AI and Law Summer School in Fiesole

by Christoph Korab and Adriana Winkelmeier

From the 10th to the 14th of June, the European University Institute, together with the University of Pittsburgh, held another iteration of the “AI and Law” summer school on the beautiful premises of the EUI campus in Fiesole close to Florence revolving around machine learning in the legal domain and its challenges, opportunities and future. Adriana Winkelmeier and Christoph Korab joined this year’s program representing the Department for Innovation and Digitalisation in Law. International speakers, among others from the Universities of Bologna, Löwen, Utrecht and Pittsburgh, elaborated on various topics surrounding the use of statistical machine learning in the legal domain. This ranged from formulating legal English in logical systems over deontological logic operators and the Bayesian theorem to introducing the most relevant machine-learning techniques. Especially interesting was the hands-on session, where the participants could use Collaborate to experience programming in Python language, a predominant programming language used for AI models or perform Network Analysis on different webpages. The program ended with a thought-provoking outlook by Prof. Kevin Ashley from the University of Pittsburgh on where legal analytics as a sub-field of the developments in AI could have an increasing impact in the future.