Taking stock of 2025

Marco Almada

Marco Almada

— 8 min read
Taking stock of 2025
Photo by Sincerely Media / Unsplash

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! First of all, I would like to wish you a happy new year. Even though 2026 has already started with some awful news in the macro scale (not personally, but look at the world!), I can only hope that you have managed to find some personal and/or professional joy in the meantime. In today's issue, I will recap some of the highlights of 2025 from my point of view.

As usual, there will be a cute otter by the end of this email. Before that, I will share a personal recap of the year, followed by some recommendations of stuff I enjoyed in 2025. Then, some job openings and academic opportunities, as usual. Hope you enjoy!

The battle's done, and we've kind of won

2025 was a weird, transitional year for me. Having just finished my PhD, I spent most of the year trying to figure out what is next for me. My plan is to stay in academia, as I feel that my temperament and interests are best suited for that career path. However, I no longer am particularly keen on the research questions that have dominated my publications over the past 8 years or so. I don't feel like I have anything particularly novel to say about transparency or regulation by design, for instance, and focusing on the law-CS interface is starting to take time from the questions that drove me to legal research in the first place. So, I ended up spending much of my year trying to figure out how to position myself as a scholar.

In that regard, my current employment under the Chair in Cyber Policy at the University of Luxembourg has been very useful. It allowed me to broaden my material focus from AI technologies to other developments such as quantum computing (or the hype surrounding it), cybersecurity challenges, and digital sovereignty. By doing so, I also had the opportunity to engage more deeply the scholarly literature on policy studies, and my ongoing research dedicates much attention to how regulators learn to deal with uncertainty and how that learning is shaped by the law. As we begin a new year, I am happy to say that I finally found a research direction that should keep me entertained for the next few years, if I find an employer willing to pay for that.

Of course, taking some time to explore new directions has some impact on my research output. This year, my article on the AI Act with Nicolas Petit was finally published, and I also had the opportunity to write a textbook on AI and data protection under the aegis of the EDPB Support Pool of Experts. Other than that, however, most of my pieces are things that either had long publication cycles (the chapter on competition and the article on XAI) or shorter invited pieces. Fortunately, these pieces have been well received, but it feels frustrating to be unable to have anything to show for my new research interest other than some very exploratory essays in previous issues of this newsletter.

Fortunately, that seems poised to change in 2026. I am proud to say that my book 'Delegating the Laws of Tomorrow: The hidden costs of technology-neutral regulation' is now under contract with Oxford University Press. While there is no publication date in the horizon, yet, I can already anticipate to you that the book considerably expands the approach I developed in my PhD thesis. It provides a clearer analytical framework for technology-neutral regulation as a form of delegation, indicates how that framing matters at various stages of the policy cycle, and applies that toolkit beyond my original focus on the EU AI Act. I will keep you posted as things evolve.

In addition to that, some of my other research directions are starting to bear fruit. I have finally shared a draft of my first engagement with policy learning in the context of digital regulation, as well as some work on digital sovereignty with my frequent pen-pal Blazej Kuzniacki, and my first joint-authored piece within the scope of the Chair in Cyber Policy is currently undergoing revisions. Hopefully this means future issues of this newsletter will be more exciting rather than just going through the motions.

Research outputs

Published

Upcoming

  • ‘The EU AI Act in a Global Perspective’ in Markus Furendal and Magnus Lundgren (eds), Handbook on the Global Governance of AI (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026)
  • ‘The Mixed Nature of the AI Act: Product Safety and Fundamental Rights Regulation’ (with de Gregorio G) in Gianclaudio Malgieri and others (eds), The Artificial Intelligence Act - A Thematic Commentary (Hart Publishing 2026)
  • Two entries with Radu A in Austen Parrish, Cedric Ryngaert and Danielle Ireland-Piper (eds), Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Extraterritoriality and the Law (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026)
  • ‘Privacy by Design’ (with Negri Ribalta C) in Rosamunde van Brakel, Valerie Steeves and David Murakami Wood (eds), Elgar Encyclopedia of Privacy and Surveillance (Edward Elgar Publishing 2026)

Things I've enjoyed last year

Recent publications and preprints

  • Silvia De Conca, ‘The Law of the European Horse: The Law and Technology Scholarship in the European Union, Between National Legal Traditions and Supranational Governance’ (2025) 11 The Italian Law Journal 118. A good treatment of the limits of importing the 'law of the horse' framing from the US context. I am sceptical about the calls towards rigour and the appropriation of established methodologies (see the recommendation for Cartwright et al below), but it is a thought-provoking read about how to do research on law and technology in Europe.
  • Vivek Krishnamurthy, ‘Anchoring Digital Sovereignty’ (2025) 25 Chicago Journal of International Law 417. An exciting, pun-filled exploration of how the law of the sea might help us think about sovereignty in cyberspace in terms of bundles of rights rather than as an all-or-nothing concept.
  • Martino Maggetti, Introduction to Regulation and Governance (Edward Elgar, 2025) So far, my favourite introductory text to regulation, as its conciseness and breadth of scope allows newcomers to view the perspective broadly and avoid capture by a narrow, economicist view of the subject.
  • Joana Mendes, ‘The EU and the Administration’s Unattainable Subordination to the Law’ [2025] Current Legal Problems cuaf007. Identifies the challenges to the rule of law posed by complex, future-looking regulation, in which the elements that legal norms would use to tame administrative action are themselves constituted, to a lesser or greater extent, by the work of the administrators themselves.

Older texts

  • Nancy Cartwright, Jeremy Hardie, Eleonora Montuschi, Matthew Soleiman, and Ann C. Thresher, The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity (OUP 2022). This book proposes that the value of science stems not from its adherence to a particular method, or from the truthfulness of specific claims or theories, but from the reliability of a variety of science products (including, yes, theories, but things such as models and procedures and many other) and the purposes that these products may serve. This is a good entry point for lawyers interested in questions of rigour who might want to look at what is going on in natural and social sciences.
  • Edward W Constant, ‘Why Evolution Is a Theory about Stability: Constraint, Causation, and Ecology in Technological Change’ (2002) 31 Research Policy 1241. A useful reminder of the importance of framing when trying to make sense of technological developments, and of the dependence of innovation on existing capabilities.
  • Claire A Dunlop and Claudio M Radaelli, ‘The Lessons of Policy Learning: Types, Triggers, Hindrances and Pathologies’ (2018) 46 Policy & Politics 255. Good introduction to the literature on policy learning.
  • Kevin J Elliott, Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press 2023). Some interesting pushback against the idea that time-demanding forms of political participation are necessarily more democratic.
  • Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman. Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton University Press 2020). A fascinating reminder of the contingent character of our current view of sovereignty as an atomic property of nation states, showing the conditions under which public-private hybrids were able to exercise some of the prerogatives we now associate with the term and how those conditions broke down.
  • Christopher Pollitt and Peter Hupe, ‘Talking About Government: The Role of Magic Concepts’ (2011) 13 Public Management Review 641. Provides an approach to think about terms that become pervasive in policy discourse despite (or even because of) their lack of a sharp definition, in light of factors such as their normative attractiveness: who is against 'transparency' or 'accountability'?

Beyond work

  • Parlement (TV show). A funny, multilingual TV show set in the European Parliament. Lots of in-jokes for EU nerds.
  • Isabel J. Kim, 'Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole' [2024] Clarkesworld. A very interesting response to a classical science fiction story.
  • Laurent Binet, Civilizations (Grasset & Fasquelle 2019). This one is kind of cheating, as I had read it before, but I'll count it because this time I could read it in the original. If you don't know it, it's a fancy alternative history book based on the premise of the European colonization of the Americas never taking place.

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.

Warwick Law School seeks to appoint one permanent Assistant Professor from 1st September 2026. They particularly welcome applicants with a focus on EU Law and/or Trusts Law. Applications are due by 13 January.

TILTing Perspectives 2026, the law and technology conference hosted by the famous tech law centre at Tilburg University, has extended the deadline for its call for papers to 25 January. The conference itself takes place from 17-19 June.

The Contextual Research in Law group at VU Brussel will host the NextGen Legal Scholars Conference for PhD and early postdoctoral researchers. They invite submissions until 30 January, with the event taking place on 20 March.

City St George’s, University of London is seeking a Lecturer (Education and Research), with preference for candidates with expertise on Torts, Land/Real Property, and Equity and Trusts. Applications are due by 30 January.

My colleagues at NOVA PEARL will host a workshop on Fundamental Rights Protection From, With, and By Regulators. Submissions from scholars at all points of their career are welcome, but early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Submit your abstract by 8 February and discuss your work in sunny Lisbon on 10 April!

The Central European University in Vienna is looking for an Assistant Professor in International Relations. Applications are due by 28 February.

And now, the otter

A close up of a sleeping otter on a blanket
Photo by Philipp Mika / Unsplash

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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!

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