Law, AI and Society - Law, AI and Society

Image attributions: Mara Seyfert

Law, AI and Society Group

The Law, AI, and Society Group, led by Dr. Alina Wernick, explores the dynamic relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and legal frameworks, focusing on their broader social and societal impacts. Our research investigates how law can balance the promotion of AI research and development with the need to regulate the technology’s potential risks—such as surveillance, discrimination, power imbalances, and threats to fundamental rights or follow-on innovation. By integrating insights from social sciences and empirical research, we also address the limitations and blind spots in AI regulation, including issues of unenforceability and the mismatch between legal frameworks and the capabilities and functioning of AI as well as the evolving scientific, industrial, and societal contexts.

The group is part of the CZS Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Law at the University of Tübingen (UT). It is also an associated member of the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning for Science (UT). The group is funded by the UT and the Carl Zeiss Stiftung.

Group Philosophy

Our research group investigates legal questions raised by artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-driven technological convergence. As AI transforms science, industry, and society, understanding its impacts—often diffuse, systemic, and large-scale—demands an interdisciplinary lens. We believe that meaningful engagement between law, computer science, the social sciences, and the humanities is essential to ensuring AI benefits society and that regulation is responsive to its real-world application contexts.

News

Upcoming

Alina’s and Kristof’s Position Paper “Position: EU AI Act’s Research Exemptions Can Break the Publication Norms of Major AI Conferences” was accepted the the ICML 2026 Conference (spotlight). Preprint is linked here.
Alina’s submission “Creative Destruction as an Underexamined Normative Goal in IP law” was accepted to ATRIP 44th Annual Congress: Intellectual Property and Politics: From Power Relations to Realpolitik, São Paulo held June-July 2026.
Alina’s submission “Matter of Life and Bits: Biological Computers as Personal Data” was accepted to the TILTing Perspectives 2026 Conference, Tilburg held in June.
Alina and Deborah Kronenberg-Versteeg will hold a workshop “Brains, bytes and the Unknown – Are we ready for Organoid Intelligence?” at the Hertie Foundation Fellows‘ Hertie Summit 2026, Berlin in June.
Alina, Semih and Nicole Ludwig ‘s submission on “The vicious cycle of distorted climate modeling for the Global South” was accepted to the 11th Biennial Conference Surveillance Studies Network: Planetary surveillance, Lille in June 2026.
Alina will teach Michèle Finck’s course AI Law and Policy at the MIPLC in April-May 2026.
Alina, Sanidhya and Semih are teaching a CIVIS course on EU Law and the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Health and Well-being in Spring 2026.

May 2026

Alina held a presentation : Biological computing as an emerging object of technology regulation Law, Technology and Sustainability Transitions (LOST) Research Group University of Lapland 15.05.2026.

March 2026

Alina held a talk “The Law and Ethics of Organoid Intelligence” at the 4th Workshop of Tübingen Women in Machine Learning.

February 2026

Alina, Miriam Klopotek (University of Stuttgart) and Deborah Kronenberg-Versteeg ((Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research) held a workshop on Organoid Intelligence at the Tübingen Stem Cells in Neuroscience Conference.

January 2026

Alina was awarded with the Athene Grant for female researchers in the postdoctoral phase for a project “The Law of Technological Convergence” from the University of Tübingen.
Alina was awarded with EU Seed Funding from The Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg.

November 2025

The Law, AI and Society Group was busy co-organizing the inaugural Tübingen conference for AI and Law. Click here for impressions.
Rabanus presented a poster on project Being Accurate: The EU AI Act on Accuracy, at Tübingen conference for AI and Law, a collaboration with Alina and Bob Williamson.
Alina pre-published a book chapter on Trade Secrets and Digital Twins: Tensions and Entitlements in Smart Factory and Smart City Contexts.

October 2025

Alina will present a poster on “Organoid reservoir computing as an object of regulation” at Research Frontiers Workshop on Scientific Machine Learning “Navigating the Bermuda Triangle of Knowledge Infusion, Explainability, and Scientific Discovery” in Stuttgart from Oct 7ᵗʰ–10ᵗʰ.

September 2025

Sanidhya had the pleasure of attending the Aligning AI and Society Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill and presenting a poster on Deepfake Enforcement Regulations.

June 2025

Alina presented a paper “Evaluating the Contextual Integrity of False Positives in Algorithmic Travel Surveillance“, co-authored with Alan Medlar, Sofia Söderholm, and Dorota Głowacka (all based at Helsinki Uni), at FAccT ’25.
Alina and Kristof published a pre-print “Beware! The AI Act Can Also Apply to Your AI Research Practices the title“, on AI Act’s research exceptions.
Alina’s and Kristof’s paper on AI Act’s research exceptions was accepted to Regulatable Machine Learning Workshop at at NeurIPS2025.

May 2025

Alina had the honour to present “Governing Knowledge Commons Framework:
Stage-Setting Reflections. Convergence Conference on Governing Knowledge Commons” alongside Mike Madison at Villanova University, USA.
Alina gave a talk on her novel research on “Is the AI Act fit for biological computing? A case of cerebral organoid intelligence” at the Tübingen Summer School on AI and Law 2025.

March 2025

Rabanus Derr gave a lightning talk on “Being Accurate: The EU AI Act on Accuracy.” a joint work with Alina and Bob Williamson at the conference ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law. TUM Munich, Munich, Germany, 25.03.2025
Alina gave a presentation on Brain Organoid Intelligence – Legal Questions on the Emerging Computing Frontier. The 5th International Interdisciplinary Symposium between Doshisha University and the University of Tübingen.