A new home

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! Today I am just writing to let you know that my newsletter has a new home now: it is hosted in a different platform, and you can access it through https://blog.marcoalmada.com! So, this issue does not feature the usual essay on law or academic life. Still, you can find the usual suspects below: some reading recommendations and a few cute otters at the end. Hope you enjoy it!

Changing platforms

As of yesterday, I have completed migration from Substack to Ghost, an alternative platform that will hopefully not show the same tolerance to genocidal ideologies. While I have been entertaining a change of platforms for a while now, seeing some Nazi apologetics on a Tuesday morning ended up being a catalyst for change. Fortunately, migration to Ghost ^[1] is very easy, and I could set up this new website quickly. I hope you will be still following AI, Law, and Otter Things in its new home!

For those of you who have a more technical mind, Ghost is an open-source project that can be used for self-hosted websites. Because I am very lazy in maintaining technical infrastructure, and I just want a place to host my newsletter, I am also using their hosted service. ^[2] If you are considering a migration away from Substack, there are other platforms, which might be more or less suitable to your purposes. Ghost provides a helpful (though naturally opinionated) comparison of current platforms, which might help you find something that suits your needs.

So far, one thing that annoys me about this platform is its sub-optimal support to footnoting. To add a footnote to my text in Ghost, I need to create a specific text block and include some Markdown annotation to insert the notes. What's worse: each block has its own footnote numbering, so the notes will reset within each section (or even before, if I add something like a GIF in-between paragraphs). There are some workarounds to this behaviour, but they all seem to work on the website while leaving the email footnotes a mess. So, I guess we'll need to live with bad footnotes for now.

As a legal scholar and Pratchett fan, I find that footnoting is an integral part of my writing style. These hiccups are not enough, in themselves, to make me drop the platform, as it seems to have various other advantages. Even so, my footnoting issues might be a factor in a future migration if other issues emerge.

Recommendations

• Andrea Bertolini, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability: A European Perspective’ (European Parliament 2025) Study PE 776.426.
• Peter Alexander Earls Davis and Rebecca Schmidt, ‘Standardised Bias? The Role – and Limits – of European Standards Bodies in the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act’ (Internet Policy Review, 24 July 2025).
• Gerda Falkner and others, ‘Digital Sovereignty - Rhetoric and Reality’ (2024) 31 Journal of European Public Policy 2099.
• Filippo Gualtiero Blancato, ‘The Cloud Sovereignty Nexus: How the European Union Seeks to Reverse Strategic Dependencies in Its Digital Ecosystem’ (2024) 16 Policy & Internet 12.
• Margot E Kaminski and Andrew D Selbst, ‘An American’s Guide to the EU AI Act’ (Social Science Research Network, 30 July 2025).
• Nari Johnson and others, ‘Legacy Procurement Practices Shape How U.S. Cities Govern AI: Understanding Government Employees’ Practices, Challenges, and Needs’, Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Association for Computing Machinery 2025).
• Rafał Mańko, ‘Procedures before the Court of Justice of the EU: A Systematic Overview’ (European Parliament 2025) Study PE 775.870.
• Aya Rizk and Ida Lindgren, ‘Automated Decision-Making in Public Administration: Changing the Decision Space between Public Officials and Citizens’ (2025) 42 Government Information Quarterly 102061.
• Diego Salazar Morales, Shivant Jhagroe and Pedro Pineda, ‘(De)Colonial Public Administration Education? A Comparative Study of North-South Curricular Differences’ [2025] Teaching Public Administration 01447394251364253.
• Kim Lane Scheppele, ‘Bullying Universities’ (Verfassungsblog, 28 July 2025).
• Alicia Solow-Niederman, ‘Beyond the Supply Chain: Artificial Intelligence’s Demand Side’ (Social Science Research Network, 25 July 2025).

Finally, more otters!

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!