21 October 2026
Can We Do Without Legal Scholars?
The impact of AI on research has already led to much reflection in general and, more recently, on legal scholarship in particular, including first attempts to measure how far the practice has spread, and to examine what happens when generative systems interpose themselves between readers and law review articles. On a similar note, we have recently argued that the way researchers build their scholarship is itself under threat, and that the response required is institutional. In this blogpost, we extend that argument to legal research, where it acquires a further consequence. Continue reading >>
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19 October 2026
The Law of Stop
In Normal Accidents (1984), the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that accidents are inevitable in complex, tightly coupled systems. Slowing AI development, as Anthropic’s chief executive has proposed, may buy time, but it cannot remove the need for a techno-legal infrastructure that makes a stop possible and prepares for its failure. Lawmakers should use that time to build it, before the next AI crisis. Continue reading >>
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16 October 2026
Who Cares Who Wrote It?
The legal academy, and perhaps many other fields, is at a curious juncture. We have largely accepted AI as a tool for refinement—for polishing language, organising footnotes, checking citations, and formatting documents to meet journal specifications. Yet we have drawn a bright line. AI must not be used for ideation, argument development, and initial writing. One can test arguments with AI-based platforms, probe for weaknesses, and refine logic through dialogue with these systems. However, the generation of core ideas and legal reasoning must remain human, and writing must remain distinctly personal. But is this the right standard to adopt? Continue reading >>
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14 October 2026
The (Currently) Uneven Intelligence of AI in Comparative Constitutional Law
Our results suggest that LLMs’ usefulness for comparative constitutional data collection depends on what researchers ask them to code. They may be able to produce datasets that simply code constitutional facts, but current versions of LLMs do not perform well when asked to create datasets that require interpreting abstract constitutional concepts or reasoning about law. However, since the models make errors in systematic ways, researchers should always be cautious about treating LLM-generated data as interchangeable with expert-coded data. Continue reading >>
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12 October 2026
What AI Cannot See
The legal traditions of Indigenous Peoples and of much of the non-Western world are characteristically oral, relational, etched in carvings, seasonal, performative, and place-based. Their normative content lives in narrative, genealogy, ceremony, and the deliberations of communities; their authority is constituted through relationships between people, land, ancestors, and the non-human world. An AI system built to learn from text does not merely fail to locate such law. It is architecturally incapable of recognising legal knowledge in the forms in which that law exists. Continue reading >>
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08 October 2026
Thinking Machines, Thinking Lawyers
This symposium explores the relationship between AI and the production and delivery of legal knowledge. It also interrogates how emerging AI-based capabilities are shaping the way lawyers think, research, and act. It does not claim to present perfect answers, but is an attempt to initiate conversations on the multifaceted changes posed by AI-assisted capabilities to our traditional ways of doing legal research and teaching. Continue reading >>25 September 2026
Why I Write
I am not an award-winning writer or scholar. I live and work in conditions that are endlessly generative in terms of ideas that I could write about, and still, those very same conditions make it almost impossible to write. I write because I have come to know that it is a way in which I experience my humanness and a way in which I connect with the humanness of others across time and space. Perhaps this is why, for my writing, I do not use AI, at least not intentionally and not yet. Continue reading >>
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11 September 2026
Towards the Smoothed Word
İnsan olmaya geldim – I have come to be human. The line goes back to Nimri Dede, a folk poet from a village near Elazığ. If you know it, you probably know it in the voice of Arif Sağ, who turned the poem into one of the best-known spiritual songs of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition. Each stanza ends on the same rhyme: Özde, in the core. Sözde, in the word. Yüzde, in the face. İzde, in the trace. Közde, in the embers. Registers of becoming human, listed one after another, none struck out or played off against the others – like a refusal to split being human into a part fit to be shown and a part one merely brings along. The academic world I work in often demands the opposite movement. It demands the split: bring the word, leave the core at home. Continue reading >>
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24 July 2026
Cuts Behind the Scenes
How do I find ideas for what I write? Luckily, beyond law there is also theatre, where I do not have to choose between guilty and not guilty, where I can instead engage with social questions in all their ambivalence – though there too, crucially, you should not waffle, at least not without dramaturgical purpose. Because in theatre especially, you must think of the audience: away with overlong monologues, unnecessary scenes, confusing plots. Cut, cut, cut. I try to follow this rule when writing academic texts too. Unfortunately, the cutting does not happen in texts, where it would make sense, but behind the scenes, where it is devastating. Continue reading >>
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17 July 2026