Research

Academic papers on AI and law: the law governing artificial intelligence and the use of AI in legal work. This section brings together legal scholarship, empirical studies and technical research with a substantive connection to law, rights or legal institutions.

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Search by title, author, subject or identifier, and filter by research area, subject, jurisdiction, publication type and year. Each record brings together its publication details, a short description, source links and related wiki coverage.

The catalogue launches with 20 papers. It is a growing bibliography with published inclusion rules and coverage gaps. It includes historical and recent work; publication dates describe the papers, while the linked wiki articles provide separately maintained legal context.

Two connected areas

• Law governing AI — Regulation, governance, copyright, liability, privacy, discrimination, accountability and rights.
• AI used in law — Legal reasoning, judicial decision-making, legal research, language processing, access to justice, benchmarks and evaluation.

Some papers belong to both areas. Research is a separate collection, with links into Policy, Governance, Cases, Legislation and Regulation and AI Systems.

Start reading

These routes are an editorial starting selection from the catalogue. Follow each link for the authors, publication details and sources. The descriptions identify the subject of each paper; they do not endorse its conclusions.

• Discrimination and legal responsibility: Big Data’s Disparate Impact — Start with the relationship between data-driven decisions and U.S. employment-discrimination law. For liability questions, continue to Artificial Intelligence and Legal Liability.
• Privacy and explanations: Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box — A proposal for explaining automated decisions through possible changes to their outcomes. Read alongside the authors’ earlier right-to-explanation argument, treating both as contributions to a historical legal debate.
• Governance and social context: Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems — A route into the institutional and social context of fairness in machine-learning design.
• Copyright and generative AI: Foundation Models and Fair Use — Connects legal analysis with technical research on generative models and training material.
• Evaluating legal AI: LegalBench — Introduces legal-reasoning benchmark design. Continue to Large Legal Fictions and Hallucination-Free? for studies of reliability in general-purpose models and commercial legal-research tools.
• Earlier foundations: A history of AI and Law in 50 papers — A bibliographic route into research before the recent generative-AI wave; the linked university record provides an abstract and publication details.

Browse related coverage

• Policy — Public strategies, competing approaches and policy debates.
• Governance — Organizational oversight and risk management.
• AI Law by Topic — Legal instruments and related subject coverage.
• People in AI and Law — Authors and other people shaping the field.
• Organizations in AI Law and Policy — Research institutions and other organizations.

How the collection works

The Research tracker holds one record per work, grouping preprints, working papers and later published versions. It distinguishes law-review articles, journal articles, conference papers and working papers; peer review is identified where confirmed. Short descriptions are based on the linked records and abstracts unless otherwise stated. Research scope and coverage explains selection, verification, corrections and the sources still to be covered.