👋 Welcome to the Legal Design & Code Lab! ⚖️💻
We’re a dynamic lab where law meets technology! 🚀
🔍 Digital law & data governance I 🤖 AI & legal automation I 🎨 Legal design & HCI
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We are on a mission to advance interdisciplinary research, legal innovation, and public interest technology to strengthen access to justice, AI and platform governance, and citizen empowerment. We leverage integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to ensure that automation, data use, and algorithmic systems serve the public good. We bring together scholars and practitioners interested in the intersection of law, technology, and design and aim to foster collaborations both within our institution and with external partners. We are also proud members of the Network of Centers Initiative! https://networkofcenters.net/
Research initiatives at the Legal Design & Code Lab
CoCoDa and Flag&Safe: The high concentration of control and data (CoCoDa) with dominant online platforms can pose risks to society. Both computer science (CS) and legal scholarship (Law) have been developing countermeasures, but typically in disciplinary silos. To overcome the challenge of having computational methods without (legal) teeth, or legal solutions that are not implementable or miss important technical aspects, there is a strong need for CS and Law to work closely together to develop a mutual understanding and integrated implementations of concepts, viewpoints, and methods. Both the CoCoDa and Flag&Safe projects address this by creating techno-legal tools to study online platforms.
Bridging Justice: Access to justice is a global challenge. From complex legal language to high costs of representation, barriers to the accessibility of law are multifold, often leaving specifically underserved communities and people in need in challenging situations. To address the needs our project "Bridging Justice: Accessible, Reliable, and Collaborative AI for Law" builds on top of our recent research in this field to develop, validate, test, and deploy legal AI tools for Swiss law for underserved communities with the goal of increasing access to law.
DECODE: DECODE aims to support the development of more transparent, accessible, and effective data protection, empowering individuals and helping shape future privacy regulations. Instead of relying only on legal rules, DECODE focuses on “human-centered” solutions, namely tools and systems that are built with people’s needs, understanding, and behavior in mind and that become scalable through recent advances in fields like artificial intelligence. To this end, DECODE brings together experts from law, communication research, and computer science to develop and test new approaches to privacy protection.
Members of the Lab
Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux is an incoming Full Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Law School, focusing on digital and computational law. She leads the Legal Design & Code Lab and specializes in research at the intersection of law and digital technologies with a particular focus on privacy, data protection, design approaches, transparency of automated decision-making and artificial intelligence, automatically processable regulation, and trust in automation. Aurelia’s scientific publications on those subject matters are available open access.
Johannes David is PhD candidate with a background in machine-learning and information systems. His research focuses on access to justice and the development and co-design of legal AI tools.
Vlada Druta is a PhD candidate specializing in artificial intelligence in the judiciary. Her expertise includes risk assessment tools in the justice system, information retrieval systems, technology adoption in the judiciary, and the impact of AI on human rights and human dignity.
Alice Palmieri is a PhD candidate specializing in platform regulation and analyzing systemic risks stemming from very large online platforms and search engines. She is a member of the CoCoDa-team, funded by the SNSF.
Luka Bekavac is a PhD candidate focusing on understanding and addressing the systemic risks posed by Very Large Online Platforms, combining methods from computer science, tech law and social sciences. He is a member of the CoCoDa-team, funded by the SNSF.
Researchers affiliated with the Lab
Dr. Yongle Chao is a postdoctoral researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research primarily focuses on data access and data portability rights, aiming to address the information asymmetries prevalent in the current data economy.
Stephan Mulders is a lawyer and external PhD candidate at the University of Maastricht. His research focuses on data protection law and damage claim under the GDPR.
Dr. Vageesh Saxena is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University researching how machine learning can uncover criminal activity in illegal online markets. His work blends AI, digital forensics, and criminal profiling to detect hidden patterns in illicit networks.
Iris Xu is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University, where she researches the effectiveness and acceptability of personalization for user privacy disclosure and decision-making. Her research focuses on social media users across China, the EU, and the US, using mixed methods and drawing from multiple disciplines.
Reach out to us! We welcome anyone interested in the pressing societal and regulatory questions at the intersection of law and computer science to connect with us by sending us an email.
Student interactions
Courses: We teach different courses related to Law & Technology. Check out the current curriculum to enroll in our modules.
Summer fellowships: If you are passionate about law & technology, you can join as a summer fellow for an interdisciplinary research experience! Our requirements are:
✅ Fluent in English
✅ Strong interest in academic research
✅ Based in St. Gallen and ideally a student at the University of St. Gallen
✅ Creative and good team player!
Apply now via email (legaldesignandcodelab@unil.ch) & be part of innovative projects at the forefront of legal automation! Please make sure to include your main skills, research interests, and/or the specific research project in which you would like to participate.
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