Projects
Main Themes
Our main research themes combine all three pillars of our lab slogan: law, technology, and society.
Computational Legal Theory
In our flagship project CompLex: Toward a Computational Theory of Legal Complexity, we combine our expertise in foundations of law with concepts and methods from computer science and network science, aiming to develop a computational theory of legal systems.
This work is funded by an ERC Starting Grant 2025 (2026–2030).
Main elements: foundations of law, network science, theoretical computer science.
Legal and Political Data Science
We collect, preprocess, and analyze multimodal legal and political data to answer domain-specific research questions. To ensure construct validity, we often develop our own data-analysis methods, guided by the research question at hand. We also create and publish high-quality collections of legal data and political data, following best practices in software engineering, data engineering, and FAIR resource sharing.
Main elements: foundations of law, network science, machine learning.
Legal Data Visualization and Data Art
Legal documents contain not only sequences of text but also elaborate hierarchical structure as well as explicit and implicit references to other documents. The information contained in legal documents can be better understood and more efficiently navigated via visualization and interaction: We create artistic visualizations that allow laypeople and professionals alike to intuitively appreciate the complexity of the law, and we leverage visual elements interaction design to build user interfaces that better support various stakeholders with their legal tasks.
Main elements: foundations of law, network science, human-computer interaction.
Side Quests
We regularly pursue side quests in all research areas fused by the lab, publishing the results in the relevant specialized communities. This usually happens as a result of curiosity and serendipity, and it expands our horizon. Here is a sample of side quests that have very little to do with law:
- network science: concepts, methods, and software for highly expressive network models (ICLR 2023, DSH 2024, JOSS 2024)
- machine learning: mathematically grounded methods for rigorous evaluations of ML models and methods (ICML 2024, ICML 2025)
- theoretical computer science: distributed (quantum) computing (SOSA 2021, 2x DISC 2025)
- human-computer interaction: relational configurations in research work with anthropomorphic conversational agents (CHI 2026)