Christoph Engel is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, a Professor at University of Bonn, and a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at ETH Zurich's Center for Law and Economics. While Christoph is most well-known for his contributions to experimental and empirical legal studies, his research interests range from almost all areas of the law to economics, psychology, political science, and data science. You can find Christoph's full academic profile and the numerous honours he received at: https://www.coll.mpg.de/engel.html

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AG Audience

English

60 Minutes

Kaiserslautern

In a profound sense, the law is an applied field. It exists because society needs rules to function. Even if these rules are seemingly “bright line”, in limit cases they require interpretation. Even more so if the rule in question confines itself to enunciate a normative program, and leaves its implementation to the administration and the judiciary. The traditional response is hermeneutical. The legislator translates the normative intention into words. That way, it implicitly delegates spelling out what these words mean to the parties and the authorities involved in dissolving the concrete conflicts of life. This sketch of the law’s mission explains the traditional character of legal research. If a researcher adopts an “inside view”, she engages in a division of labor with practicing lawyers. The quintessential product of this research is a “commentary”. The researcher summarizes the state of the art thinking about a statutory provision (and maybe proposes an alternative reading). Alternatively, the researcher adopts an “outside view”. In the spirit of a social scientist, she treats the law as her object of study. Typical products are more precise definitions of and empirical investigations into a class of social problems that legal rules are meant to address; or attempts at finding traces of judicial policy in the jurisprudence of a court. Large language models have the potential to deeply affect all of these strands of legal research. As the potential is more easily discernible for the “outside view”, the talk will only briefly illustrate in which ways LLMs are likely to fuel this strand of legal research. It will drill deeper into the “inside view”, and explain how an important part of this research, the summarization of the jurisprudence on a statutory provision (the guarantee of freedom of assembly in the German Constitution) can already today be delegated to the LLM. It is not difficult to predict that, ten years from now, legal research will look radically different.

Gretchen Gravelle

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