Digital Legal Lab Newsletter April

Hi! Thanks for reading the monthly Digital Legal Lab newsletter, where we round up the latest news & views from our cross-university research collaboration on digital legal studies. For more information, updates and events, please visit our website.

What's new at the Digital Legal Lab

We would like to invite you to our DLS Winter School titled “Data, personalization, and the law 2023” that we organise from 4 to 8 December 2023 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands! The winter school will be dedicated to technological and regulatory developments and interdisciplinary debates in relation to data and personalisation. The winter school is aimed at early career researchers – PhD students and post-doctoral researchers – active in these topics, from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. There will be no participation fee and we also plan to cover participants’ accommodation.

Reminder: The deadline for submitting abstracts for the Digital Legal Talks (4th June) is approaching. Digital Legal Talks 2023 will be an all-day event packed with exciting talks and sessions on law & digital technologies, with researchers from within and outside the Digital Legal Lab sharing their work, perspectives and ideas on the digitalization of society. The conference will be held fully in-person this year, at De Zalen va Zeven (Boothstraat) in Utrecht. Participation is free of charge. We are absolutely delighted to announce that the keynote speaker at DLT2023 is professor Luciano Floridi, the founding director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

You can download the call for papers and submit your abstract before 4th June. Stay tuned for more details on the program, registration and other information about DLT2023.

We are excited to announce that we have opened the registrations for yet another meeting of the Privacy Book Club. This time, we will discuss The Fight for Privacy by Danielle Keats Citron. The session will be held on 19 June 2023, from 12-13:00h CEST. This session's book pick is The Fight for Privacy by Danielle Keats Citron! Registration will open soon here.

Organized by Digital Legal Lab members Irene Kamara (Tilburg University) and Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux (Maastricht University), the Privacy Book Club aims to bring together researchers interested in privacy-related topics to discuss new scholarship on privacy, revisit critical theories, and debate the future of privacy. The book club welcomes everyone interested in privacy and data protection and is willing to share their thoughts with the club members.

Conference on the "Legal and Technical challenges of large generative AI models". On July 4 and 5, a conference on “Legal and technical Challenges of Large Generative AI Models (LGAIMs)” takes place at the UN headquarters in Geneva. Organised by Philipp Hacker (European New School of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina, Germany) and Sarah Hammer (University of Pennsylvania Law School, USA), the conference hosts a well-selected variety of speakers from many reputable institutions. DLS researcher Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius will speak on large generative AI models and non-Discrimination Law.

DLS researchers Gijs Van Dijck (Maastricht University), Antoine Louis and Gerasimos Spanakis published a very interesting research paper on whether and how machines can help providing basic legal assistance to people who need it. They analysed how to automatically identify the relevant legal provisions (articles) given a legal question. Traditional approaches to searching for legal articles do not take into account the way that legal articles are connected to each other. Their approach uses this interconnectedness to quite significantly improve the search results compared to existing models. The results bring us a step closer to reducing the gap between laypersons seeking legal information and the information enclosed in often complex laws.

On 26 May 2023, the ArbMetaBlock 2023 will take place in Ghent. Organised by the university of Ghent, it centres around the topic: The future is now! Blockchain, Metaverse, Web3 and (what it really means for) arbitration. The event will offer insightful panel dicussions and ample networking opportunities. Breakfast, coffee breaks, lunch and a reception at the end of the day are included. DLS researcher Pietro Ortolani is one of the invited speakers!

We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Dr. Lokke Moerel, Professor of Global ICT Law at Tilburg University and Senior of Counsel, Morrison & Foerster (Brussels) will give the keynote speech at the Cybersecurity Conference on 22nd June in Brussels. There is still time to register for the conference, so make sure to join us in Brussels!

We are looking for a student assistant! Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) is looking for a student assistant to support in the communication around the Digital Legal Studies Network in which the universities of Tilburg, Amsterdam, Maastricht and Nijmegen collaborate. The position gives you the opportunity to become involved in the work of a group of more than 50 researchers at Dutch universities in the field of law and technology.