A trip to Sweden

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! Even though I still haven't returned to my usual newslettering rhythm, I must say that things are going generally well. Life in Madrid is treating me well, I got two revise and resubmit results for papers I like, and CUNEF has been a very welcoming work environment. I haven't much to complain about, other than the fact that I am still struggling to establish a routine.

In today's newsletter, I want to share some things I had the opportunity to think about in preparation for an event on digital sovereignty, and that might be of interest for readers of this newsletter. Beyond that, you will find the usual: reading recommendations, academic opportunities, and cute otters. Hope you enjoy!

AI and the shifting visions of sovereignty

Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to Sweden for the first time, combining two commitments. On Wednesday, Sarah de Heer and the EU Law Discussion Group at Lund University kindly hosted me for a discussion of my working paper on common specifications as an alternative to harmonized standards in EU product law — by coincidence, the day after the Commission published its proposed reform of the Standardization Regulation. Then, I travelled to Stockholm for a two-day conference on Digital Sovereignty in the Age of AI, organized by Liane Colonna, Martin Ebers, Donal Casey and Katja de Vries. In this newsletter, I will focus on the latter, though I hope to share more news about the former in due time.

At the Stockholm conference, I was invited to give a keynote talk. My first attempt to do one of those (online during the COVID years) was a bit of a disaster, but the conference was interesting and I'd like to believe that I have evolved a bit since then. So, it was with great pleasure and some apprehension that I accepted the invitation, not least due to an impostor syndrome screaming "you are just three otters in a trenchcoat, no way you are senior enough for this". But people were kind enough to engage with my talk, so I like to think it was a fruitful contribution to the debates.

What did I talk about? In short, my goal was to raise the question of how to make sense of the various conceptions of sovereignty that appear in discourses about "digital sovereignty" while trying to manage the space of irreducible conflict. Though (or perhaps because) I am pretty sceptical about the value of digital sovereignty as a normative ideal, it seems to me that we might still salvage something out of value — if not from the ideal itself, then at least from its growing salience in political agendas. As Chris Marsden puts it, maybe the best we can do with sovereignty is to direct the hype towards doing things we should be doing anyway but might not be as effecting in gathering political attention.

A particularly instructive example here is cybersecurity. There is a lot of lip service (among companies, public sector entities, lawmakers, etc) to the idea that digital technologies need to be developed in secure ways, but issues such as vulnerabilities are often treated as problems that harm specific (if many) individuals or entities. Yet, as digitalization spreads to many of the infrastructure that sustain critical aspects of our social lives — as well as those that are not critical but nonetheless would be annoying to do without — risks to cybersecurity become risks to a state's sovereign prerogatives. In such an environment, digital sovereignty cannot be understood as a separate domain in which a state makes claims to sovereign prerogatives, being instead a cross-domain issue that can touch even traditional state prerogatives.

My framing above is deliberately state-centric, as that matches my research interests more closely. However, debates about digital sovereignty also feature other characters. In a work-in-progress manuscript, for instance, I analyse how the EU relies on its piecemeal legal competences to stake a claim to "digital sovereignty" even though its Member States have been typically averse to anything resembling a recognition of the EU as a trans-national sovereign. Other scholars have dealt with different kinds of sovereign actors: individuals, collective sovereigns such as indigenous peoples, corporations, you name it. Each of these starting points leads to different concerns and ambitions for sovereignty. Still, they all deal with the common question of who gets to use power legimately, over whom, and in which circumstances.

AI technologies affect debates about that question in quite a few ways. They appear as instruments for power, which can support internal checks to political power (e.g. through civic tech) or enable new capabilities (such as the use of AI to support authoritarian politics). AI also appears as an object of sovereign prerogatives, as claims to sovereignty can be used for controlling or at the very least disrupting access to AI technologies and the massive social and technical infrastructures that support their use. Last but not least, they can also reshape the structures in which sovereignty claims are made and put to the test. Moreover, AI technologies deployed with one of these goals in mind might be easily repurposed to advance different aims or the interests of different stakeholders. As such, AI does not necessarily lead to a reconfiguration of the legal contours of sovereignty, but it certainly affects the mechanics through which these legal contours make themselves felt in the world.

Why does all of that matter? The panels over two days of the conference presented various insights that one might read through this lenses. I could not possibly hope to summarize them here, but all of them showed, in a way or another, how the concept of digital sovereignty — and its applications to AI — are open to various forms of political contestation. If we are to govern them in a democratic way, then we will need to develop legal and technological infrastructures that allow us to live with disagreement and change course. This is far from trivial, of course, but the alternatives are unbearable: either stasis or the foreclosure of discussions about how society and the future might be different. If "digital sovereignty" can become an umbrella for those discussions, then the concept might turn out to have a useful contribution after all. But, of course, that is always a big if.

Recommendations

In my final months in Luxembourg, I had the pleasure to collaborate with Tom Deckenbrunnen and a research team from LIST, and the outputs of our collaboration have just been published in the AIES 2026 conference: Tom Deckenbrunnen and others, ‘Bathtubs, Boundaries, and Sandboxes: AI Regulatory Learning Under Legal Uncertainty’ (2026) 9 Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 775.

And here are some interesting things from other people:

• Pratham Ajmera, ‘European Product Regulation Gets a Security Update – The EU Cyber-Resilience Act as an Adaptation to a Highly Digitised Product Market’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation.
• Flavia Donadelli, ‘When Evidence Does Not Matter: The Barriers to Learning from Science in Two Cases of Environmental Policy Change in Brazil’ (2020) 47 Science and Public Policy 313.
• Martin Dresler and others, ‘Effective or Predatory Funding? Evaluating the Hidden Costs of Grant Applications’ (2023) 101 Immunology & Cell Biology 104.
• Odile Feltkamp, ‘More than a Broker: The Commission in Trilogues for Geoeconomic Instruments’ [2026] Journal of European Public Policy.
• Tom Kelsey, ‘Why Concorde Failed: Political Economy and the Limits of Techno-Nationalism’ (2026) 67 Technology and Culture 559.
• Kai Purnhagen and Justus Wesseler, ‘The Icarus Effect in EU Law’ [2026] Yearbook of European Law yeag005.
• Renske Vos, ‘“If the Law Were a Colour [It Would Be Gold]”: The Architecture of the CJEU’ [2026] European Law Open.
• Fan Yang and others, ‘From Regulatory Learning to Institutional Change: How Organizations Translate Regulatory Engagement into Governance Influence’ (2026) 230 Technological Forecasting and Social Change 124756.

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.

Applications for our assistant professorships at CUNEF University are open until TOMORROW (15 October 2026).

The College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the School of Law at Northeastern University seek to fill an open-rank faculty position at the tenured/tenure-track Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor level in the area of Artificial Intelligence Policy, Regulation, and Governance. Applications will be reviewed from 31 October 2026 onwards, with an expected starting date of 16 August 2027.

At the other side of town, IE University is looking for tenure-track assistant professors in Public Law and Private Law, as well as for a tenured Professor of Law. In all cases, applications are expected by 10 November 2026.

In Brazil, the São Paulo state research funding agency (FAPESP) invites applications for its Young Investigator Grant for International Researchers. This is a 60-month grant meant to support employment and help scholars not based in Brazil transition into permanent employment. Applications, supported by a hosting university, are due by 19 November 2026.

The #EUIA27 conference will take place in Brussels from 12 to 14 May 2027, with the theme Europe in a disrupted global order. Paper proposals are due by 6 December 2026.

And now, the otter

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!