Tübingen Conference for AI and law

November 5-6 2025 in Tübingen

The Tübingen Conference for Artificial Intelligence and law brings together academic researchers from both computer science and law in an interdisciplinary format that fosters exchange and discussions between these two fields. The conference targets an international, academic audience that is willing to think beyond the boundaries of their own discipline.

Confirmed Invited Speakers

Rediet Abebe – Harvard University / ELLIS Institute and University of Tübingen
Solon Barocas – Microsoft Research / Cornell University
Sylvie Delacroix – King’s College London
Lilian Edwards – Newcastle University
Christoph Engel – Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Michal Gal – University of Haifa
Philipp Hacker – European New School of Digital Studies, Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
Christoph Kern – Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Christoph Sorge – Saarland University

Keynote Speakers

Philipp Hacker

Philipp Hacker, LL.M. (Yale), holds the Research Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS) at European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). His research focuses on the regulation of digital technologies, particularly concerning artificial intelligence. Philipp often collaborates with computer scientists and mathematicians, especially on questions of explainable AI, algorithmic fairness, and AI’s climate effects. For his work, he received several academic prizes, such as the 2020 Science Award of the German Foundation for Law and Computer Science. He regularly advises national and EU legislators, regulatory agencies, and industry. Philipp co-founded and co-leads the International Expert Consortium on the Regulation, Economics and Computer Science of AI (RECSAI). Recently, he has been appointed General Editor of the novel, 11-volume AI and Society series published from 2025-2027 by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Task Force AI Governance and of the Advisory Board on AI and Sustainability, both for the German Federal Government, and also co-chaired the Working Group on “AI Liability” for the European Parliament in 2024-25.

Christoph Kern

Christoph Kern is Junior Professor of Social Data Science and
Statistical Learning at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and
Project Director at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research
(MZES). He received his PhD in social science (Dr. rer. pol.) from the
University of Duisburg-Essen in 2016. Before joining LMU Munich, he was
a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Professorship for Statistics and
Methodology at the University of Mannheim and Research Assistant
Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the
University of Maryland. His work focuses on the reliable use of machine
learning methods and new data sources in social science, survey
research, and algorithmic fairness.

Solon Barocas

Solon Barocas is a Principal Researcher in the New York City lab of Microsoft Research, where he is a member of the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) research group, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. His research explores ethical and policy issues in artificial intelligence, particularly fairness in machine learning, methods for bringing accountability to automated decision-making, and the privacy implications of inference. He’s co-author of the textbook Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities and co-founder of the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).

Michal Gal

Michal Gal (LL.B., LL.M., S.J.D., Hon. Dr.) is Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa, Israel, and was, until recently, the President of the International Academic Society for Competition Law Scholars (ASCOLA), comprising of more than 600 competition researchers worldwide. She was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, Melbourne, National University of Singapore, and Bocconi. Prof. Gal is the author of several books, including Competition Policy for Small Market Economies (Harvard University Press, 2003). She also published numerous scholarly articles in leading journals and has won numerous prizes for her research and her teaching. Inter alia, her paper, “Patent Challenge Clauses: A New Antitrust Offense?” (with Alan Miller) won the Jerry S. Cohen Medal, given by the American Antitrust Institute, for best antitrust paper published in 2017. In 2019 she won the highest award given by the University of Haifa, for Best Senior Researcher. In October 2022 she was chosen by Global Competition Review as one of 25 most influential competition academics (law or economics) in the world. In April 2024 she received a Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Sylvie Delacroix

Sylvie Delacroix is the Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and the director of the Centre for data Futures (King’s College London). She is also a visiting professor at the University of Tohoku (Japan). Her research focuses on the role played by habit within ethical agency, the role of humility markers as conversation enablers and the potential inherent in LLMs’ participatory interfaces. She also considers bottom-up data empowerment structures and the social sustainability of the data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible. The latter work led to the first data trusts pilots worldwide being launched in 2022 in the context of the Data Trusts initiative www.datatrusts.uk. Her latest book Habitual Ethics? was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (open-access)

Christoph Engel

Christoph Engel has been director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn from 1997 – 2025. He is a lawyer by training, with a strong interest in the law as a tool for governing society. This perspective has led him to experiments (law reacts to the behaviour of its addressees, and tries to influence it) and to large language models (both as proxies for human behaviour, and as tools for designing interventions).

Lilian Edwards

Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law and Emerita Professor of Law, Innovation & Society at Newcastle University. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985.

She worked at the University of Strathclyde from 1986–1988 and the University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at the University of Strathclyde, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at the University of Edinburgh. She resigned from that role in 2018 to take up a new Chair in Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University. She also has close links with the Oxford Internet Institute.

She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law (Hart, 2018). She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper (“Slave to the Algorithm” with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT* in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a partner in the Horizon Digital Economy Hub at Nottingham, the lead for the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI, and a fellow of the Institute for the Future of Work. At Newcastle, she is the theme lead in the data NUCore for the Regulation of Data. She currently holds grants from the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust. Edwards has consulted for inter alia the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.

Edwards co-chairs GikII, an annual series of international workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture.

Tentative Program

Wednesday 5th of November

09.00 - 09.10	Initial Remarks
09.10 - 09.15	Welcome Note - Karla Pollmann - President of the University of Tübingen
09.15 - 09.20	Welcome Note - Felix Streiter - Managing Director of the Carl Zeiss Foundation
09.20 - 09.30	Welcome Note - Marion Gentges - Minister of Justice and Migration in Baden-Württemberg (tbc)
09.30 - 10.15	Keynote - Sylvie Delacroix - Designing with uncertainty: LLM interfaces as transitional spaces for democratic revival
10.15 - 10.45	Coffee Break
10.45 - 11.45	Contributed Short Presentations
	Marta Soprana - LSE Ideas - Trade-Relevant Models for AI Governance: ‘Brussels Effect’ vs ‘Singapore Effect’
	Lyrissa Lidsky, Andrew Daves - University of Florida Levin College of Law - Inevitable Errors: Defamation by Hallucination in AI Reasoning Models
	Pierre-Alexandre Murena - Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) - Legal Co-pilots: Perspectives and Technical Challenges
11.45 - 12.30	Keynote - Solon Barocas - Informal Algoriths: On the Use of Generative AI for Decision Making
12.30 - 13.30	Lunch
13.30 - 14.30	Contributed Posters
	Wijnand van Woerkom - Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law - Applications of a Fortiori Case-based Reasoning in AI and Law
	Sebastian Nagl, Elly Breu, Angelina Greiner, Matthias Grabmair - TUM - BenGER (Benchmark for German Law) System Showcase
	Bianca Steffes, Diogo Sasdelli - Saarland University, Universität für Weiterbildung Krems - Negation as a Challenge for Machine Translation from Natural Language into Logical Formalisms in the Legal Domain
	Rabanus Derr - University of Tübingen and Tübingen AI Center - Being accurate: The EU AI Act on Accuracy
	Vivian Nastl - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen - Extending Legal Databases with LLM Annotations: Opportunities and Challenges
	Stefano Tramacere, Mathias Hanson - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa - Beyond the Vacuum: Neither Magic, Nor Mathematics! How Techno-Normative Choices Have Critical Implications for Persons Subjected to ML-Driven Decision Systems.
	Marco Sanchi - University of Pisa, University of Bologna - Towards Explainable Autonomous Vehicles Through The Artificial Intelligence Act
	Lukas Arnold - University of Bern, Institute of Public Law, and Columbia University, Department of Computer Science - Regulatory Protection Against AI Discrimination: A Comparison Between the US and the EU
	Jan Grenzebach - Federal Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (BAuA), Dortmund - Fairness Engineering in the Algorithmic Management of Platform Work
	Lezel Roddeck - Bucerius Law School - Automation Bias in Education: A Blind Spot in the European AI Act?
	Giovanni Zaccaroni - University of Milano-Bicocca - AI, democracy and the EU digital strategic autonomy
	Elif Ildirar - Hamburg University - Digital Watcher or Dijital Prosecutor? AI in Child Protection and Its Evidentiary Role in Criminal Procedure
	Yangzi Li - National University of Singapore - Human Creativity vs. Machine Intelligence: Reconceptualizing the Copyrightability of AI-Generated Outputs
	Daniel Eder - Johannes Kepler University Linz - The AI Act and Bias - Effectiveness and Technical Feasibility of Countermeasures
	Pınar Çağlayan Aksoy - Bilkent University Faculty of Law / King's College London Visiting Researcher - Attributing Agency Laws to Machines: Legal Design for the AI-Driven Contract Economy
	Tahoora Heydari - University of Helsinki - Defectiveness in the Age of AI: The Challenges and Innovations of Article 7 in the Revised EU Product Liability Directive
	Peter R. Slowinski - Adam Mickiewicz Univerity, Poznan - Legal protection of synthetic data for artificial intelligence training
14.30 - 15.15	Keynote - Lilian Edwards - ChatGPT, Why Did You Tell Me That?
15.15 - 15.45	Coffee Break
15.45 - 16.45	Contributed Short Presentations
	Vittoria Caponecchia - Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa - Defining Significant Harm in the AI Act: the Case of Voice-Based Virtual Assistant
	Madeleine Waller, Paul Waller, Karen Yeung - King's College London - Can Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods satisfy legal obligations of transparency, reason-giving and legal justification?
	Zachary Cooper - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - Dams in the Infinite River: Next-Generation Copyright In Next-Generation Interactive Media
16.45 - 17.30	Keynote - Cristoph Sorge
19.00	Conference Dinner

Thursday 6th of November

09.00 - 09.45	Keynote - Michal Gal - Optimal regulation of algorithmic competition
09:45 - 10:45	Keynote - Christoph Kern - The Human Factor in AI Pipelines
10:45 - 11:15	Coffee Break
11:15 - 11:55	Contributed Short Presentations
	Marilyne Ordekian - University College London - The Application of Large Language Models in Law: A Systematic Interdisciplinary Study of Privacy, Security, and Ethical Risks
	Teodora Groza - Sciences Po Paris - AI as self-improving infrastructure
11:55 - 12:45	Keynote - Christoph Engel - Professor GPT: Having a Large Language Model Write a Commentary on Freedom of Assembly
12:45 - 13:30	Lunch Break
13:30 - 14:15	Keynote - Rediet Abebe
14:15 - 14:55	Contributed Short Presentations
	Alessio Azzutti - University of Glasgow - Artificial Intelligence and Illegal Markets
	Anne Lauber-Rönsberg - TU Dresden University of Technology - Inferring how to Generate Outputs - Rethinking the AI System Definition under the EU AI Act
14:55 - 15:30	Coffee Break
15:30 - 16:15	Keynote - Philipp Hacker - Between hallucinations and reality: AI liability along the value chain
16:15	Closing Notes

Registration

Please fill the following form for the registration https://forms.gle/kpumJm5CwSAuCgKS6

Where

The conference will take place in Tübingen, a picturesque university town in the south-west of Germany.

Conference venues are:

📍 Day 1:
Alte Aula, in the historic town center, next to the Stiftskirche, University of Tübingen

📍 Day 2: MvL1, a brand-new building on the Tübingen AI research campus

About Tübingen

Tübingen is a leading hub for AI and law research in Europe and beyond. City is home to the:

These institutions are part of a vibrant research ecosystem that fosters collaboration across law, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

Hotels and Venue

Ibis Styles Tübingen (https://all.accor.com/hotel/9841/index.de.shtml)

Koncept Hotel Tübingen (https://www.koncepthotels.com/neue-horizonte-tuebingen/#/booking/search)

Hotel Domizil (https://www.hotel-domizil.com/)

Hotel Krone (https://www.krone-tuebingen.de/de/)

Organizing Team

This conference is funded by the Carl Zeiss Stiftung and the Cluster of Excellence “Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science.”