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
Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker
Prof. Dr. 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)
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 - Saarland University - 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 |
| 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:
- CZS Institute for AI and Law
- Tübingen AI Center
- Cluster of Excellence – Machine Learning for Science
- Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
- ELLIS Institute Tübingen
- Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen
- Department of Law, University of Tübingen
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.”
