The age of simplification

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! November has been a bit more busy than I expected, between teaching, research, planning, and Winnie's health (she's well now, but she gave us quite a bit of a scare some weeks ago). As a result, I had to scrap some of my plans for the newsletter, but hopefully I will have a bit more of time to develop them in the near future.

In today's newsletter, I want to talk about what is perhaps the most fundamental skill for academics: reading. It can feel embarrassing to suggest that one could learn how to read better, except maybe when trying to learn the mores of some other academic discipline, but my impression is that it might be worthwhile to probe the fundamentals once in a while, especially as new cohorts come with different baselines for core competencies. After that rambling, of course, there are the usual reading recommendations, opportunities, and otters. Hope you enjoy!

ABC, easy as 1, 2,3

One of my favourite science fiction stories is Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic fiction from the 1950s. That book, patterned after the Dark Ages myth that shapes popular views of the European Middle Ages, follows humanity's slow recovery after a nuclear war. One of the distinctive features of that future is that a significant chunk of the loss of knowledge and technology after the war did not come from the nukes themselves. Instead, it follows from an "Age of Simplification" in which mobs, angry at the mass carnage inflicted by the weapons developed by industrial civilization, destroy anything they associated with science and industry. Given how much in modern politics can be explained (at least in part) as a reaction against the complexities of modern society, I find myself thinking more and more about this passage.

But what that has to do with the purported topic of this rant, namely reading skills? Sparing you from my attempts at literary criticism, my throwback to Leibowitz illustrates something I see as a challenge in both teaching and reading: the fact that reading is an infrastructural skill that we all too often take for granted. This is especially true for those of us working on disciplines that centre the written word, such as the law or the humanities. My impression is that wer are seeing a breakdown of some of that infrastructure, which in turn feeds into some difficulties in communication in the classroom and within academia.

From my own experience, and those of colleagues with considerably more teaching under their belt, there is often a gap between what we see as a clear setting of expectations in writing (be it in a syllabus, a task assignment, or written feedback) and what the students make out of it. While some degree of "asking for things that are in the syllabus" has always been part of teaching experiences, there seems to be a qualitative difference over the last few years. This period coincides with things like the COVID pandemic and the spread of genAI technologies, which have certainly affected the way students develop their reading competences. Reading skills are not, of course, the only factor at stake in miscommunication, and one can point to a lot of societal expectations at play (such as the commoditization of education). However, there seems to be something different in the way newer cohorts of undergraduates and postgraduates engage with texts, particularly written ones.

It is not my goal here to say that "No, it's the children who are wrong." I want to seize this general observation to discuss something much more specific: perhaps we, as legal scholars and teachers, need to be more explicit in teaching people how to read. At this point, I am not necessarily referring to functional illiteracy, though it might be necessary to engage that phenomenon in certain contexts. Rather, anecdata suggests that we take for granted a high level of literacy (after all, law degrees everywhere tend to be attractive to a certain kind of wordcel). From that starting point, we direct our focus towards introducing students to specific legal genres: for example, Jasper Krommendijk and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius have excellent guides to reading CJEU judgments and EU legislative text. If the hypothesis of weaker (or at least shifting) literacy from the previous paragraph holds, it might be the case that we need to couple this kind of genre introduction with more basic exercises on how to make meaning, deal with ambiguities and so on. Doing so would be something akin to the "pre-calculus" courses that some universities around the world have adopted in order to cover gaps in the kind of basic mathematics that students are expected to know before university.

Regardless of that, some degree of revisiting what we take as basic reading skills can be useful even for those of us that feel comfortable as readers. Although I would suspect (or at least hope) that most people who decide to pursue careers in reading-intensive professions have more robust reading strategies than "grabbing a few words in the text and extrapolating the overall meaning based on them", there are always things we can improve. Some of us legal scholars are great at reading at depth and struggle at skim-reading, or vice-versa. For those of us that work in more international environments, there are the ongoing struggles to deal with tropes and writing styles that have been imported from one legal tradition to a different one (see, for example, how the late Cançado Trindade's...peculiar verbosity would irk scholars from other legal cultures). These and other issues illustrate how scholars learn, often by trial and error, to read in different ways.

Naturally, everybody is free to prefer some approaches to reading to others, and I do not think there is one single correct way to read a text, legal or whatever. My point is quite the contrary: at all levels, we would benefit from being exposed to different methods and ways to read. Some of them might stick with us, others might not, but we can still embrace other techniques that seem to make sense for us, or incorporate aspects of them into whatever suits us.

Nowhere the advantages of this "anthropophagic" approach to reading appear more clearly than in interdisciplinary work. One all-too-common failure mode of reading across disciplines is that we end up reading unfamiliar literary genres with the expectations from our home disciplines. Legal scholarly articles perform different roles in academic cultures than, let's say, an article in a computer science journal (a discipline that is mainly driven by conferences), and as such it has differences in structures and content. If we try and read the former like the latter, or vice versa, we might miss important information, or make legal-scholarly claims that go much beyond what the computer science evidence would support. If, instead, we are alware of these different expectations in reading, we can make better sense of the texts and potentially avoid some embarrassment.

In short, my point is that maybe we can improve the ways we think about reading and teach about reading. Not being an expert on how to teach reading, my guidance on this would not be particularly insightful. Still, the fact that those techniques exist, and sometimes fly beneath our radar, suggests we can benefit from including "reading" into the already excessively large set of skills we are invited to be reflective about. We might be ashamed of acknowledging that we need to teach students how to read — or, Heaven forbid, that we need to learn once again how to read — but there might be some fruits in doing so. So, I can only hope that we start seeing more courses on "legal reading" at all levels.

Recommendations

My upcoming book chapter with Giovanni de Gregorio, ‘The Mixed Nature of the AI Act: Product Safety and Fundamental Rights Regulation’, is now available on SSRN. This chapter will be published as part of the Hart commentary on the AI Act edited by Gianclaudio Malgieri, Gloria Gonzalez Fuster, Alessandro Mantelero, and Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna: The Artificial Intelligence Act - A Thematic Commentary (Hart Publishing 2026).

• Wolfgang Alschner, ‘Recalibration, Shielding and Containment: How the World Trading System De-Risks from China and the United States’ (2025) 24 World Trade Review 498.
• Sarah Barrington, ‘Generative AI Is Neither Too Unprecedented Nor Too New to Regulate’ (Tech Policy Press, 14 November 2025).
• Stacie E Goddard and Abraham Newman, ‘Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System’ (2025) 79 International Organization S12.
• Rafael Grohmann and Alexandre Costa Barbosa, ‘Sovereignty-as-a-Service: How Big Tech Companies Co-Opt and Redefines Digital Sovereignty’ [2025] Media, Culture & Society 01634437251395003.
• Jing Men, ‘EU–China Relations at 50: Continuity, Change, and Institutional Resilience’ [2025] China International Strategy Review.
• Andreea Năstase and Elissaveta Radulova, ‘When Consultants Come to Town: How the European Commission Justifies the Involvement of Private Contractors in Online Public Consultations’ (2025) 7 International Review of Public Policy.
• Karin Väyrynen, Casandra Grundstrom and Heidi Hietala, ‘The Role of Regulation in Information Systems Research - A Conceptual Framework’ (2025).

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. Alas, I do not make any money or benefit from these recommendations, either, so I hope at least one of you find this useful!

Next Monday and Tuesday (8-9 December 2025), the postdocs at the Department of Law of the University of the Luxembourg will host the workshop "Methods in Legal Discipline: Post-Doctoral Insights Across Research Fields". It will feature panels on comparative law, law and technology (featuring yours truly, among others), empirical methods, and law and public policy. Register ASAP to join us, either in person or online!

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has opened its call for the Support Pool of Exports for the 2026-2030 period. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis from now until August 2030.

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is looking, inter alia, for a Legislative and Scientific Officer - Legal Aspects of Data and Digital Sovereignty. If this might be you, apply by 9 January 2026.

The EUI International Economic Law and Policy Working Group (IELP WG) will host a one-day Conference on Economic Statecraft on 27 May 2026. They invite submissions on topics including sanctions, export controls, trade agreements, investment review, industrial policy, development assistance, TWAIL, infrastructural power, digital trade, climate change, shadow fleets, and digital currencies. Submit an abstract (max 500 words) + short bio (150 words) in one PDF to IELP.WG@eui.eu with the subject “Abstract_Economic Statecraft 2026_full name”. Deadline: 20 January 2026.

Melanie Fink and Daria Morozova are hosting a DigiCon symposium on humanity in the automated state. Expressions of interest are due by 2 February 2026.

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!