Description: Exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping legal practice in the EU and examining regulatory, ethical, and practical implications through current legal frameworks and academic literature.
As a law student, I am deeply interested in how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming legal practice and raising new challenges for regulation within the EU. I would like to explore the foundations of AI, from early symbolic systems and connectionist models to modern deep learning and neural networks, as well as the design of autonomous agents capable of learning, reasoning, and performing complex tasks. Understanding technical properties such as opacity, unpredictability, and inherent biases is crucial to assess how AI interacts with law, justice, and governance.
I am particularly drawn to practical applications for legal professionals, prosecutors, judges, and arbitrators, including predictive policing, forensic mass data analysis, AI-assisted legal research, case prediction, and administrative support for courts. I hope to examine these applications in light of regulatory and ethical frameworks, such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (2021/0106(COD)), the CEPEJ Action Plan “Digitalisation for a Better Justice”, and the European Ethical Charter on the use of AI in judicial systems (Council of Europe, 2018).
To inform this discussion, I aim to draw upon key literature, including:
Sutton & Barto (2018), An Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
Sumers et al. (2024), Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents, https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02427
Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville (2016), Deep Learning, MIT Press
Jurafsky & Martin (2022), Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft), https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/
Lopes Rocha & Soares Pereira (eds.), Inteligência Artificial & Direito (2020)
Bench-Capon et al. (2012), History of AI and Law in 50 papers, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 20:215–319
EUROPOL (2025), AI and Policing: Benefits and Challenges, https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/AIand-policing.pdf
AA (2022), Guide on the Use of AI-Based Tools by Lawyers in the EU, https://ai4lawyers.eu/
Through this Idea, I hope to initiate a rich discussion with the Forum community about both the technical foundations of AI and its legal, ethical, and regulatory implications, inviting diverse perspectives on how AI can be responsibly integrated into European legal systems.
The opinions expressed on the ECI Forum reflect solely the point of view of their authors and can in no way be taken to reflect the position of the European Commission or of the European Union.
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