Summer musings

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! I hope you have been doing well since the last issue, a few weeks ago. Summer was never my favourite time of the year, and moving countries during a heatwave wasn't a particularly pleasant experience, either. Other than that, however, I have little to complain about, and hopefully future issues of this newsletter will have more exciting stuff to share.

In the meantime, this issue follows the usual division into four main parts. First, I share some recent publications and works in progress, before highlighting the work of others. After that, you can find some opportunities (jobs, events, and the like), before the newsletter ends with a cute otter. Hope you enjoy!

Taking stock of the semester

My final semester in Luxembourg was not very productive in terms of outputs. Over the last few months, I have wrapped up a few projects (including some material still under review) and sowed the seeds for some future work. I gained a lot from that time—not just in the weight department—but that has not always led to tangible outputs. So, allow me to gather together a few things that you can actually see.

The most relevant of those are, perhaps, the publications I was involved in. As a sole author, I focused on my monograph (which is not close to the shelves yet), as well as two submitted articles:

• One on common specifications; and
• Another that argues that a comprehensive legal framework for quantum computing is neither feasible nor desirable at this point.
• Also, my book chapter on how the AI Act's diffusion as a global standard for AI governance is limited both by its regulatory architecture and the current geopolitical context is now out.

Much of my output this semester has come from collaborations. This is not necessarily optimal from a career perspective, as law hiring panels and evaluation boards do not always see such collaborations as a possibility of writing something bigger than the sum of their parts. Still, I find that a good collaboration can not only lead to better research, but can be a fun experience, too (although this is not inherent to joint work). And I quite enjoyed the ones that got published this year:

• An article in Digital Society, with Blazej Kuzniacki. on the interconnection between digital sovereignty and tax sovereignty in the context of digitalized public adimistrations;
• An article in European Law Open, with Niovi Vavoula and Giacomo Zampieri, on the interplay between securitization and fundamental rights as horizontal concerns that reshape the market-based approach of EU digital regulation; and
• A book chapter with Giovanni de Gregorio on the structural implications of the AI Act's peculiar mix of product safety and fundamental rights.

For the next semester, I plan to spend some time focusing on my research on technology-neutral regulation, both for revising the book manuscript and for producing spin-off publication(s). Since I will be adjusting to a new job, with a somewhat greater teaching load, I do not want to commit to more than that. But let's see what the next four months or so will bring.

Recommendations

Today's recommendations are a bit more discursive than usual. This is not only a way to compensate for the self-promotion above, but also a way to highlight a few things that might be particularly interesting for some of you.

As I refreshed my Bluesky timeline today, I came across a post by Steffen Hope about Serendipity as method, or - The case for reading broadly. Not knowing the author, or his field of work, I nonetheless found it a useful read for, well, everyone. To the extent that I have something interesting to say about law and technology, I owe that to filtering my legal and computer-science educations through an accumulation of readings on random topics.

There is, of course, a trade-off between breadth and depth, and the neophilia that characterizes technology law scholarship means that we have our plates full with keeping up with recent legal, societal, and technical developments. Still, this blogpost argues (and I wholeheartedly agree) that one should make the effort to read in a less immediately instrumental way, at least some of the time. Otherwise, we run the risk of reading the same texts and saying the same things when we write.

This is, in fact, one of my main gripes with 'law and technology' as a scholarly community. For all the diversity of societal sectors touched by the law, and of ways of framing them, scholarship on legal issues connected to technology tends to gravitate towards certain formulas, topics, and approaches. This is not to say that everything is always the same: some scholars give voice to groups and concerns that are underrepresented in the literature, others draw our attention to new problems or borrow techniques from other disciplines to make sense of what we are looking at, and so on. But, if we fail to regularly engage with things other than the scholarship produced by the law and tech community, our debates can quickly become stale and self-referential.

As tempting as it is to blame staleness on a lack of interdisciplinarity, or the rejection of history that leads law and tech scholars (myself included) to rewrite the same papers every 10 years or so, that is not the only thing we should be concerned about. A recent blogpost by Lee Vinsel pushes back against the idea that we should look at 'technology' as something that can be analysed as a coherent target of critique. Vinsel makes a good case that the term has little value as an analytical category and that we should focus instead on concrete problems and their causes. So, I would recommend this blogpost to people trying to pin down what we are studying when we study law and technology, even if I have some reservations about a reductionist materialism.

From a legal perspective, Vinsel's arguments about the problems with 'technology' as a focus for scholarship create a problem for the ongoing methodological turn in law and tech. Methods are expected to offer guidance and rigour to our studies but they cannot, in itself, solve the problem of shoddy foundations. As Geoffrey Samuel reminds us poor lawyers, astrology's systematic character does not make it any less awful as a guide for life. If technology turns out to be a useless or even harmful concept for understanding how particular technical arrangements become relevant to the law, building a complex and coherent field of 'law and technology' might likewise be problematic. Perhaps we would do well to consider alternative ways to frame these challenges to the law.

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 European Public Law Organization (EPLO) is looking for resident teaching staff for their campuses in Legraina (Greece), Rome (Italy) and Cascais (Portugal). Applications are due by 31 July.

Eva van der Zee at the University of Hamburg is recruiting two research associates (PhD candidates) to explore sustainable development/climate change through the lens of international/EU law. Command of the German language is desired but not required. Applications close by 17 August.

Erasmus University Rotterdam is recruiting an Assistant Professor in the Governance of Complex Societal Transformations. Applications are due by 21 August.

Leiden University is recruiting an Assistant Professor in Security Studies. Applications are due by 28 August.

The folks at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law are looking for an associate professor in international and European law, with a focus on either EU digital regulation or international law. Applications are due by 29 August, with an envisaged starting date of 1 January 2027.

UC Berkeley Law is looking for a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Inequality, and Society. Applications are due by 4 September.

Singapore Management University is recruiting professors at all ranks in a variety of areas, including FinTech and Law and Technology. Applications are due by 25 September.

TalTech (Tallinn, Estonia) is looking to hire a tenured professor in European Legal Policy and Technology Law. Applications are due by 1 October.

The Open Institute for Digital Transformations at SciencesPo invites applications for visiting faculty working on the transformative role of AI in society and its potential impacts on democracy. Applications are due by 15 November, but candidates should contact the relevant department/research centre at least 6 weeks prior to this deadline.

And now, the 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!