Digital Legal Lab Newsletter February

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 or follow us on social media.

What's new at the Digital Legal Lab

If you haven’t yet listened to the fourth episode of the “Research Conversations” Podcast, join host Iris Xu, a PhD researcher in Maastricht’s Law and Tech Lab, and the three guests involved in the CLASSICA project, which aims to validate AI in classifying cancer in real-time surgery. Our guests are Prof. Ronan Cahill, who is the Coordinator of CLASSICA and the Director of the Centre for Precision Surgery, UCD and the Digital Surgery Unit, MMUH, Prof. Sara Gerke, an Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law and Head of the Penn State Dickinson Law Study, and Prof. Mindy Nunez Duffourc, an Assistant Professor of Private Law, a member of the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab and Member of Penn State’s CLASSICA legal research team. They discuss the importance of the project in helping surgeons make better decisions during operations, particularly in cases where it is difficult to determine if a polyp is cancerous or benign.

Dive into the intricate world of technology regulation with a book, edited Digital Legal Lab's Inge Graef and Bart van der Sloot. This upcoming publication, "The Legal Consistency of Technology Regulation in Europe," masterfully combines the critical spheres of fundamental rights, economic law, and the cutting-edge issues of digital platforms, data, and AI.

Inge Graef, an esteemed Associate Professor of Law & Technology, brings her deep knowledge of competition law and its intersection with other critical areas of EU law to the table. Meanwhile, Bart van der Sloot, an Associate Professor of Big Data & Privacy, offers his profound insights into privacy, big data, and the intricacies of internet regulation.

This book can be your key to understanding the complex web of technology regulation in Europe, poised to become an essential resource for professionals and scholars alike. Scheduled for open access release in mid-June, the opportunity to gain insights is not to be missed.

Secure your copy today by pre-ordering and be among the first to explore the legal frameworks that will shape our digital future.

Embark upon an analytical exploration of data categorization and its legal protections with the forthcoming publication, "The Boundaries of Data," under the editorship of Bart van der Sloot, Associate Professor specializing in Big Data and Privacy, alongside Sascha van Schendel, a post-doctoral researcher in the field of AI and the rights to data protection and non-discrimination. This interesting work is further augmented by contributions from Inge Graef and Thomas Tombal, offering a wealth of scholarly insight. The compilation scrutinizes the adequacy of prevailing data protection norms and introduces innovative approaches in response to technological progress.

Spanning topics from the impact of quantum computing on privacy to the regulatory intricacies of non-personal data, this volume stands as a comprehensive resource for scholars and practitioners alike, poised at the forefront of data protection evolution. You can find a sneak peek of the full table of contents on our website.

Scheduled for publication in mid-March, "The Boundaries of Data" promises to equip its readers with a profound understanding of the changing paradigms in data regulation. We invite you to pre-order your copy today, ensuring early access to a work that promises to redefine the parameters of data boundaries. The offer includes access to a complimentary ebook version.

Digital Legal Lab member Antoine Louis, alongside Gijs van Dijck and Jerry Spanakis, will present their collaborative research, "Interpretable Long-Form Legal Question Answering with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models," at AAAI2024.

This research addresses the challenge many individuals face in understanding and navigating the complex legal system. It proposes a novel approach to legal question answering that leverages natural language processing to retrieve relevant information and then analyze it to generate comprehensive responses. The approach is supported by the Long-form Legal Question Answering (LLeQA) dataset, which consists of expert-annotated legal questions and detailed answers in French. While the experimental results indicate potential, they also highlight areas requiring further development. The research team releases their code, data, and models to encourage ongoing research in this field and establish a benchmark for system evaluation.

Antoine Louis is pursuing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Law at the Maastricht Law & Tech Lab. His research explores the application of data science and natural language processing to legal automation.

Mindy Duffourc, an Assistant Professor of Private Law at Maastricht University and a member of the Law and Tech Lab, explores the challenges of applying traditional liability frameworks to AI in healthcare, particularly black-box AI systems that lack transparency in her new publication “Decoding U.S. Tort Liability in Healthcare’s Black-Box AI Era: Lessons from the European Union”. She critiques the existing approaches in the U.S. and the EU, suggesting that insights from the EU's handling of such issues could improve the management of AI-related medical liability. Duffourc proposes more tailored product liability frameworks and adjustments in evidentiary rules to better address AI's complexities in medical injuries.

Congratulations to Konrad Kollnig on being honored with the Stefano Rodotà Award for his thesis on "Regulatory technologies for the study of data and platform power in the app economy." This work delves into the technological and legal aspects of mobile applications, aiming to enhance data protection practices.

Konrad holds a position as assistant professor at the Law & Tech Lab within Maastricht University's Law Faculty and serves as an associate researcher at the Open Data Institute.