliest conveninence. Tilburg Law School is looking for an Assistant professor in Technology Regulation with a focus on Energy Law and Policy. Applications are due by **15 March**. The European Standardization Organizations have an open call for interest for a Member of Advisory Steering Committee for project to Reinforce the European Standardization System through Education. Apply by **20 March**. The Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London is looking for a Post-graduate Researcher in Cloud Computing Law. Applications are due by **23 March**. The University of Amsterdam is hiring Two Postdoctoral Researchers on AI & Politics. Applications are due by **23 March**. From 6 to 10 July, the University of Pisa will host a Summer School on Law and Geopolitics. Applications are due by **31 March**. The Socialists and Democrats at the European Parliament have released a Call for expressions of interest for experts in various domains of interest. Selected experts will be added to a reserve list for potential contracts, which will remain valid until February 2031. ## And now, the otter Photo by Robin Teng / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! It has been a bit over three weeks since the previous newsletter, but that delay is largely for good reasons. After a slow start to the year, my two remaining brain cells seem to be back on speaking terms with one another, so I've managed to get some writing done. Also, I had the opportunity to speak at three events: * On 28 January, I was in Lisbon to receive the Abreu Advogados Award, granted by a leading Portuguese law firm to innovative legal research. There, I had the opportunity to present my PhD thesis on technology neutrality and discuss how I'm building on that work for the book. * On 3 February, I presented my EDPB SPE training module on AI and data protection to the Global PETs Network, managed by the Future of Privacy Forum. * On 10 February, I acted as a discussant at the workshop 'Law, Power & Development in the Global South: Digital & Agrarian Sovereignty in Laos'. There, I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on fascinating work being developed by Melina Anastasopoulou and Felipe Costa Lima, and learn more about the challenges and recent developments of law in Laos. Photo by Katerina Papazi, all rights reserved. In the rest of today's issue, I want to talk about the revision process. After that, you'll find the usual: some potentially interesting recommendations, a few events and opportunities, and some cute otters by the end of the newsletter. Hope you enjoy! ## On revisions Frequent readers of this newsletter might have noticed that attention to detail is _not_ my strong suit. As somebody who is prone to paralysis and excessive optimization—it is not for nothing that my _nom de plume_ for many years was 'Asno de Buridan'—the only way I can get something done is by not obsessing with getting everything right at first. So, unless I'm writing something that can be done in a rather sloppy way (as is the case for this newsletter), I usually leave myself some time to edit things and fix my own messes. Learning how to do that helped me a lot, not just psychologically but also in terms of the quality of my writing. One of the most important things I learned from William Germano's _On Revision_ (and from Raul Pacheco-Vega's fantastic blogging) is that one should be seen this kind of editing as an integral part of the writing process. And, because my experience with blogging and technical writing in corporate contexts have taught me how to produce readable-ish texts quickly, I find that most of my time is now dedicated to reworking whatever blobs of text I had produced in previous steps. Even though I don't fancy myself a particularly stylish writer, doing so has helped me to produce clearer outputs—and to mitigate a bit my sloppiness of thought. Which brings me to the operational question: _how_ to revise? So far, I have tried to read what I can about the subject, trying bits and pieces to see what I can incorporate into my own workflows. Laura Portwood-Stacer, whose book on writing academic book proposals has helped me a lot so far, has a more recent manuscript on developmental editing, which I still have to read. Still, one of my challenges in applying those techniques is trying to avoid boredom. Yesterday, an odd set of circumstances pushed me towards something fun. I had to prepare a text for a Spanish-language presentation and, given my current time constraints, I decided to translate the latest draft of my works in progress. Doing so will allow me to gather feedback from a different audience from the ones that have already been exposed to this particular work. And it also helped me to see the original draft with fresh eyes, so I could already introduce some changes to the arguments and the presentation which will go back to the English-language draft. Of course, this does not seem to be a particularly scalable method for revising, but it certainly was fun. ## Recommendations I am a latecomer to the whole Bad Bunny phenomenon, but his Superb Owl halftime show was something else. And, as Steven Nelson skeeted, "If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare." As for academic readings, I'd like to recommend a few things y'all might enjoy: * Andrea Bertolini and others, ‘The Brussels Sphinx’s Riddle. What Is a High-Risk AI System?’ [2025] Rivista di diritto dei media. * EDPB-EDPS Joint opinion 2/2026 on the Proposal for a Regulation as regards the simplification of the digital legislative framework (Digital Omnibus) * Dermot Hodson and others, _Banking on Europe: Why the EU Became a Sovereign-Style Borrower and How It Should Be Held to Account_ (1st edn, Oxford University Press 2026). * Vivek Krishnamurthy, ‘The Sovereign AI Myth’ (Social Science Research Network, 1 February 2026). * Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan, _Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice_ (De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2025). * Leonore ten Hulsen, ‘Digital Fixes and Techno-Solutionism: The EU’s Tech-Based Battle against Child Sexual Abuse’ (2025) 16 New Journal of European Criminal Law 154. * Philipp Trein, Nicole Lemke and Frédéric Varone, ‘Generalist and Specialist Roles of Policy Actors: Insights from Preferences on AI Regulation’ [2026] Public Policy and Administration 09520767251411201. * Ellen Vos and Luca Knuth, ‘Deregulating New Genomic Techniques: The Challenge of Ambiguous Objects’ [2025] Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ Next week, we will host a book launch for a book edited by my boss Niovi Vavoula with Lilian Tsourdi and Valsamis Mitsilegas, Intertwining Criminal Justice and Immigration Control in the EU. It will take place on **19 February** , from 16:00 to 18:30 Luxembourg time. Join us, either in person or remotely! On **3 March** , I will present my ongoing research on common specifications to the EU Law Discussion Group at Lund University. For more information, contact the organizers at euldiscussiongroup@jur.lu.se. Cambridge's Bennett School of Public Policy is hiring professors of public policy at various levels (two Assistants, one Associate, one full), partly to support their upcoming masters programme on digital policy. Applications are due by **22 February**. Urs Gasser at TU Munich is hiring a PhD researcher to work on the governance of far-upstream technologies, such as quantum, neurotech, or fusion. Applications are due by **24 February**. The School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool is recruiting eight (!) Lecturers in Law, who would start in the 2026-2027 academic year. Applications are due by **26 February**. TriCON and ICON-S have opened applications for ICON-S-Pre/ICON Esprit. This early career workshop for junior scholars working on public law will take place on 27th-28th of June in Trinity College Dublin, right before the main ICON-S conference. Applications are due by 1 March. The Institute of Tax Law (KU Leuven), with partner universities across Europe, will host the 16th Doctoral Seminar on EU and International Tax Law. Applications are due by **31 March**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Alex Gisby / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! Is 20 January already? Oh my! I surely am not back to my cruise speed yet, and I don't really know why. I'd love to blame the Luxembourgish weather, but I think that might have more to do with (almost!) reaching the ripe old age of 35...or maybe the ongoing collapse of many of the remaining pieces of the liberal international order. Sometimes writing about implementation details of digital regulation can feel like coming up with a particularly neat arrangement for deck chairs on the Titanic. Still, if nothing else, there are still research questions that interest me, deadlines that I must meet, and bills to pay, so here we go. For today's newsletter, I will share some notes on my ongoing work on regulatory learning and digital innovation. After that, the usual: reading recommendations, opportunities related to law and technology, and some cute otters. Hope you enjoy! ## Worse learning through better regulation? Last month, I had the opportunity to join a workshop on digital innovation organized by Nikita Divissenko and Olia Kanevskaia from Utrecht University. Even though I am not really an economic law person (let alone a law and economics enthusiast!), my work is occasionally of interest for people working on this space. So, I received a kind invitation to connect the topic with my work on technology-neutral regulation and its impact on power. I was happy to follow up on that invitation and discuss how the pursuit of technology neutrality can constrain regulators as they try to deal with innovative technologies. In the context of digital technologies, 'technology-neutral regulation' tends to be presented as inherently desirable, or at least as a default from which regulators diverge at their own peril. This view of technology-neutral regulation as a magic concept persists in spite (or perhaps because) of considerable disagreement about what the concept actually means and how it should guide regulators and regulatees. In the paper I presented, and in my upcoming book, I argue that we can better evaluate regulation if we depart from a clear concept of technology-neutral regulation and analyse how it is maintained through a series of delegations of power. Understanding technology-neutral regulation in terms of the delegation of the power to determine the technical contents of the law is also useful for distinguishing this concept from another popular buzzword: _futureproof regulation_. The idea behind futureproofing, in short, is that regulation should remain effective as it becomes applicable to new technologies. To produce that stability, lawmakers deploy a vast array of regulatory techniques, such as sunset clauses or experimental regulation mechanisms. When it comes to regulation directed at particular technologies, this idea is often coupled with technology-neutral regulation. The relationship between technology neutrality and futureproofing tends to be ambiguous, both in policy and scholarly literature. Sometimes, the terms are treated as a legal doublet, that is, a pair of expressions that have the same meaning. In other cases, technology-neutral regulation is seen as an approach that enables regulators to produce futureproof regulation even they target specific technologies as the regulatory object. Both readings can be found in the literature on digital regulation, as well as in policy documents such as the European Commission's Better Regulation Toolbox, which uses both terms without particularly clear definitions of what is entailed by either. In my view, such lack of clarity blurs the fact that neither of these accounts is really conducive to good results. From a conceptual standpoint, I would argue that technology-neutral regulation and futureproof regulation aim at different things. While the former is concerned with sparing regulators from having to make choices about technological specificities, the latter aims to provide a relatively stable set of effects. These goals are not necessarily at odds with one another, but neither are they the same thing. As Atte Ojanen illustrates in the context of the AI Act, and I have discussed with regard to digital infrastructures, there are situations in which the attempt to create technology-neutral regulation renders the law more brittle in light of future change, rather than the opposite. So, we cannot treat the terms as synonymous. Decoupling the definitions also helps us understanding that technology-neutral regulation and futureproof regulation create different obstacles to regulators trying to govern technological innovation. Because futureproof regulation is meant to produce roughly the same effects as time passes by, the regular operation of the regulatory framework might deprive regulators from information about changes in the social context that render previously acceptable solutions undesirable. By contrast, one issue with technology-neutral regulation is that it allows regulators to cast questions that are heavily laden in values, such as the protection of fundamental rights, as being purely technical issues to be solved by experts. Acknowledging the differences between those two learning problems will allow regulators (and regulatees) to address them separately, and so balance eventual trade-offs rather than coming up with a blanket solution that address neither one nor the other. If you would like to see a less compressed version of my arguments, there is a draft chapter available on SSRN. Don't hesitate to reach out with your thoughts. Any comments before 15 February are particularly appreciated, as I am currently revising this draft into something more polished. ## Recommendations * Craig Atkinson and Hanane Becha, ‘Setting International Technical Standards to Shape Digital Trade Policy: Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities for Developing Countries’ (IISD 2025). * Stacie E Goddard and Abraham Newman, ‘Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System’ (2025) 79 International Organization S12. * Päivi Leino-Sandberg, ‘The Secret Life of the EU Treaties: NGEU and the Politics of the EU’s “Living Constitution”’ [2026] European Law Open. * Andrea Pollio, _Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital_ (University of California Press 2026). * Baiyang Xiao, ‘Agile and Iterative Governance: China’s Regulatory Response to AI’ (2025) 58 Computer Law & Security Review 106183. * Bishoy L Zaki, ‘Policy Learning and Policy Analysis Within European Union Institutions: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda’ [2026] European Policy Analysis early view. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ NOVA School of Law (Lisbon) will host an online Executive Education course on AI in the European Legal Framework. This course will feature an in-depth analysis of the ethical and regulatory dimensions of AI in Europe, with special attention to the AI Act. The course's programme features many of the leading scholars on EU AI regulation, as well as yours truly. Lectures start on **27 February** , so there is still time to join us! On **30 January** , the EUI Digital Public Sphere Working Group will host a roundtable on The future of data protection law in Europe and beyond, featuring Ignacio Cofone, Orla Lynskey, Thomas Streinz, and Emmanouil Bougiakiotis. Registration is mandatory but free. Open Government Partnership is looking for a research consultant to create the foundations for an Open Gov Guide chapter on Digital Public Infrastructure. Expressions of interest are due by **31 January**. The Law, AI, and Regulation (LAIR) conference will take place at Erasmus University Rotterdam on 11 and 12 June 2026, with the topic 'Critical perspectives on the AI Act'. Abstracts are due by **28 February**. Jacopo Franceschini and Ayhan Gücüyener Evren are convening a workshop on Studying Cyber Conflict in a Fractured Digital Order: Concepts, Methods, and Evidence at EWIS 2026 (1-3 July 2026, Izmir, Turkey). Abstracts are due by **11 February**. Wenlong Li and Zihao Li are guest-editing a special issue of _Computer Law and Security Review_ on AI Regulation in Asia – Emerging Pathways, Divergent Models, and Global Implications. Papers are due by **15 September**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Kedar Gadge / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! First of all, I would like to wish you a happy new year. Even though 2026 has already started with some awful news in the macro scale, I can only hope that you have managed to find some personal and/or professional joy in the meantime. In today's issue, I will recap some of the highlights of 2025 from my point of view. As usual, there will be a cute otter by the end of this email. Before that, I will share a personal recap of the year, followed by some recommendations of stuff I enjoyed in 2025. Then, some job openings and academic opportunities, as usual. Hope you enjoy! ## The battle's done, and we've kind of won 2025 was a weird, transitional year for me. Having just finished my PhD, I spent most of the year trying to figure out what is next for me. My plan is to stay in academia, as I feel that my temperament and interests are best suited for that career path. However, I no longer am particularly keen on the research questions that have dominated my publications over the past 8 years or so. I don't feel like I have anything particularly novel to say about transparency or regulation by design, for instance, and focusing on the law-CS interface is starting to take time from the questions that drove me to legal research in the first place. So, I ended up spending much of my year trying to figure out how to position myself as a scholar. In that regard, my current employment under the Chair in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg has been very useful. It allowed me to broaden my material focus from AI technologies to other developments such as quantum computing (or the hype surrounding it), cybersecurity challenges, and digital sovereignty. By doing so, I also had the opportunity to engage more deeply the scholarly literature on policy studies, and my ongoing research dedicates much attention to how regulators learn to deal with uncertainty and how that learning is shaped by the law. As we begin a new year, I am happy to say that I finally found a research direction that should keep me entertained for the next few years, if I find an employer willing to pay for that. Of course, taking some time to explore new directions has some impact on my research output. This year, my article on the AI Act with Nicolas Petit was finally published, and I also had the opportunity to write a textbook on AI and data protection under the aegis of the EDPB Support Pool of Experts. Other than that, however, most of my pieces are things that either had long publication cycles (the chapter on competition and the article on XAI) or shorter invited pieces. Fortunately, these pieces have been well received, but it feels frustrating to be unable to have anything to show for my new research interest other than some very exploratory essays in previous issues of this newsletter. Fortunately, that seems poised to change in 2026. I am proud to say that my book 'Delegating the Laws of Tomorrow: The hidden costs of technology-neutral regulation' is now under contract with Oxford University Press. While there is no publication date in the horizon, yet, I can already anticipate to you that the book considerably expands the approach I developed in my PhD thesis. It provides a clearer analytical framework for technology-neutral regulation as a form of delegation, indicates how that framing matters at various stages of the policy cycle, and applies that toolkit beyond my original focus on the EU AI Act. I will keep you posted as things evolve. In addition to that, some of my other research directions are starting to bear fruit. I have finally shared a draft of my first engagement with policy learning in the context of digital regulation, as well as some work on digital sovereignty with my frequent pen-pal Blazej Kuzniacki, and my first joint-authored piece within the scope of the Chair in Cyber Policy is currently undergoing final revisions. Hopefully this means future issues of this newsletter will be more exciting rather than just going through the motions. ### Research outputs #### Published * _Law & Compliance in AI Security & Data Protection_ (European Data Protection Board 2025) * ‘The EU AI Act: Between the Rock of Product Safety and the Hard Place of Fundamental Rights’ (2025, with Petit N) 62 Common Market Law Review 85 * ‘Exploring Explainable AI in the Tax Domain’ (2025, with Górski Ł and others) 33 Artificial Intelligence and Law 551. * ‘Book Review: “Standardizing Personal Data Protection” by Irene Kamara, Oxford University Press 2025’ (2025) 11 European Data Protection Law Review 385 * ‘Between Data Protection and Artificial Intelligence: The Work of the European Data Protection Board’s Support Pool of Experts’ (2025) 2 Journal of AI Law and Regulation 398 * ‘What Is an Artificial Intelligence System, Really? Notes on the European Commission’s Guidelines on Article 3(1) of the AI Act’ (2025) 2 Journal of AI Law and Regulation 76 * ‘Will the EU AI Act Shape Global Regulation?’ (_Network Law Review_ , 5 March 2025) * ‘Competition in and through Artificial Intelligence’ (with Maranhão J and Sartor G) in Pier Luigi Parcu, Maria Alessandra Rossi and Marco Botta (eds), _Research Handbook on Competition and Technology_ (Edward Elgar Publishing 2025) #### Upcoming * ‘The EU AI Act in a Global Perspective’ in Markus Furendal and Magnus Lundgren (eds), _Handbook on the Global Governance of AI_ (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026) * ‘The Mixed Nature of the AI Act: Product Safety and Fundamental Rights Regulation’ (with de Gregorio G) in Gianclaudio Malgieri and others (eds), _The Artificial Intelligence Act - A Thematic Commentary_ (Hart Publishing 2026) * Two entries with Radu A in Austen Parrish, Cedric Ryngaert and Danielle Ireland-Piper (eds), _Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Extraterritoriality and the Law_ (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026) * ‘AI Governance’ * ‘Brussels Effect’ * ‘Privacy by Design’ (with Negri Ribalta C) in Rosamunde van Brakel, Valerie Steeves and David Murakami Wood (eds), _Elgar Encyclopedia of Privacy and Surveillance_ (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026) ## Things I've enjoyed last year ### Recent publications and preprints * Silvia De Conca, ‘The Law of the European Horse: The Law and Technology Scholarship in the European Union, Between National Legal Traditions and Supranational Governance’ (2025) 11 The Italian Law Journal 118. _A good treatment of the limits of importing the 'law of the horse' framing from the US context. I am sceptical about the calls towards rigour and the appropriation of established methodologies (see the recommendation for Cartwright et al below), but it is a thought-provoking read about how to do research on law and technology in Europe._ * Vivek Krishnamurthy, ‘Anchoring Digital Sovereignty’ (2025) 25 Chicago Journal of International Law 417. _An exciting, pun-filled exploration of how the law of the sea might help us think about sovereignty in cyberspace in terms of bundles of rights rather than as an all-or-nothing concept_. * Martino Maggetti, _Introduction to Regulation and Governance_ (Edward Elgar, 2025) _So far, my favourite introductory text to regulation, as its conciseness and breadth of scope allows newcomers to view the perspective broadly and avoid capture by a narrow, economicist view of the subject._ * Joana Mendes, ‘The EU and the Administration’s Unattainable Subordination to the Law’ [2025] Current Legal Problems cuaf007. _Identifies the challenges to the rule of law posed by complex, future-looking regulation, in which the elements that legal norms would use to tame administrative action are themselves constituted, to a lesser or greater extent, by the work of the administrators themselves._ ### Older texts * Nancy Cartwright, Jeremy Hardie, Eleonora Montuschi, Matthew Soleiman, and Ann C. Thresher, _The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity_ __(OUP 2022). _This book proposes that the value of science stems not from its adherence to a particular method, or from the truthfulness of specific claims or theories, but from the reliability of a variety of science products (including, yes, theories, but things such as models and procedures and many other) and the purposes that these products may serve. This is a good entry point for lawyers interested in questions of rigour who might want to look at what is going on in natural and social sciences._ * Edward W Constant, ‘Why Evolution Is a Theory about Stability: Constraint, Causation, and Ecology in Technological Change’ (2002) 31 Research Policy 1241. _A useful reminder of the importance of framing when trying to make sense of technological developments, and of the dependence of innovation on existing capabilities._ * Claire A Dunlop and Claudio M Radaelli, ‘The Lessons of Policy Learning: Types, Triggers, Hindrances and Pathologies’ (2018) 46 Policy & Politics 255. _Good introduction to the literature on policy learning_. * Kevin J Elliott, _Democracy for Busy People_ (University of Chicago Press 2023). _Some interesting pushback against the idea that time-demanding forms of political participation are necessarily more democratic._ * Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman. _Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World_ (Princeton University Press 2020)._A fascinating reminder of the contingent character of our current view of sovereignty as an atomic property of nation states, showing the conditions under which public-private hybrids were able to exercise some of the prerogatives we now associate with the term and how those conditions broke down._ * Christopher Pollitt and Peter Hupe, ‘Talking About Government: The Role of Magic Concepts’ (2011) 13 Public Management Review 641._Provides an approach to think about terms that become pervasive in policy discourse despite (or even because of) their lack of a sharp definition, in light of factors such as their normative attractiveness: who is against 'transparency' or 'accountability'?_ ### Beyond work * Parlement (TV show). _A funny, multilingual TV show set in the European Parliament. Lots of in-jokes for EU nerds._ * Isabel J. Kim, 'Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole' [2024] Clarkesworld. _A very interesting response to a classical science fiction story._ * Laurent Binet, _Civilizations_ (Grasset & Fasquelle 2019). _This one is kind of cheating, as I had read it before, but I'll count it because this time I could read it in the original. If you don't know it, it's a fancy alternative history book based on the premise of the European colonization of the Americas never taking place._ ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ Warwick Law School seeks to appoint one permanent Assistant Professor from 1st September 2026. They particularly welcome applicants with a focus on EU Law and/or Trusts Law. Applications are due by **13 January**. TILTing Perspectives 2026, the law and technology conference hosted by the famous tech law centre at Tilburg University, has extended the deadline for its call for papers to **25 January**. The conference itself takes place from 17-19 June. The Contextual Research in Law group at VU Brussel will host the NextGen Legal Scholars Conference for PhD and early postdoctoral researchers. They invite submissions until **30 January** , with the event taking place on 20 March. City St George’s, University of London is seeking a Lecturer (Education and Research), with preference for candidates with expertise on Torts, Land/Real Property, and Equity and Trusts.**** Applications are due by **30 January**. My colleagues at NOVA PEARL will host a workshop on Fundamental Rights Protection _From_ , _With_ , and _By_ Regulators. Submissions from scholars at all points of their career are welcome, but early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Submit your abstract by **8 February** and discuss your work in sunny Lisbon on 10 April! The Central European University in Vienna is looking for an Assistant Professor in International Relations. Applications are due by **28 February**. ## And now, the otter Photo by Philipp Mika / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! As you read this issue, I am putting the final touches on my presentation for the workshop Methods in Legal Discipline: Post-Doctoral Insights Across Research Fields, in which I will talk about how to engage with technology in legal scholarship when you do not want to become a law and technology person. Later this week, I will present ongoing work on regulatory learning and its relationship with technology-neutral regulation and futureproofing (spoiler: it's not very synergetic). So, today's issue will be a bit more fragmentary than usual. It features two short notes of the 'old man yells at cloud' variety: one on anticipatory governance, and the other on the proliferation of academic posters in legal events. After that, the usual recommendations (but no opportunities this time, as we near the end of the year), plus the cute otter at the end. Hope you enjoy! ## Everybody has a plan until they're punched in the face Technology regulation, in Europe and elsewhere, has an unhealthy love affair with anticipation. Faced with the possibility of being caught by Collingridge's Dilemma and regulating technologies when it is too late to effect any change, regulators all over the world try to foresee the impact of potential technologies and create laws that can cover said impact. All too often, however, these efforts lead to a considerable waste of resources and intellectual work: as Alec Muffett recently pointed out on Bluesky, the Metaverse has consumed a lot of attention in the law and technology space, but recently even Meta is trying to cut its losses on it. What is to be done? I would argue that one way out of this problem is to place less weight on individual predictions for regulatory design. Trying to come up with ideas of what might happen is not, in itself, problematic. Quite the contrary: the exercise of trying to foresee potential risks and opportunities can lead us to re-examine certain premises we take for granted and prepare for changes. And, when we design policy responses to potential scenarios, we end up with gameplans that might be easily adaptable to situations that have similar effects, even if they are caused by different developments. (Incidentally, forecasting is not too dissimilar from science fiction in this regard, but this is a post for another day) The problem arises, instead, when prediction is combined with other parts of the technology regulatory approaches used by the EU and elsewhere. For example, the EU's Better Regulation Toolbox establishes _futureproofing_ as a desirable property of technology regulation: that is, regulations should be designed in a way that makes their effects resilient in light of future change. One way to do so is through regulation by design—the embedding of legal requirements into the technical requirements that guide the construction of particular technical artefacts. However, as I argued elsewhere, codifying broad requirements (such as the protection of fundamental rights) requires designers to make decisions about the connent of those requirements. This can have at least two adverse effects for policy: first, it can make the effectiveness of regulatory contingent on the decisions made by software designers (public or private); second, the particular vision embedded in software or other technologies might be hard to adjust to reflect changes in political priorities or societal values. So, if one is making strongly binding actions grounded on a particular forecast, the least we can expect is that this forecast should be _very_ trustworthy. Yet, that is not often the case: a correct forecast of socio-technical trends must get lots of things right, as the interaction effect between different technologies can be enough to lead things astray from the forecaster's perspective. Think of how many science fiction works could get individual technologies right (Trekkies, for instance, have long lists about what the show anticipated) and yet their overall predictions end up sounding quaint to modern observers. In short, I believe the anticipation of technological effects can be useful, but one should be wary of placing all eggs in one basket. Instead, we should use anticipation techniques as a partial guide to the future but nonetheless rely on regulatory approaches that leave margin for the unknown unknowns life might throw at us. ## Against academic posters in law It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that it is increasingly common to see academic conferences in law where scholars are invited to submit posters. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the practice, an academic poster is a research output that summarizes findings in a somewhat visual form: Scientific poster presented at the GMDS 2018 conference in Osnabrück, Germany on September 5th, 2018. Poster by Markus Suhr, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International. Posters are common in some disciplines, notably in the life sciences and informatics. As such, legal scholars already were required to create posters from time to time, for example when participating in university-wide events. However, the practice is becoming more widespread, as some law-specific conferences now invite poster submissions. While the idea of shaking up the traditionalist environment of legal academic conferences is welcome, I strongly believe posters are a net negative for scholarship, particularly when it comes to the law. An academic poster is meant to solve a few problems of scarcity. In conferences, even the big ones, programme organizers might find themselves with more interesting talks than available timeslots. So, by fitting a poster session somewhere in the programme (or even in the coffee breaks), one could have more research exposed. Also, poster tracks are often targeted at early-career scholars, who would potentially be at a disadvantage when competing with more experienced peers for a presentation timeslot. So, by allowing those scholars to come and present their posters, one could find a way to involve them as contributors, allowing poster authors to get feedback on their research, add a line to their CV, and potentially drawing from institutional funding they could not access otherwise. At first glance, this seems a win for everybody involved. The only problem with this idea is that posters are a _terrible_ medium for research communication. Some years ago, Iva Cheung wrote a great post titled 'Why academic conference posters suck', in which she points the various ways in which these posters are counterproductive. I recommend that you read the entire post, both for her arguments and proposed alternatives, but there are a few points from her post that I want to highlight. From a logistical standpoint, it can be very awkward to travel with a poster for a conference. Once you are there, further problems issue from the fact that you have to actually stick by your poster, so you don't get to see much of what other poster authors are doing, in the hope that somebody will stop by your poster to have a chat. Furthermore, designing effective posters requires time and particular design skills, which are...lacking in most posters. Last but not least, the contents of posters are rarely accessible afterwards, so they end up falling into the cracks of academic conversation. In short, the medium has considerable drawbacks. Beyond these general problems, there are some specificities of legal scholarship that make me particularly sceptical of the value of posters here. Good posters cannot help but trade off some nuance for accessibility; this is valuable in public communication affairs, but can be complicated in legal disciplines, where the crux of the findings often resides in how some tiny detail is addressed. This risk is particularly amplified when one considers how visual law projects and legal design are often geared towards the use of aesthetics as a tool for persuasion, rather than one for clarifying epistemic confusion. All things considered, I think legal scholars (especially early career ones) are better served by things like pre-event workshops, lightning talks, or ECR-specific sessions, which make it easier to accommodate text-intensive forms of legal scholarship. Of course, none of this is to disparage the hard-working people who are trying to innovate in legal academic events. A shakeup in this domain is much needed, especially if we are to find spaces for early career scholars to flourish, as opposed to old boy networks. But I encourage you to explore other alternative forms, too. Otherwise, we might end up replicating a model that does not necessarily work even at its home disciplines. ## Recommendations * Paul N Edwards, ‘How to Read a Book, v5.0’ (University of Michigan 2015) _Thanks to Thomas Streinz for the recommendation!_ * Cristóbal Garibay-Petersen, Marta Lorimer and Bayar Menzat, ‘Creating Certainty Where There Is None: Artificial Intelligence as Political Concept’ (2025) 12 Big Data & Society 20539517251396079. * Joana Mendes, ‘Law in Complex Fields: The Case of EU Regulation of Pesticides’ (Social Science Research Network, 24 July 2025). * Nicole Manger and Mishra Vidisha, ‘Can Europe Build Digital Sovereignty While Safeguarding Its Rights Legacy?’ (_Tech Policy Press_ , 5 December 2025). * Patricia Owens, ‘Distinctions, Distinctions: “Public” and “Private” Force?’ (2008) 84 International Affairs 977. * Andrew Phillips and JC Sharman, _Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World_ (Princeton University Press 2020) <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691206202/html> accessed 3 December 2025. * Raul Pacheco-Vega, Reading Strategies. A useful set of approaches to reading, more geared towards the social sciences but also useful for lawyers. * Fabian Teichmann and Bruno S Sergi, ‘The EU Cyber Resilience Act: Hybrid Governance, Compliance, and Cybersecurity Regulation in the Digital Ecosystem’ (2025) 59 Computer Law & Security Review 106209. ## And now, the otter Photo by Audi Nissen / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! November has been a bit more busy than I expected, between teaching, research, planning, and Winnie's health (she's well now, but she gave us quite a bit of a scare some weeks ago). As a result, I had to scrap some of my plans for the newsletter, but hopefully I will have a bit more of time to develop them in the near future. In today's newsletter, I want to talk about what is perhaps the most fundamental skill for academics: _reading_. It can feel embarrassing to suggest that one could learn how to read better, except maybe when trying to learn the mores of some other academic discipline, but my impression is that it might be worthwhile to probe the fundamentals once in a while, especially as new cohorts come with different baselines for core competencies. After that rambling, of course, there are the usual reading recommendations, opportunities, and otters. Hope you enjoy! ## ABC, easy as 1, 2,3 One of my favourite science fiction stories is Walter M Miller's _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ , a post-apocalyptic fiction from the 1950s. That book, patterned after the Dark Ages myth that shapes popular views of the European Middle Ages, follows humanity's slow recovery after a nuclear war. One of the distinctive features of that future is that a significant chunk of the loss of knowledge and technology after the war did not come from the nukes themselves. Instead, it follows from an "Age of Simplification" in which mobs, angry at the mass carnage inflicted by the weapons developed by industrial civilization, destroy anything they associated with science and industry. Given how much in modern politics can be explained (at least in part) as a reaction against the complexities of modern society, I find myself thinking more and more about this passage. But what that has to do with the purported topic of this rant, namely reading skills? Sparing you from my attempts at literary criticism, my throwback to _Leibowitz_ illustrates something I see as a challenge in both teaching and reading: the fact that reading is an infrastructural skill that we all too often take for granted. This is especially true for those of us working on disciplines that centre the written word, such as the law or the humanities. My impression is that wer are seeing a breakdown of some of that infrastructure, which in turn feeds into some difficulties in communication in the classroom and within academia. From my own experience, and those of colleagues with considerably more teaching under their belt, there is often a gap between what we see as a clear setting of expectations in writing (be it in a syllabus, a task assignment, or written feedback) and what the students make out of it. While some degree of "asking for things that are in the syllabus" has always been part of teaching experiences, there seems to be a qualitative difference over the last few years. This period coincides with things like the COVID pandemic and the spread of genAI technologies, which have certainly affected the way students develop their reading competences. Reading skills are not, of course, the only factor at stake in miscommunication, and one can point to a lot of societal expectations at play (such as the commoditization of education). However, there seems to be something different in the way newer cohorts of undergraduates and postgraduates engage with texts, particularly written ones. It is not my goal here to say that "No, it's the children who are wrong." I want to seize this general observation to discuss something much more specific: _perhaps we, as legal scholars and teachers, need to be more explicit in teaching people how to read_. At this point, I am not necessarily referring to functional illiteracy, though it might be necessary to engage that phenomenon in certain contexts. Rather, anecdata suggests that we take for granted a high level of literacy (after all, law degrees everywhere tend to be attractive to a certain kind of wordcel). From that starting point, we direct our focus towards introducing students to specific legal genres: for example, Jasper Krommendijk and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius have excellent guides to reading CJEU judgments and EU legislative text. If the hypothesis of weaker (or at least shifting) literacy from the previous paragraph holds, it might be the case that we need to couple this kind of genre introduction with more basic exercises on how to make meaning, deal with ambiguities and so on. Doing so would be something akin to the "pre-calculus" courses that some universities around the world have adopted in order to cover gaps in the kind of basic mathematics that students are expected to know before university. Regardless of that, some degree of revisiting what we take as basic reading skills can be useful even for those of us that feel comfortable as readers. Although I would suspect (or at least hope) that most people who decide to pursue careers in reading-intensive professions have more robust reading strategies than "grabbing a few words in the text and extrapolating the overall meaning based on them", there are always things we can improve. Some of us legal scholars are great at reading at depth and struggle at skim-reading, or vice-versa. For those of us that work in more international environments, there are the ongoing struggles to deal with tropes and writing styles that have been imported from one legal tradition to a different one (see, for example, how the late Cançado Trindade's...peculiar verbosity would irk scholars from other legal cultures). These and other issues illustrate how scholars learn, often by trial and error, to read in different ways. Naturally, everybody is free to _prefer_ some approaches to reading to others, and I do not think there is one single correct way to read a text, legal or whatever. My point is quite the contrary: at all levels, we would benefit from being exposed to different methods and ways to read. Some of them might stick with us, others might not, but we can still embrace other techniques that seem to make sense for us, or incorporate aspects of them into whatever suits us. Nowhere the advantages of this "anthropophagic" approach to reading appear more clearly than in interdisciplinary work. One all-too-common failure mode of reading across disciplines is that we end up reading unfamiliar literary genres with the expectations from our home disciplines. Legal scholarly articles perform different roles in academic cultures than, let's say, an article in a computer science journal (a discipline that is mainly driven by conferences), and as such it has differences in structures and content. If we try and read the former like the latter, or vice versa, we might miss important information, or make legal-scholarly claims that go much beyond what the computer science evidence would support. If, instead, we are alware of these different expectations in reading, we can make better sense of the texts and potentially avoid some embarrassment. In short, my point is that maybe we can improve the ways we think about reading and teach about reading. Not being an expert on how to teach reading, my guidance on this would not be particularly insightful. Still, the fact that those techniques exist, and sometimes fly beneath our radar, suggests we can benefit from including "reading" into the already excessively large set of skills we are invited to be reflective about. We might be ashamed of acknowledging that we need to teach students how to read — or, Heaven forbid, that we need to _learn_ once again how to read — but there might be some fruits in doing so. So, I can only hope that we start seeing more courses on "legal reading" at all levels. ## Recommendations My upcoming book chapter with Giovanni de Gregorio, ‘The Mixed Nature of the AI Act: Product Safety and Fundamental Rights Regulation’, is now available on SSRN. This chapter will be published as part of the Hart commentary on the AI Act edited by Gianclaudio Malgieri, Gloria Gonzalez Fuster, Alessandro Mantelero, and Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna: _The Artificial Intelligence Act - A Thematic Commentary_ (Hart Publishing 2026). * Wolfgang Alschner, ‘Recalibration, Shielding and Containment: How the World Trading System De-Risks from China and the United States’ (2025) 24 World Trade Review 498. * Sarah Barrington, ‘Generative AI Is Neither Too Unprecedented Nor Too New to Regulate’ (_Tech Policy Press_ , 14 November 2025). * Stacie E Goddard and Abraham Newman, ‘Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System’ (2025) 79 International Organization S12. * Rafael Grohmann and Alexandre Costa Barbosa, ‘Sovereignty-as-a-Service: How Big Tech Companies Co-Opt and Redefines Digital Sovereignty’ [2025] Media, Culture & Society 01634437251395003. * Jing Men, ‘EU–China Relations at 50: Continuity, Change, and Institutional Resilience’ [2025] China International Strategy Review. * Andreea Năstase and Elissaveta Radulova, ‘When Consultants Come to Town: How the European Commission Justifies the Involvement of Private Contractors in Online Public Consultations’ (2025) 7 International Review of Public Policy. * Karin Väyrynen, Casandra Grundstrom and Heidi Hietala, ‘The Role of Regulation in Information Systems Research - A Conceptual Framework’ (2025). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below. Alas, I do not make any money or benefit from these recommendations, either, so I hope at least one of you find this useful!_ Next Monday and Tuesday (8-9 December 2025), the postdocs at the Department of Law of the University of the Luxembourg will host the workshop "Methods in Legal Discipline: Post-Doctoral Insights Across Research Fields". It will feature panels on comparative law, law and technology (featuring yours truly, among others), empirical methods, and law and public policy. Register ASAP to join us, either in person or online! The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has opened its call for the Support Pool of Exports for the 2026-2030 period. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis from now until August 2030. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is looking, _inter alia_ , for a Legislative and Scientific Officer - Legal Aspects of Data and Digital Sovereignty. If this might be you, apply by **9 January 2026**. The EUI International Economic Law and Policy Working Group (IELP WG) will host a one-day Conference on Economic Statecraft on 27 May 2026. They invite submissions on topics including sanctions, export controls, trade agreements, investment review, industrial policy, development assistance, TWAIL, infrastructural power, digital trade, climate change, shadow fleets, and digital currencies. Submit an abstract (max 500 words) + short bio (150 words) in one PDF to IELP.WG@eui.eu with the subject “Abstract_Economic Statecraft 2026_full name”. Deadline: **20 January 2026**. Melanie Fink and Daria Morozova are hosting a DigiCon symposium on humanity in the automated state. Expressions of interest are due by **2 February 2026.** ## And now, the otters Photo by Lilian Dibbern / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! I hope you are doing well these days. My plans were to write this issue shortly after the previous one. However, a few of my works in progress are finally coming to fruition and, since they are the ones paying my bills, they naturally take priority. But now that things have calmed a bit, I'd like to come back to the newsletter. Here in Luxembourg, the weather is looking unexpectedly nice for early November, giving us the opportunity to bask in some extra sunlight before the clouds take over. Still in the terrain of seemingly positive developments, the Danish presidency of the EU Council seems to have removed the mandatory scanning provision from its attempt to pass the Chat Control 2.0 regulation, though some commenters warn that the draft compromise still leaves room for sneaking that requirement back in. Amid the FOMO-driven proposals for the "digital omnibus", this at least has the potential not to be awful. Still, this is unlikely to be the last time digital law scholars and activists have to spend an awful lot of energy showing once more that this is a terrible policy idea. In today's issue, I am a bit more tongue-in-cheek as usual, as I share some ~~brain farts~~ thoughts on the methodological turn(s) in legal scholarship, with special attention to my corner of tech-related stuff. After that, as usual, we will have a few reading recommendations, opportunities, and an adorable otter. Hope you enjoy! ## What can legal research methodology do for us? Habitual readers of this newsletter might be aware that I am _very_ interested in matters of research methodology. So, it was with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation to speak at the workshop "Methods in Legal Discipline: Post-Doctoral Insights Across Research Fields", which is being put together by some early career colleagues at my department. In my talk on **8 December** , I will cover briefly a question that increasingly reflects my personal approach to research: _how do you deal with technology when tech is not your central object of interest?_ In addition, we will also have other researchers from the University of Luxembourg discussing questions on research methods in law. Generally speaking, my impression is that reflections about how to do research in legal academia are becoming more and more common. In part, this popularization stems from the growing acceptance of non-doctrinal research as legal scholarship, even in more traditional academic _milieux_. Another chunk of it comes from the attempt of new specialisms, such as the Law & Technology tradition in which I have been trained, to claim a seat at the adults' table. But even within doctrinal scholarship one can point out to a growing level of reflection about the aims, objectives, and processes of research, in addition to the classic concerns with the identification of sources and their interpretation. I, for one, welcome those developments. Still, my non-legal past makes me wonder if we do not expect too much from methodology sometimes. For example, a focus on methodology is often presented as an antidote to sloppy scholarship. This belief can take various forms, such as the obsession with the idea of a "legal science" present in Civil Law jurisdictions, the embrace of quantification as a way to produce more "objective" claims about the law, or the idea that "merely" doctrinal research is akin to astrology. To a certain extent, this belief is indeed true, as more rigour with our methods can help us pay more attention to what we can (or not) claim on the grounds of the facts and the applicable normative framework. The problem comes when the belief degenerates into a fragmented view of knowledge, which sees it as the product of individuals (or small groups thereof) applying some method to produce insights about the world. While a focus on the process of inquiry can indeed lead to improvements in the individual outputs generated by them, one should not lose track of systemic factors that can reduce the contribution of such outputs to the big enterprise of knowledge. For example: * Different communities within the same field (let's say, technology law) might be working from incommensurable perspectives, so that one cannot simply accumulate the outputs of methodologies that might be perfectly reasonable under their own terms. See, e.g., the clashes between critical approaches to the law and the mainstream. * Not all research puzzles are made equal. Some low-hanging fruits might yield considerable insight while demanding relatively little effort, while others might demand much attention and advance in little our understanding of certain fields of the law. These evaluations are necessarily value-laden, and are unlikely to be feasible _ex ante_ , which means that methods can do little to help us at this stage. * Even when there are established best practices in terms of methodology, other mechanisms might mean that sub-par results are still produced. As the replication crisis in science illustrates, attention to methodology can be useful for detecting various problems with studies, but it is not in itself enough to prevent the publication of improper or even fraudulent claims. Another issue, which is not entirely unrelated, is that methodology is _difficult_. Even more so in law, where we are often prompted to import the practices of other disciplines without having training in the concepts and techniques that sustain those practices. The result, more often than not, is scholarship that uses jargon from other disciplines to bludgeon the reader into submission, rather than as a tool for broadening horizons. This is not to say that legal scholarship should be "pure" and never draw from the outputs of other disciplines; it would be very hypocritical of me to say that, at the very least. But, when we do, one must always be careful not to reify those disciplines. It is all too grating to see people claiming that "economics says X", or "sociology says Y" as a reason for why we should interpret the law in a certain way, rather than understanding that X and Y are claims that are made within a context and with lots of caveats. That is even more so when we are talking about using the _methods_ of others: there is no sense in replicating practices that lead to good knowledge in a field that we wish to emulate if we do not understand why these practices work — and, more importantly, when they do not. Such understanding is not beyond the reach of lawyers, and, for any given discipline, there are many examples of legal scholars doing good interdisciplinary work. But doing so requires effort, and in its absence, a methodology that is potentially useful can end up being little more than an attempt to "borrow" the legitimacy of practices in a way that other legal scholars might accept because they lack the means to criticize it. None of that, of course, means that legal scholars should spend less time thinking about methodology. Quite the contrary: we need to think more about that, and to have proper methodological training in our formation as researchers (So, by all means, join our workshop in December!). From an individual perspective, such training will likely have considerable payoff and help you and I in becoming the best researchers we can be. But we should not miss the forest for the trees, losing track of the broader contexts in which methodologies are expected to operate. (And, if you happen to work on these structural questions as they emerge in legal research, I would love to hear from you!) ## Recommendations Just the other day, _European Data Protection Law_ published my review of Irene Kamara's book "Standardizing Personal Data Protection" (OUP 2025). You can check the open-access review here, and then read the book afterwards. As for other people's writing, here are some things I've enjoyed recently: * Deirdre Curtin and Tommaso Fia, ‘Cracking AI Secrecy: EU Migration Law & Governance and Beyond’ European Law Open forthcoming. * Dave Lewis and others, ‘Mapping the Regulatory Learning Space for the EU AI Act’ (arXiv, 28 May 2025). * Joana Mendes, ‘The EU and the Administration’s Unattainable Subordination to the Law’ [2025] Current Legal Problems cuaf007. * Francesca Minetto, ‘Does the EU Ever Import Its Policies? The Overlooked Role of International Institutions’ Journal of European Public Policy early access. * Caio Mario da Silva Pereira Neto and Arthur Sadami, ‘The Third Wave of Globalization in Competition Policy: Uncertainty, Fragmentation and Institutional Experimentation’ (21 October 2025). * Paul Ohm, ‘The Future-Proof Fantasy of AI Regulation’ (_Network Law Review_ , 1 October 2025). * Philippe van Basshuysen, ‘Performativity in Science: Past and Future’ (2025) 20 Philosophy Compass e70062. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ Are you a legal (or legal-adjacent) professional interested in the impact of AI in law and society? Then, the Brussels Study Center has just the thing for you: an Executive Master in Law & AI, with lectures that cover the legal and technical foundations of this domain. Their next cohort starts on **21 November 2025** , and I will give a lecture to them on the AI Act on 9 January 2026. David Hadwick, a friend and interlocutor on matters of tax and AI, will defend his PhD "Deus Tax Machina: The use of artificial intelligence by EU tax administrations and its impact on taxpayers’ fundamental rights" on **24 November 2025**. Join the defence if you want to learn about digitalization, tax administrations, and/or fundamental rights in AI. The Center for AI and Digital Policy has now opened applications for the Spring 2026 CAIDP AI Policy Clinics. These Clinics are intensive, interdisciplinary, semester-long courses established to train future AI policy leaders, and I have the pleasure of collaborating with CAIDP as part of their Global Academic Network. Submit your application by **2 December 2025**! For the final _Phish and Chips_ lecture of 2025, we will have the pleasure of hosting Pier Giorgio Chiara for a talk on the EU's Cyber Resilience Act. The talk will take place on **28 November 2025** , both in person at the Weicker building (Kirchberg) and online. Registration is mandatory but free. The Information Society Law Center at the University of Milan invites applications for non-resident fellows for the 2026-2027 biennium. During that period, activities will be focused on five thematic areas: Videogames and Law; Geopolitics, Global Affairs and Human Rights; AI and Health; New Technologies and Vulnerable Groups; and The Augmented Jurist. Applications are due by **30 November 2025.** The REALaw Forum 2026 will take place on 3-4 September 2026, in Aix-en-Provence (France). For next year's edition, they invite contributions from early career scholars on ‘Escaping accountability - EU law and comparative administrative law perspectives’. For more information, see their LinkedIn post, and send your abstract by **30 November 2025**. My doctoral _alma mater_ , the European University Institute, is now looking for PhD researchers for its four doctoral programmes (Law, Economics, Social and Political Sciences, and History). Applications are open until **15 January 2026**. Funding for doctoral programmes in the EUI is connected to your country of origin, but each department has at least one scholarship for candidates from outside the EU. In particular, if you are a student from the Global South interested in technology law and/or innovation more generally, look into the ASPIRE programme, which kindly funded my final year of doctoral research. ## And now, the otter Photo by Radek Kozák / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! After a flurry of posts in August and September, I had to take a few weeks off writing this newsletter, in order to ~~stop procrastinating~~ finish some projects. While I still owe some writings to some of you, I now feel comfortable enough to get back to this newsletter. So, today I want to share some brief thoughts on the value and limits of metrics for regulation, especially in the digital domain. After that, the usual: some reading recommendations, some job and event opportunities, and cute otters. Hope you enjoy! ## Measurement as a problem for experimental regulation In recent times, we see more and more talk about experimental regulation. Faced with the complexity of emerging technologies such as AI and of developments such as the effects of climate change and geopolitical rivalry, scholars and policymakers are highlighting the need for acknowledging uncertainty and coming up with means to manage it. To give two examples that strike close to home, Ben Crum has framed the AI Act's external impact as a form of experimentation, while Thibault Schrepel's handy overview of adaptive regulation proposes not only the need for an adaptive mindsed in the implementation of regulations in AI and beyond, but also the need for a more overt engagement with complexity in future regulation. I am very sympathetic to both claims, and indeed, one of my main current interests lies in the idea of how the law shapes learning in complex domains. However, a successful approach to experimental design will require us to tackle certain challenges, which I hope to discuss in future newsletter. The first of these challenges pertains to the difficulties of measuring what is going on. On a naïve account, we may speak of an experiment as a way of testing theories about the world: we intervene on the world somehow (or seize an event that was already take place), look at what is going on, and try to square off what we see with the theories we started from. Of course, such an image is complicated once we start to look at what is going on, for example, in physics and biology, and even more so when we discuss the value-ladenness of data about social phenomena. Personally, I suspect that a full theory of experimental regulation would benefit from a more pluralistic treatment of measurement than what is offered by an economic lens. But, for now, I am interested in an earlier issue: the object we are looking at. Enter Goodhart's Law. In its most popular form, this law states that a metric that becomes a target eventually loses its value as a metric. For example, standardized testing in education has been introduced as an 'objective' measure of what students learn in a given context (let's say, high school). However, they have famously given origin to the phenomenon of 'teaching to the test', in which teaching institutions (especially if they are resource constrained) organize their approaches to maximize student performance even if that leads to a less robust education overall. The phenomenon, in itself, is not new, and in fact one of the potential advantages of experimental regulation is that it would allow regulators to replace metrics as they become rigged or otherwise irrelevant. What concerns me, however, is the speed with which metrics can become irrelevant. To the extent that AI technologies and other statistical techniques actually deliver some value, they would make it easier for regulatees to figure out how to game the game. Those same techniques could also be used (in fact, they are already, at least if one reads reports on administrative best practices) to help regulators in detecting instances of gaming. Yet, there is an asymmetry of weapons here, as the cost of designing and monitoring a new regulatory setup is likely to be much higher than the cost of optimizing a metric. How to solve this issue? One might be tempted towards making the measurements secret somehow, and this might indeed be a valid solution in some cases. But it might not be universally desirable for reasons of practice and principle. From a practical perspective, security by obscurity is not usually a sustainable practice, at least not if deployed by itself, and so the regulatees might obtain information about metrics anyway. From a more principled standpoint, adding opacity to this kind of experimentation, while at the same time using it to deal with important questions such as the governance of the public values protected by the AI Act, is a sure-fire way to erode democratic legitimacy. Secrecy is therefore unlikely to be a major element of a robust experimental regulatory model, though it surely has its role to play. Fortunately, there is already a substantial body of work on how to measure regulatory performance. The OECD, for one, is a strong proponent of that kind of measurement, and the European Commission's Better Regulation Toolbox also puts a great emphasis on measurement. Still, as lawyers interested in regulation, we should not take for granted that the tools for measuring what we want are agile enough to capture the dynamics we want to observe. Otherwise, we might develop a regulatory system that is moving - but is always one step behind of the targets it should achieve. ## Recommendations * Donato Di Carlo and Luuk Schmitz, ‘Europe First? The Rise of EU Industrial Policy Promoting and Protecting the Single Market’ (2023) 30 Journal of European Public Policy 2063. * Urs Gasser and others, ‘Interim Reflections on EU-LAC Digital Regulatory Learning’ (TU Munich 2025). * Andrew Leyden, ‘Standards and the EU AI Act: Legitimacy, State of Play, and Future Challenges’ Information & Communications Technology Law early access. * Esther Nieuwenhuizen, ‘Algorithmic Transparency in Government: A Multi-Level Perspective on Transparency of and Trust in Algorithm Use by Governments’ (dr, Utrecht University 2025). * Bao-Chau Pham and Sarah R Davies, ‘What Problems Is the AI Act Solving? Technological Solutionism, Fundamental Rights, and Trustworthiness in European AI Policy’ (2025) 19 Critical Policy Studies 318. * Tim Requarth, ‘Why AI Guidelines Aren’t Enough’ (_The Third Hemisphere_ , 10 October 2025). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The National University of Singapore's Centre for International Law is hosting the conference Empowering Through Digital Technologies. They invite individuals and organisations working on practical projects that design and/or apply digital technologies to empower vulnerable individuals and communities to share their insights and experience at the conference, and some limited travel funding is available. Submit your application by **19 October 2025** (Sunday). Next Tuesday, **21 October 2025** , Thomas Streinz and Jen Tridgell at the European University Institute are hosting a panel on the recent EU Sovereign Tech Fund Feasibility Study to which they contributed. Register and join in-person or online! Maastricht University is looking for an Assistant Professor of European Union Law. Applications are due by **27 October 2025** , with a starting date of 15 January 2026. The famous CPDP conference on computers, privacy, and data protection is looking for Programme Assistants to support the coordination of panel sessions for next year's edition. For more information, contact them at info@cpdpconferences.org. Our neighbours at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law invite applications for their Early Career Visiting Scholars Programme. Send your application by **30 October 2025** for a visit in the first half of 2026. King's College London is looking for two lecturers in the area of digital law, with special interest for candidates in FinTech, IP & Data Protection or Regulations/Compliance/Ethics. Applications are due by **5 November 2025**. WeRobot 2026 will take place in Berlin from 23 to 25 April. They invite abstracts until **17 November 2025,** with particular interest in interdisciplinary work. The Université Libre de Bruxelles is looking for a chair in the regulation of artificial intelligence (50% teaching and 50% research). Applications are due by **5 January 2026** , with a starting date of 1 October 2026. If you have a native level of French, they are also looking for a professor of legal theory, with applications due by **2 February 2026** and the same starting date. ## And now, the otters Photo by Thomas Lipke / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! In today's issue, I wrap up my initial reflections on legal research programmes and the production of knowledge with some thoughts on whether the notion of a 'degenerate research programme' might help us put a name to the intuition that some research agendas just...fade away. After that, as usual, there are reading recommendations, job and event opportunities, and a cute otter. ## What is a degenerating legal research programme? When I engaged with the notion of a research programme in an earlier issue, I did so in an anthropophagic mood. I was not so much worried with doing justice to Lakatos's picture of science or the problems that he and other philosophers of science were trying to address, focusing instead on whether (my reading of) their outputs might be somehow relevant to the law.[1] For today's flight of fancy, however, I will need to add some context: what they were looking at. If we go to Lakatos's _Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes_ ,[2] we can see from the outset that the notion of scientific research programmes was introduced as an attempt to explain science as a rational practice (or at least as something that can be reconstructed as one). Doing so requires, on the one hand, distinguish scientific from non-scientific practices[3] and, on the other hand, explain why scientific knowledge seems to grow. It is in this context that the distinction between the 'hard core' and the 'protective belt' of a scientific research programme emerges: to show why scientists might be rationally justified in sticking with a particular set of theories even in light of discoveries that cannot be properly explained by them. So, when would rationality compel the abandonment of a particular research programme? To answer this question, Lakatos distinguishes between _progressive_ and _degenerating_ research programmes. In short, a progressive research programme is one in which abandoned theories are replaced by new theories that predict some facts that were not expected under the previous theories (this is what makes the programme _theoretically progressive_) and these new theories lead to new empirical discoveries (thus being _empirically progressive_). If a research programme fails to have both problems, it becomes a degenerating programme, as it is no longer yielding new knowledge about the world. But it can retain a claim to scientific-ness if it is, at the very least, theoretically progressive. The account given above of scientific progress does not speak to many pressing concerns of legal scholarship. There is, indeed, a need to demarcate law from non-law, but, in legal philosophy, that tends to have more with the nature and identification of political authority than with facts above the world.[4] But the distinction between progressive and degenerating programmes might nonetheless be of some use to explain why some research programmes, once popular, end up losing steam. When extending such an account to legal scholarship, we once again face the problem that its main object of interest is not directed at empirical facts.5] To the extent that one is interested in the [normativity of the law, one is not looking at facts, but at the counterfactual expectations that the law may produce -- such as the idea that somebody who has been harmed in a certain way has the right to compensation. Therefore, one would have to specify a certain object of interest that would play the role that empirical facts play with regard to scientific research programmes. Multiple constructions of this type might be possible, leading to different kinds of insights. For example, a legal positivistic research programme might be assessed in terms of what it tells us about the norms that belong to a legal system. It would be theoretically progressive to the extent that the succession of theories belonging to it offers explanation to a growing set of phenomena: for example, by accounting to recent developments such as the relevance of technical standardization and other forms of private orderings within state law. And it would be empirically progressive to the extent that the theoretical predictions offer a good account of law "as it is". As the latter framing suggests, a lot of this evaluation would eventually hinge on value judgments about research agendas that might themselves be contestable. A more concrete example might illustrate this. A bit over a decade ago, the legal scholar Anu Bradford introduced the term Brussels Effect to label her theory of how the EU manages to set global standards through unilateral action. This theory, refined by Bradford and others along the years, proposes certain conditions that would be necessary and sufficient for the propagation of EU unilateral norm-setting, and identifies some examples where it would be arguably successful. As such, the early successes of the theory illustrate both elements of a progressive research programme. Theoretical progressiveness can be seen in the successive refinements of the theory, while the wealth of instances of the Effect would suggest a degree of empirical progressiveness. It comes as no surprise, under these circumstances, that the Brussels Effect became part of the imaginary not just of scholars but also of the EU institutions themselves, as seen in the AI Act's declared aims of leveraging this effect towards EU leadership in the regulation of AI technologies. In the last two years or so, however, one might point towards some indicia of degeneration in both aspects of the research programme. From an empirical perspective, one might point out to the absence of EU influence in cases where it would be expected: for example, AI regulation around the world has pursued approaches that deviate from the EU template, even when the theoretical conditions for a Brussels Effect are met. To accommodate these deviations, some authors have proposed adjustments to the policy-making mechanisms as well as supplementary effects that would address some of the perceived weaknesses of the model. If those adjustments fail to expand the reach of predictions offered by current theories of the Brussels Effect, the research programme might eventually become theoretically degenerative. At that point, it would be irrational to stick to it as a tool for understanding whether and how EU-set norms spread around the world. To fully explain why research programmes in law are abandoned, one cannot restrict oneself to purely epistemic reasons. Macro-political factors will surely come into play, as one can see, for instance, in the rise (and perhaps fall?) of the originalist fetish in US legal academia. Politics at a smaller scale can also be influential, as disputes between schools of thought shape the availability of academic jobs and what kinds of scholarship get published where. I suspect we even might get something out of looking at this problem from the perspective of aesthetic fads among scholars. But, unless we are fully sceptical about the epistemic value of legal scholarship, it does not seem much of a stretch to believe that epistemic factors play at least _some_ role in why some approaches to the study of the law are no longer seen as fruitful. If what a particular set of theories tells us about the law no longer matches our construction of reality, we might no longer see that as particular informative. And, to the extent that rejection is guided by epistemic grounds, looking at the programmes of yesteryear as something akin to degenerating research programmes might tell us something about how legal programmes generate knowledge about the law. * * * 1. Of course, were I to develop this beyond this early-stage reflection, I would need to properly reconstruct the concept and explain where and why I deviate from its 'proper' formulation. I will not do so at the moment, but please bear with me. ↩︎ 2. Here, I am relying on the version collected in Lakatos, _The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers_ (John Worrall and Gregory Currie, eds.) (OUP, 1999). ↩︎ 3. Such as astrology, or whatever it is that your colleague next door is invoking as a 'scientific' basis for legal scholarship. ↩︎ 4. With apologies to my legal philosopher friends, even those of a hedgehog persuasion. ↩︎ 5. Lakatos himself would not see much of a problem in applying the idea of a research programme to this kind of a normative object. In p. 92 of the book quoted in [^fn-fmrsp], he explicitly mentions that this approach could be extended to non-empirical research programmes, as he does himself in his treatment of logic. ↩︎ ## Things you might want to read * Laura Aade and Catalina Goanta, ‘Ban-It-Harderism in European Consumer Law: The Case of the French Influencer Law’ [2025] Journal of Consumer Policy. * Johan Adriaensen, Sophie Vanhoonacker and Igor Sarkissian, ‘The Effect of Geopoliticisation on the EU’s Polity: Exploring Institutional Power Shifts’ [2025] Journal of European Public Policy forthcoming. * Bibi van den Berg, ‘Dealing with Uncertainty in Cyberspace’ (2024) 144 Computers & Security 103939. * Matthijs M Maas, _Architectures of Global AI Governance: From Technological Change to Human Choice_ (Oxford University Press 2025). _Available in Open Access starting this Friday, 26 September!_ * Noa Melin Mingarini and Oscar Larsson, ‘Resilience Is Everywhere, but What Does It Mean? A Study of the Use of the Term Resilience in Swedish Public Policy’ [2025] Critical Policy Studies forthcoming. * Harry Oppenheimer, ‘Digital Interdependence and Power Politics’ (2025) 55 British Journal of Political Science e93. * Karen Yeung and Wenlong Li, ‘From “Wild West” to “Responsible” AI Testing “in-the-Wild”: Lessons from Live Facial Recognition Testing by Law Enforcement Authorities in Europe’ (2025) 7 Data & Policy e59. * Kyoko Yoshinaga, ‘Interoperability in AI Governance: From Principles to Action - Insights from OECD-GPAI Initiatives’ (2025) 43 Journal of Information and Communication Research 81. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The DSA and Platform Regulation Conference 2026 invites abstracts by **30 September 2025,** with the event taking place in 16-17 February 2026. The Law department at the University of Surrey is looking for a Lecturer B in Law, with particular interest in scholars whose research is relevant to some aspect of defence or national security policy. Applications are due by **2 October 2025**. In **8 October 2025** , Ben Farrand (Newcastle University) will speak at a webinar about Cybersecurity, Weaponised Interdependence, and the AI Race: The Geopolitical Commission at a Crossroads. Free registration, and make sure to join and get a sneak peek at his upcoming book! The Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University is looking for two PhD candidates (4 years) and a post-doc (2.5 years) for a project on best practices in organizational cybersecurity. Applications are due by **24 October 2025**. Vassilis Galanos and Maarten Hillebrandt are putting together a special issue on Disinformation after Generative AI & Synthetic Data for _Information Polity_. Abstracts are due by **14 November 2025** , with full papers expected by early March 2026 for publication in 2027. ## And now, the otter! Photo by Theo Jores / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! It has been a bit more than a week since our last issue, and in the meantime the European Commission has opened a call for evidence meant to support its ~~windmill-hunting efforts~~ project of simplifying the digital _acquis_. My colleagues working on cookies and online platforms have been shocked with the push against the ePrivacy directive, while the AI Act part has quite a few sweet nothings. So, for the time being, I will not add anything on it. Today's issue, instead, comes back to my work on AI transparency. As I mentioned before, this is no longer a research priority for me, as my work moves more and more towards more abstract questions of regulation. Still, I find myself coming to the topic from time to time, not only because of its saliency on AI debates but also because it remains relevant for some of my more applied work. In this context, I want to revisit some thoughts on inherently interpretable models that I had developed for an abandoned project that is now being revived. After that, of course, you will find the usual content: some reading recommendations, academic opportunities, and a cute otter. By the way, if you are at the ELU-S conference in Prague next week, make sure to say hi! # Model interpretability: what is it good for? When one talks about technical transparency in AI models, there is an almost knee-jerk tendency of equating it with explainable AI models. However, the kind of information such models provide about opaque AI systems does not always line up with what the law expects when it demands transparency, especially when one considers that explanations are subject to manipulation precisely in the kinds of adversarial contexts where they would be the most useful. Faced with those limitations of explanation, scholars and activisms sometimes propose an elegant solution: if we cannot make all algorithms transparent, then we should prohibit the use of opaque techniques, at least in some contexts. This restrictive approach would allow an extensive form of transparency. Whereas any transparency offered by explainable AI is mediated by how the explanation model is constructed, a restrictive approach would result in inherently interpretable models. That is, an AI system can only be used (at least in some contexts) if external observers can make sense of the inner logic that guides its operation. This promise of direct visibility would thus produce a form of transparency that is closer to the core meaning of that term, removing barriers to the scrutiny of those systems. However, a few factors might limit the potential of inherently interpretable models as a tool for keeping algorithmic power in check. First, one might point out that the various forms of human oversight currently proposed in law often reduce humans to mere rubberstampers of automated decisions, as they do not equip human overseers with the knowledge and conditions they would need for properly inspecting and potentially overriding automated decisions. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient for control of how AI systems operate. In addition, transparency is in the eye of the beholder. A system that a technical expert might deem perfectly interpretable might not be much clearer to the untrained eye than a complex neural network. This has been suggested, for exampe, by the empirical study of the accuracy-explainability trade-off carried out by Andrew Bell and co-authors some years ago. So, even the clearest interpretable models might be of little value for citizens trying to enforce their individual rights in contexts of automation, or for human workers trying to control systems that are formally under their responsibility. Such pointlessness might become even more pressing in cases where humans have only a limited time to respond to AI outputs, as they will likely not have the time to make sense of techniques that they could understand given time. These constraints suggest that interpretability is of limited use for some of the roles that the law expects AI transparency to play. Nonetheless, inherently interpretable models can still be valuable in some contexts. An obligation that certain models must be interpretable unless there are good reasons otherwise might force an actor that is developing or implementing an AI system to consider whether the purported gains from an opaque model are indeed relevant in a given context. For example, Paul Ohm argues that many AI applications, especially in the public sector, do not benefit that much from the gains in performance promised by opaque models. Here, the main contribution of transparency mandates comes from tinkering with the trade-offs that organizations consider when they make use of AI technologies. Mandated interpretability can also be useful for _ex post_ scrutiny of algorithmic decisions. Even if individuals might lack the resources to interpret the models in real-time, entities such as civil society organizations, journalists, and the courts might be able to tap into technical expertise and take the time to make sense of what is going on within a model. In doing so, they might identify issues with actually-existing systems, a task that might lead to fixing those systems and/or to the ascription of liability from any harms caused by those issues. So long as we do not expect it to be a silver bullet, the mandated use of inherently interpretable models can indeed contribute to control over AI-powered practices. # Things you might be interested in I finally got to watch Parlement, a comedy TV series set in the European Parliament. Being halfway through the second season, I have enjoyed it very much so far, and the show also offers me the opportunity to practice my French, as its dialogue shifts between English, French, and German (with some other languages appearing from time to time). In Luxembourg, you can watch it on Netflix, so that might be an option in other countries, too. As for academic stuff, here are some materials I've come across recently that might be of interest to you: * Antonio Calcara, Joris Teer and Ivan Zaccagnini, ‘Technological Underpinnings of European Autonomy and US-China Competition’ (2025) 47 Journal of European Integration 943. * Silvia De Conca, ‘The Law of the European Horse: The Law and Technology Scholarship in the European Union, Between National Legal Traditions and Supranational Governance’ (2025) 11 The Italian Law Journal 118. * Orla Lynskey, Maria Helen Murphy and Katherine Nolan, ‘Digital Empire or Digital Fiefdoms? Institutional Tensions and the EU Right to Data Protection’ [2025] Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies 1. * Diego Machado and Lucas Anjos, ‘Is That a Fully Automated Decision? Comparing ADM Regulation under EU and Brazil’s Data Protection Law’ [2025] International Data Privacy Law ipaf008. * Martino Maggetti, ‘Policy Spandrels: How Design Decisions Can Open Up Spaces for Unintended Policy Change’ (2025) n/a European Policy Analysis in print. * Cathrin Mohr and Christoph Trebesch, ‘Geoeconomics’ (2025) 17 Annual Review of Economics 563. * Plixavra Vogiatzoglou and Joris van Hoboken, ‘The EU’s Digital Sovereignty and Quantum Technologies: To What End?’ (2026) 18 Law, Innovation and Technology forthcoming. # Opportunities The research seminar FAIRNESS IN DIGITAL CONTRACT LAW: EUROPEAN AND GLOBAL COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES will take place at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland) on 4-5 December 2025. Abstracts are due by **26 September 2025.** The BRIDGES (Brazilian Research, International Dialogue, and Global Exchange Symposium) symposium, convened by Brazilian professors based in Canada and the US, offers Brazilian early-career scholars the opportunity to get feedback on works in progress, with a view to submitting them to English-language law journals. Abstracts are due by **15 October 2025**. The School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University is looking for a fixed-term (2 years) Assistant Professor in Cybersecurity with a Focus on Human Practices, Values and Behaviours. Applications are due by **9 October 2025** , for starting on January 2026. The research project 'Artificial Secrecy? Taking Transparency in EU Digital and Data Regulation Seriously' at the University of Amsterdam is hiring a PhD candidate and a postdoc to research the balance between transparency rules and confidentiality in regulated digital technologies and data in the EU. In both cases, applications are due by **17 October**. The IE Law School in Madrid is looking for 4 tenure-track Assistant Professors in Law. They are hiring broadly, but particularly interested in Private Law (Contracts, Torts, Property, Family Law, Conflicts of Law, etc.); Commercial, Corporate, and Finance Law; IP Law; Digital & Tech Law; Human Rights; and Environmental & Climate Change Law. Applications are due by **31 October 2025** , for a start in 1 September 2026. # Finally, the otter "I have a cunning plan" - Photo by Hoyoun Lee / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! I was planning to write a newsletter last week, but a few things got in the way. Even though I had a wonderful time at the UACES Annual Conference, I came back somewhat ill, so my brain was barely functional for a few days. Once it got minimally back into shape, most of my energy went into finally submitting a book proposal based on my PhD thesis. As a result, it was only now that I could get my otters in a row to finish a draft post. Today, I want to follow up on my discussion of legal scholarship as a knowledge-producing practice (the next issue will be on law and tech, I promise!). But I once again got carried away with speculation, so readers less interested in these forays into philosophy will find some reading recommendations and academic opportunities before my essay on research programmes in law. In the end of the newsletter, as usual, you will find an adorable otter. With that said, let's move on! ## Things you might want to read * Ben Crum, ‘Brussels Effect or Experimentalism? The EU AI Act and Global Standard-Setting’ (_Internet Policy Review_ , 27 August 2025) * Sebastian Heidebrecht, ‘Digital Policy as a Driver of Integration: Spillover Effects and European Commission Empowerment’ (2025) 13 Politics and Governance. * Helle Strandgaard Jensen, ‘How I Got an ERC CoG: The Idea, Application, Interview, and Reviews’. * Margot Kaminski and Gianclaudio Malgieri, ‘Stakeholder Participation in AI and Data Governance’ (2025) 27 Yale Journal of Law & Technology 247. * Thibault Schrepel, ‘Adaptive Regulation’ (SSRN, 15 August 2025). * Susan Leigh Star, ‘Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions’ (1990) 38 The Sociological Review 26. * Jeffrey R Yost and Gerardo Con Díaz (eds), _Just Code: Power, Inequality, and the Political Economy of IT_ (Johns Hopkins University Press 2025). * Kai Zenner and J. Scott Marcus, 'The top 20 digital laws that all digital policy experts should know' (CEPS, 26 August 2025). ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The conference Empirical Perspectives on European Law will take place in Umeå, Sweden on 22-23 January 2026. Abstracts are due by **15 September 2025**. On **19 September 2025** , Mitchell Travis (Leeds) will give an online talk on science fiction as a legal research method for examining the futures of law. Free registration at the Max Planck Law website. The symposium Vulnerability and the Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives will take place in Maastricht on 14 November 2025. It will feature three tracks: "Vulnerability and Climate Change", "Vulnerability and Digitalization", and "Vulnerability and the Responsive State". Abstracts to them are accepted until **22 September 2025.** IE University’s School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs seeks applicants for a tenure-track faculty Assistant Professor in Security Studies. Applications are due by**6 October 2025** , with an envisaged start date of 1 September 2026. They also have open positions at the same level in International Political Economy and Comparative Politics, so check them out if you work on those topics instead. Dr. Seda Gürses and prof. Linnet Taylor are recruiting a postdoc to work on the Impact of Computational Infrastructures on Public Institutions and Administration of Justice. Applications are due by **12 October 2025** for a two-year contract. The 2025 Common Market Law Review Prize for Young Academics accepts submissions on any EU law topic (up to 10,000 words including footnotes). Authors should be 30 or under, or have not completed their PhD more than 3 years ago. The winner gets a prize of 500 Euros and publication in the journal. Submissions are due by **15 October 2025**. The European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs is organizing its yearly research conference on the EU Single Market, which will take place in Brussels on 19 March 2026. Abstracts are due by **31 October 2025**. The interdisciplinary Controversies of AI society conference will take place at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, on 9-10 April 2026. Submissions of abstracts (up to 500 words) or full papers (up to 8,000 words including references) are invited until **1 December 2025**. ## Are there research programmes in law? A few posts ago, I mentioned that I am not a big fan of the notion of "legal science". Its usage often denotes an attempt to try and come up with a supposedly rigorous method for legal scholarship, which would allow it to be a "proper" discipline. My objection to this idea does not come from a belief that anything goes in legal scholarship; in fact, I am a firm believer that not only we can distinguish between good and bad scholarship, but most legal scholarship falls in the second category.[1] It comes, instead, from pragmatic reasons, such as the fact that all too often the supposedly more rigorous work that comes from the use of those methods in the law falls short of academic standards both in law and in their disciplines of origin.[2] Attempts to "scientify" legal scholarship also tends to rely on a highly idealized of what people are supposedly doing in the more rigorous disciplines, and as such they offer less-than-adequate guides for action. This lack of engagement with actual science (or even actual discourse about science) is something I see as a missed opportunity. Even if you agree with me that what a legal scholar does is not _science_ in the narrow sense of the word, and that broadening that sense brings no particular advantages, there are still some similarities between scholarship on law and what is done in scientific disciplines. In particular, I think that reflections from the philosophy of science might provide us with good ideas to think about the outputs of legal scholarship at a more abstract level. For example, let's look at the notion of _research programmes_. As per the ever-trustworthy Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a research programme is a cluster of theories, which can be divided into a hard core and the auxiliary theories surrounding that core. Theories belonging to the core of that research programme are thought to be irrefutable, while the auxiliary theories are less stable, but provide grounds for making affirmations about the world. So, if the research programme offers predictions that fail to match observations of reality, one can adjust it by making changes to the auxiliary theories rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Such a view can be useful for lawyerly meta-reflection because it invites us to think beyond individual claims to knowledge. While there is, as I mention in the next-to-last post, quite a bit of work on legal knowledge claims, I have seen much less description of how these claims go together in aggregate. Would a research programme offer a suitable description of knowledge-seeking practices in legal scholarship? This brief discussion cannot hope to provide a definite answer to this question; instead, I am just thinking aloud to see if this idea would be worth pursuing further. To do so, I would need to address potential applications of this concept to legal scholarship, and show that viewing things in terms of research programmes adds something new to the mix. Otherwise, doing so would be little more than a parlor trick. When Lakatos and his successors speak of research programmes, they are dealing with sequences of theories that make claims about what (a certain aspect of) the world _is_. If a programme's predictions eventually do not match the facts on the ground, it will at some point---though not ultimately---lose its scientific pedigree. Such a rationale cannot be immediately transposed to legal scholarship. Transposition is complicated by a series of factors. First, one might wonder whether there is such a thing as a construct in legal scholarship that would correspond to scientific theories. At first glance, my impression is that it is not particularly difficult to find this correspondence, as one can identify both "core theories" that offer explanations of the law and "auxiliary theories" that make specific predictions. For example, classical law and economics features narratives about the role of the law and the worldviews of the actors it governs, as well as narrower predictions, such as whether an emerging technology is better regulated through _ex ante_ norms or _ex post_ judicial decisions. At least in a first approximation, we can say that legal scholarship does rely on sets of claims about the law that can look like scientific research programmes if you squint your eyes enough. In particular, one might take as starting candidates for legal research programmes certain "branded" lines of inquiry. Beyond law and economics, one can look, for instance, at law and political economy, digital constitutionalism and various other projects. Once we do, however, we are faced with a stark difference between such programmes and traditional scientific programmes: their normative character. All of them make claims about what _ought_ to be the law, in light of certain assumptions, even if sometimes those claims are formulated as a statement of what the law currently requires. However, what the law _is_ in practice depends on the practices of certain actors—such as judges or the bureaucrats in charge of enforcing law—which are guided by their own interpretations of the law. Even if one buys into the idea that there is always a correct interpretation within the legal system, the legal officer might always act in an unlawful way. It might be the case, therefore, that a research programme offers a correct[3] legal interpretation which still does not match what officials do in practice. One might say that, in such a case, the research programme has offered an incorrect prediction. Taken to an extreme, such an approach would mean that the goal of legal scholarship is to predict what legal officials will decide.[4] This is not a view of legal scholarship I find particularly attractive, as it leaves no room for the critique of how power is exercised. But, if legal scholarship is not just an exercise of descriptive truth-seeking, the analogy between scientific research programmes and legal research programmes will likely break down at some point. With that _caveat_ , one might still find it useful to think about legal research programmes as somehow similar to scientific research programmes. Zooming out from the level of individual knowledge claims reminds us that it can be rational to stick with a particular set of theories even if their predictions have been falsified in practice. It also calls to mind—though not necessarily so—the collective dimension of scholarly work, as research programmes are often developed by large communities of practice, even those that are closely associated with individual leading figure.[5] Furthermore, the distinction between progressive and degenerate research programmes might offer us a good analogies to discuss what is good legal scholarship. The latter is what I meant to do today, in fact, but the post is already too big as it stands. Alas, I will need to leave that discussion for another day. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on the law as an epistemic practice. * * * 1. Which turns out, I believe, to be a good thing for legal scholarship as a whole. Naturally, I am not excluding my own work from this, but, to summarize that post, I believe that risk-averse legal scholarship does no favours to society. ↩︎ 2. Of course, that is not an inevitable consequence of interdisciplinarity, which can be (and is) done well in many cases. ↩︎ 3. "Correct", here, is a value-laden term, and one could have a field day just in discussing whether there is a single reference for correctness in legal scholarship. That discussion is orthogonal to the one I propose above: no matter what definition of correct one adopts, the issue still persists. ↩︎ 4. A claim that is often associated with American legal realism, though potentially as a kind of caricature. ↩︎ 5. Such as, let's say, Newtonian physics or, to a lesser degree, the negative comparative law associated with Pierre Legrand. ↩︎ ## And now, the otter! Photo by Jakub Neskora / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! I was originally planning to continue last week's foray into the philosophy of science and whether it might help us think about the law. However, I find myself once again dragged into current affairs, as Mario Draghi gave a speech in Rimini about the EU's geopolitical vulnerability. Given that this has to do with some of the research directions I am interested in, I will try and think aloud about the topic. After that, you'll find the usual: some reading recommendations, academic opportunities, and a lovely otter! Before that, a brief clarification is in order. After moving to Ghost, I have decided to turn on the option for paid subscriptions. There is just a single subscription plan, which does not offer any extra content or anything like that. The content of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_ will remain free (as in beer, not as in software), but this paid option is there in case somebody feels like pitching in for hosting costs and the like. Think of it as a way of subsidising semi-regular otter pics and the content that accompanies them. You can also support the newsletter with an one-time tip, pay me a cup of tea at some conference, or simply spread the word to your friends. But the greatest value I derive from this newsletter is the continuous exchange of ideas with you folks, so please keep that going. On an unrelated note, if you will be at the UACES annual conference in Liverpool next week, I will be presenting on Monday at 4pm, on the Digital Policy track, where I'll talk a bit about how technology-neutral regulation can disguise the exercise of power in the EU digital _acquis_. Earlier the same day, at 9am, Renata Vaz-Shimbo will present her ongoing research on informal care work and how it is (not) treated in the CJEU case law. Don't hesitate to say 'hi'! ## Ninety-nine outside context problems As I write this newsletter, the Heaven of Juristic Concepts is in a sorry state. International lawyers have been struggling with what is left of the profession amid the ongoing genocides,1] liberals have found that institutional neutrality is [no longer tenable within societies (if it ever was), not to mention the whole cottage industry of reflections about AI disrupting the law. Regardless of where one looks, it is easy to leave with the impression that the edifice of legal scholarship has some structural cracks. To some extent, this has always been the case. It is hard to think of a more well-established tradition in academia (or in thought more generally) than pointing out that the current state of affairs is somehow broken. Some of those claims have turned out to be true and some part of our intellectual endeavours were abandoned or made worse off.[2] Other alerts turned out to come in time for the undesirable fate to be avoided,[3] while some of them turned out to be addressable by the evolution of our conceptual tooling.[4] Yet, there is always the fear that the Current Crisis might be what Iain M Banks called an _outside context problem_ , that is, a situation so out of parameters that one cannot even make sense of the problem within our current worldview, let alone address it. So, what does this have to do with Mario Draghi's speech on Friday? One of the strongest points of his talk is that the last months have punctured the illusion that the EU is a significant geopolitical power. Over the past decades, we have seen Brussels wield its economic weight to influence policy around the world, and quite a few theories have been proposed to explain that effect. Like any theory, these theoretical constructs try to explain something---in this case, the EU's perceived power---based on certain assumptions about the world an geopolitical actors. But, as Draghi point out, we now live in a world where both the assumptions of these theories and the very influence they aim to explain seem to be vanishing. Where do we go from here? I do not think this change in geopolitical context amounts to a _true_ Outside Context Problem for theories of EU as an international actor. After all, scholars of various theoretical and ideological bents have been pointing out to the growing role of political rationales beyond economic efficiency.[5] Furthermore, the idea of the neoliberal EU as an actor has always been more of an ideal type than a description of reality, as Single Market policy was all too often entangled with non-economic goals such as security.[6] What we are facing is something more prosaic: theories break down once their hypotheses no longer hold true. For example, much of the Brussels Effect as originally formulated considers extra-EU businesses as relatively independent actors, but their margin of action may be consdierably reduced if they are targeted by the US or some other polity. However, there is a sense in which the idea of an Outside Context Problem can help us make sense of this particular mess. While I was drafting this newsletter, the dynamic duo of Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell published an FT opinion piece in which they claim that the recent geopolitical turn cannot be solved by the EU's technocratic approach of framing it as a well-defined technical problem. A bigger rupture with business as usual is needed if the EU is to preserve relevance in the international landscape. Likewise, the theories that seemed to explain EU power in calm geopolitical waters, in which its economic influence was mostly left uncountered, may no longer be a reliable guide for making sense of a world in which less subtle forms of power are back in fashion. It is in this sense that our current articulations of the EU as a power might be facing an Outside Context Problem. If current theories are inadequate, one has a few options beyond quietism. First, one might try to modify existing theories to incorporate new factors. A recent exercice in this regard is Matti Ylönen's attempt to reconceptualize the Brussels Effect by adding new actors and interactions between them. Such reconceptualizations aim at providing coherent frameworks that refine whatever they build on, potentially making those theories fitter for a messy reality. An alternative to that refinement exercise would be to propose new models from wholly different bases. That, of course, is an awful lot of work, but developing alternatives from the ground up might help avoid some of the jury-rigging and path dependence that are inherent to starting from existing practices. We will probably need to do both kinds of things in the next few years to identify whether and how the EU can navigate this 'geoeconomic turn'. Of course, the outline above does not exhaust any of the discussion it raises. It does not show that existing theories cannot be salvaged, though I am somewhat skeptical of that, as it might be more beneficial (both policy- and theory-wise) to try to project forward instead of finding conditions in which old formulas for EU influence can work once again. The sketch above certainly does not offer a cogent case for what we should do, or show exactly how any of the other domains mentioned above are broken. But I think there is some value in voicing this idea that everything is broken. Not only doing so is a way to vent, but it might also help us find similarities (and differences) between how different conceptual edifices are breaking down. And maybe that will help us think better about how to face the small and big horrors the world throw at us.[7] * * * 1. Of course, theoretical disquiet is among the lesser problems, the most important thing being that there are some goddamn genocides going on. The links are not meant to be exhaustive of what is going on, but there are voices that are much better positioned to myself to say anything more meaningful than 'genocide bad, must stop' (which should be the standard position, but alas). ↩︎ 2. One example that comes to mind is that, after humans started to detonate atomic bombs in the 1940s, steel is often contaminated by nuclear fallout, creating all sorts of distortions for things like particle detectors. ↩︎ 3. For a practical, rather than conceptually oriented example, think of the Y2k bug. ↩︎ 4. Assessments of this kind of thing tend to be on the eye of the beholders, even more than the previous classes. What jumps to mind, in this case, is the discussion about 'revolutions in military affairs' in the 1990s and 2000s. ↩︎ 5. See, e. g., Sophie Meunier and Kalypso Nicolaidis, ‘The Geopoliticization of European Trade and Investment Policy’ (2019) 57 JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 103. ↩︎ 6. See, e.g., Tobias Liebetrau, ‘Problematising EU Cybersecurity: Exploring How the Single Market Functions as a Security Practice’ (2024) 62 JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 705. ↩︎ 7. At the end of the day, concepts won't solve any of the very real human problems we are facing. Thinking about them is no substitute for doing things that might make a difference, or that might have value in themselves. For examples of the latter, one might think about how some people (not me) derive pleasure from solving puzzles of any kind, or the sheer beauty of some kinds of research (non-applied math is the first thing that comes to mind). Personally, I think this intrinsic value is much less relevant when it comes to legal scholarship, but that's a subject for another day. ↩︎ ## You might want to read... ### Academic publications * Marina Buitrago-Perez and others, ‘XAI for Safe AI: Technical-Legal Misconceptions and Misalignments’ (2025). * Thomas Duve and Tamar Herzog (eds), _The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective_ (Cambridge University Press 2024). * Annegret Engel, Xavier Groussot and Gunnar Thor Petursson (eds), _New Directions in Digitalisation: Perspectives from EU Competition Law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights_, vol 13 (Springer 2025). * Amanda Reid, Lorcan Neill and Evan Ringel, ‘Nerd Harder: A Typology of Techno‐Legal Solutionist Logics in Child Online Safety Laws’ (2025) 17 Policy & Internet e70012. * Eric Repetto, ‘Concept “Stretching” or Concept Innovation? A Review of the Usages of Sovereignty in the Digital Sovereignty Literature’ (2025) 17 Policy & Internet e70011. * Sherry MB Thatcher and Greg Fisher, ‘From the Editors—The Nuts and Bolts of Writing a Theory Paper: A Practical Guide to Getting Started’ (2022) 47 Academy of Management Review 1. ### Blogging, newspapers, and magazines * Maria Badillo, 'AI Regulation in Latin America: Overview and Emerging Trends in Key Proposals' (_Future of Privacy Forum,_ 20 August 2025). * Cosma Shalizi, 'The Presentation Exchange for Workshops and Classes' (_Three-Toed Sloth_ , 23 March 2024) _A useful approach for fostering interdisciplinary discussion_. * Lee Vinsel, 'Against Narcissistic-Sociopathic Technology Studies, or Why Do People *USE* Technologies?' (_Peoples & Things_, 20 August 2025). * Jeffrey R Wilson, 'Aphorisms on Structure for Theoretical Papers in the Social Sciences'. ## Opportunities _Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below._ The Portuguese Competition Authority has an award for the best unpublished competition law paper. Submissions are due this Friday, **29 August**. The 2025 Platform Governance Research Network (PlatGovNet) conference invites abstracts until **2 September** , with the conference taking place on 1-2 December. Friso Bostoen and Inge Graef at Tilburg University are looking for a Postdoctoral researcher in Competition Law & Digital Regulation. Applications are due by **28 September** , with the start of a 30-month contract envisaged by 1 January 2026. The Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University is looking for two Assistant Professors in Public Administration, with particular interest in candidates whose research and teachning focuses on sustainability and/or digitalization. Applications are due by **14 September**. Also at Leiden, the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) looks for an Assistant Professor with a specialization in Intelligence and Security. Applications for this position are due by **30 September**. The Department of Law, University of Southern Denmark is hiring one or more professors, at the Assistant or Associate level, in a broad range of areas. Applications are due by **17 November** , with an envisaged starting date of 1 February 2026. ## Finally, the otter Photo by Eleonora Patricola / Unsplash Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of _AI, Law, and Otter Things_! This should be the first 'proper' issue now at the newsletter's new home, now that I'm back from a much-needed staycation. In today's issues I'll think aloud about the relationship between law and science, a hobby horse of mine. After that, you'll see the usual: a few recommendations, some opportunities, and adorable otters to wrap up the deal. ## All my tubes and wires and careful notes When I first decided to attend law school, I was primarily interested in philosophical questions about the law.1] To further ground my development in this field and broaden my horizons, I decided to take some courses at the philosophy department. Two of those ended up being in Philosophy of Science, both taught by Valter Alnis Bezerra[2]: in one of them, we spent the semester on a close reading of Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ , and the other was dedicated to making sense of the concept of models in philosophy. Those courses have been eye-opening, and I keep referring to their conceptual toolkit in some of [my work, even though I ultimately decided to focus on technology law and regulation. Before making that decision, however, I had entertained the idea of pursuing a PhD that would approach legal scholarship as a knowledge-producing practice. That research emerged, in part, from how annoyed I am at how Civil Law try to revive the label of _legal science_ from time to time. I am not quite sure that what we mean by 'science' in Portuguese or English is actually a good description of what legal scholars do or should do.[3] If that holds, trying to adopt a definition of science that encompasses both the work of jurists and that of natural and social scientists would lead to standards that are inadequate to either or both sides of the divide. But what annoyed me the most is that defenders of the idea of a legal science would rarely bother to engage with scientists or philosophers of science. At best, they would regurgitate some half-remembered Popper4] or Kuhn[5] to defend the honour of legal scholarship without engaging with the implications of their frameworks. So, younger Marco ended up with a half-baked idea that we might use some recent works in philosophy of science to try and map what distinguishes what we do in legal scholarship from scientific practices. Alas, no doctoral programme was interested in that,[6] and it turns out I am better suited to [shallower forms of research. This is not to say that law has _nothing_ to do with scientific research. I am pretty comfortable with the idea that legal research generates knowledge, which can be useful for practice but is ultimately different from what practitioners would do with much less tight time constraints than they face in practice. Moreover, as the project I mentioned above suggests, I believe some of the tools and questions raised by philosophy of science might be useful for understanding the knowledge-generating aspect of legal scholarship. By looking at the law from those perspective, and triangulating them with other forms of reflection about the law, we might understand better how legal scholarship is similar to scientific research---and when those similarities break down. Fortunately, discussions about law and science can also take forms that are more interesting than the simple question of 'is there a science of law?'7] A recent trend in legal scholarship has paid more attention to what one could term the conditions of knowledge about the law. For example, Martijn Hesselink has written on how understandings of EU law are shaped by the researchers's epistemological and ontological commitments.8] There is also considerable attention to the handling of scientific knowledge within the courts, for example in this [insightful article by Marta Morvillo and Maria Weimer. But I, for one, would like to see more work on the [social epistemology of legal scholarship, that is, to how the production of knowledge about the law is shaped by the dynamics within communities of legal scholars. My original plan for this issue, in fact, was to share a few thoughts about research agendas in the law and how we determine whether a research agenda has failed. The paragraphs above were meant as a prologue, but they quickly got out of control, so I'll stop for now and come back to the topic in the future. In the meantime, please let me know if you are familiar with recent production on the social epistemology of legal scholarship! * * * 1. In Brazil, as one would expect from a Civil Law jurisdiction, this means quite a bit of Kelsen and the Hart-Dworkin debate at the undergraduate level (and in my case, some Habermas from his later period as a minor Rawlsian). The graduate offerings were fortunately much more diverse. ↩︎ 2. Thanks, Valter! ↩︎ 3. This, of course, hinges a lot on the valence acquired by _science_ in each language. _Rechtswissenschaft_ is way more acceptable than _ciência jurídica_. ↩︎ 4. Especially if they are into some quantitative stuff. ↩︎ 5. Which is, like, my third or fourth least favourite thing about Boaventura de Sousa Santos. ↩︎ 6. At the same time, however, I was looking for a PhD outside Brazil, and ended up pitching this proposal to some Anglo departments, where, of course, the idea of thinking of law as a science is rightfully laughed out of the room. ↩︎ 7. Personally, I think 'law as engineering' offers a better model than 'law as science', but that is a discussion for another moment. ↩︎ 8. Acknowledging this value-ladenness of legal knowledge is not, in itself, an argument against the idea that law might be a science somehow. See, e.g., how philosophers of science discuss the impact of values in science and whether a value-free science is desirable or even possible. ↩︎ ## Things you might want to read * Sascha Albers, Jenny Gibb and Volker Rundshagen, ‘Theory Paper Development Training in Doctoral Education: Reflections on a PhD Workshop’ [2025] Journal of Management Education 10525629251355610. * Sarah Backman and Tim Stevens, ‘Cyber Risk Logics and Their Implications for Cybersecurity’ (2024) 100 International Affairs 2441. * Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’ (2005) 59 International Organization 39. * Paul Cairney, ‘Why Perfect Policy Coherence Is Unattainable (and May Be Ill-Advised)’ [2025] Policy Sciences. * Eva Krick and Åse Gornitzka, ‘Tracing Scientisation in the EU Commission’s Expert Group System’ (2024) 37 Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 319. * Han-Wei Liu and Ching-Fu Lin, ‘Techno-Geopolitics and Semi-Conductor Chokepoints: Beyond the US-China WTO Dispute’ (2025) 26 The Journal of World Investment & Trade 749. * Jason Seawright and John Gerring, ‘Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options’ (2008) 61 Political Research Quarterly 294. * Volker Stocker and Anna Maria Mandalari, ‘Governing IoT Cybersecurity in the Digital Single Market: A Techno-Economic and Policy Analysis of the EU Cyber Resilience Act’ (Social Science Research Network, 10 August 2025). For those of you who are into Warhammer 40,000, make sure to check out Liam Kofi Bright's Sherden Pact! This page collects lots of material that Liam and other authors have thought about Liam's Khornite army. Basically, think about what kind of society a bunch of Utilitarians would build around the idea of maximizing blood for the Blood God and skulls for the Skull Throne. Hijinks ensue. ## Opportunities We are still in a slow period in the Northern Hemisphere, so I don't have that many opportunities to share. The call for papers on (De)regulation: an interdisciplinary look at changes in EU government has been extended. Send your abstract by **1 September**! For scholars based in Brazil, CNPq has released a call to select up to 20 Brazilian PhDs to do research stays with principal investigators from ERC projects. Erasmus University Rotterdam offers a fully-funded PhD position in AI, Law and Public Power, to be supervised by Pim Jansen and Sascha van Schendel. Applications are due by **3 September**. Lund University is looking for two PhD students in law with a specialisation in total defence, preparedness and resilience. Applications are due by **22 September.** Finally, if you are an EU national, make sure to contact your government regarding the Danish presidency of the Council's latest attempt to push a flawed proposal that will lead to massive scanning of online communications while failing to effectively protect children from the harms of the online environment. Voting is currently expected to take place around 14 October, so, if you have a voice on this, use it! ## And now, the otters! Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already: Subscribe Thanks for your attention! Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!