Plus ça change...

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.

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.
• M^a 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

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!