Research initiatives at the Legal Design & Code Lab

CoCoDa and Flag&Safe: The research project is motivated by the fact that online platforms increasingly play a key role in our societies. This creates systemic risks to democracy, such as undermining freedom of information and online privacy. These risks are, however, merely symptoms of a root cause: the high concentration of control and data (CoCoDa) with dominant online platforms. Both computer science (CS) and legal scholarship (Law) have been developing countermeasures, but typically in disciplinary silos. In CS, researchers have tried to find workarounds for the lack of explicit research platform data access methods by combining available technical methods (e.g., data scraping, blackbox testing, network traffic analysis). However, those approaches face challenges, stemming from platform-imposed restrictions and limited legal support. In Law, the EU enacted the Digital Services Act (DSA) in late 2022 to enable vetted researchers to better access dominant online platforms. However, there is a significant risk that, without sufficient technical support and alignment, these promising legal mechanisms become moot in practice. 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.

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 especially of migrants and individuals with lower economic status and to “bridge justice”, research on legal artificial intelligence (AI) tools supporting laypersons as well as resource-constrained legal professionals working in legal aid are needed. Our proposed project Bridging Justice: Accessible, Reliable, and Collaborative AI for Law (ARCL) 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. ARCL aims at scientific impact and its translation into practical implementation and use that aids society. First, we examine barriers to access to law by drawing on computational law techniques and social science methods. To mitigate these barriers, we develop, validate, and deploy accessible and reliable legal AI tools in partnership with Caritas Switzerland. For broad coverage, our two concrete use cases are aimed at legal professionals and laypersons, respectively. We next study how laypersons and legal professionals interact with the developed tools and measure their impact in the scope of the two use cases. Finally, we publicly deploy our tools to generate sustained societal impact. Across these steps, we synthesize design principles for effective human-AI collaboration in the legal domain.