fortuna e virtù

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! It has been two weeks since I last wrote you, and quite a bit has happened in the marvellous world of cybersecurity: state-sponsored fridge hacks, a commercial roll-out of Anthropic's approach to AI-powered bug-finding, not to mention good old human intelligence. I don't have anything ultra insightful to add about these topics at the moment, other than to highlight how these developments can be read in the key of the mainstreaming of cybersecurity concerns that has been studied, inter alia, by your humble scribe. Still, I guess this means questions of cybersecurity are likely to keep popping up in my work.

Today I will talk, instead, about randomness and the amount of wasted work that is more and more common in academic careers. After that, you will find the usual reading recommendations and opportunities, plus a cute otter. Hope you enjoy!

Frittering academic work

Just the other day, academics in my network were shocked by the sheer number of applications to the ERC Starting Grant: more than 7,700 proposals were received, and the expectations are that around 370 or so will be funded. Since this was the first year in which I would be eligible to submit a proposal, I must confess that my first reaction to this number was to feel less guilty about not doing so. After the knee-jerk relief, a second reaction was to try and understand the multiple causes for that development, such as the use of AI in grant writing, the mismatch between EU's ambitions of profiting from the US and UK efforts to destroy their academic powerhouses and the funding available for European research, the even worse starvation of most national research agencies...all of those are relevant factors, about which I am not particularly qualified to speak.

What I can talk about, however, is the sensation that all of that is a lot of wasted time. Preparing a grant application is something that takes time and, even if one assumes most of those application are AI slop, the amount of person-hours that will have been spent in drafting ERC Starting Grant proposals far outstrips the work time that all the awarded grants will fund. And that's even before we get to the time spent reading these applications and arriving at difficult decisions about which research agendas are to be rewarded with recognition (and the ensuing prestige that awardees get from succeeding at the rat race). Pardon me if I am not entirely convinced that this is the most rational way to allocate research funding from a societal perspective.

Especially once we consider that the ERC Starting Grant is not an outlier. If anything, the situation with the Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdocs is even more competitive, and each national system (in the EU and beyond) has its own form of hell. And the phenomenon of wasted work is not limited to funding. In my two forays into the academic job market—before and after my postdoc—I had submitted over 50 applications, which led to 19 interviews and a much smaller number of offers. Having landed a postdoc that allowed me to mature and now a tenure-track position, I count myself lucky, as some brilliant colleagues have spent even more energy in their applications. And, of course, think of the poor folks processing all of these applications and attending the interviews with hopeful candidates. All in all, a massive time drain for everyone involved.

From those experiences, I am mostly left with two impressions. On a personal level, this is all a lesson in humility. While my work has been fortunately well received by some cool academic communities, that is no guarantee of a career. There is enough quality going around that many hiring committees (and funding agencies) can still find a suitable candidate by choosing at random between qualified candidates. So, the fact that I now have a job that I enjoy is something that owes as much—and likely more—to happenstance and lucky breaks than it does to the quality of my work.

On a systemic level, it all makes me think that we as scholars tend to overestimate our precision as evaluators. We might be very well able to identify when a research proposal has little to add to academic knowledge, or when a candidate is clearly unqualified for a function. I am much more sceptical that we fare that well in trying to distinguish the top 5% from the top 4% of applications, even more so if we are trying to rank among options that would already be satisfactory. But, in an attempt to be fair, academia as a promotion spends more and more effort and time (which could go to something else) to rely on fine distinctions that, after a certain point, become very hard to distinguish from motivated reason.

Because of this, I am increasingly sympathetic to biting the bullet of randomness. One nice initiative in this regard is the British Academy's use of partial randomness to assign Small Research Grants, which has led to increased diversity among grant awardees, while relying on a first round of assessment to winnow projects that do not reach a certain level of quality. I am not entirely sure that we can get such proposals to work at a larger scale, as enough people have a visceral reaction to randomness and the risk that some 'undeserving' person might luck out. Yet, my impression is that any manageable solution to academia's future will require something like that. Otherwise, we end up with the worst of both worlds: an unfair system that optimizes neither for quality research nor for the best use of public resources.

Recommendations

It has been a while since my last shameless plugging of my works in progress, but readers might be interested in my drafts on anticipatory regulation and quantum computing and common specifications in EU law.

For non-academic recommendations, I have recently enjoyed two fiction books that I think you should look into. Emily St John Mandel's Exit Party is a gripping narrative about alternative realities, the bonds we form, and toxic relationships, set against the backdrop of two different failure modes of the United States. Annalee Newitz's A Wall is Also A Road is a tale of academia, tough choices, and the encounter with the Other, set between an alien university and a pre-eruption Pompeii. Readers who have an inclination to be annoyed by "woke stuff" might want to skip both, but it's their loss.

As for academic recommendations, here are a few picks that might interest you:

• Albert Adusei Brobbey, ‘Persistent Agent Memory under the EU AI Act and NIS2: Misalignment, Emergent Behaviour and Regulatory Fit’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation.
• Graham Butler, ‘Legal Basis of EU Legal Acts: Choice, Doctrine, and Practice’ [2026] Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies.
• Henk W de Regt and others, ‘Scientific Understanding Across Disciplines: In Varietate Concordia?’ [2026] Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
• Francesca Fumagalli, ‘The CJEU on the of “Free Access” to ISO Standards in EU Law’ [2026] European Journal of Risk Regulation.
• Atte Ojanen and others, ‘Governing Rapid Technological Change: Policy Delphi on the Future of European AI Governance’ [2026] Foresight.
• Monika Plozza, The Human Right to Science: A Framework for Justiciability (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.

Tomorrow (11 November), our Department of Law at CUNEF Universidad will host Amaya Alvez Marín (Universidad de Concepción) for a talk on «Reconsiderando la necesidad de un constitucionalismo más-que-humano. ¿La forma por sobre la sustancia?», from 13:00 onwards. If you would like to join, contact Andrés Delgado at firstname.lastname@cunef.edu

The STRATEGO Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Antwerp invites applications for its Visiting Researchers Programme 2027. Researchers working on topics related to Regulatory Simplification and Trust in EU Governance can apply until 30 November 2026 for short stays at the Centre of Excellence.

The call for applications to the EUI doctoral programmes in Economics, History and Civilisation, Law, and Political and Social Sciences is now officially open. Doing a PhD at the EUI (at least in the Law department) is a unique experience, with an openness to methods and research topics that is difficult to find elsewhere and welcoming social environment—while allowing you to work and live amid stunning buildings and art. Applications will remain open until 15 January 2027, and some virtual information sessions will be held in the first week of December 2026.

The University of Luxembourg Institute for Digital Ethics (ULIDE) is looking for a post-doctoral researcher in cybersecurity or related fields for a 24-month project. The ideal candidate should have a particular emphasis or interest in humanitarian cybersecurity, data protection, and/or privacy-by-design.

Stergios Aidinlis (Monash) is organizing a special issue of Laws on the topic of 'AI Law(s): A New Legal Order, or Old Tools in New Hands?' Submissions are due by 31 October 2027.

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!