Research Group News
February 2026
Wijnand van Woerkom wins Prestigious Donald H. Berman Award
In February, the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law just announced the award of its prestigious Donald H. Berman Best Student Paper Award to Wijnand van Woerkom. The award was presented at the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL-25), held at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago. During the conference, Wijnand presented his article “Formal Results on Case-Base Consistency: A COMPAS Case Study," recently published in ICAIL’s Conference Proceedings. The Berman Award recognized both the quality and the originality of Wijnand’s scholarly work. Congratulations, Wijnand!
Wijnand van Woerkom attends AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
In January, Wijnand van Woerkom attended the 40th annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held at the Singapore EXPO Convention and Exhibition Center. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), founded in 1979, is dedicated to “advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.” With almost 29,000 paper submissions, AAAI-26 is among the largest and most important AI conferences. On special invitation to contribute to the conference’s distinguished Journal Track, Wijnand presented his recent article "A Fortiori Case-Based Reasoning: From Theory to Data,” published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
November 2025
„Past and Current Research in AI and Law” – An interdisciplinary Workshop
On 20 November 2025, the Artificial Justice group held a workshop on “Past and Current Research in AI and Law.” In the morning, workshop participants presented on a wide variety of topics, including computational legal theory, neuro-symbolic AI and law, and Large Language Model benchmarking. In the afternoon, Katharina Isabel Schmidt interviewed Bart Verheij and Henry Prakken, AI and law pioneers, as part of her ongoing oral history project, “Legal Information Science Before Large Language Models.”
Dinner at a local Georgian restaurant concluded the workshop while providing plenty of opportunity for informal talks about the future of AI and law.
Wijnand van Woerkom represents the Artificial Justice Group at the Tübingen Conference for AI and Law
On November 5-6, 2025, Postdoctoral Researcher Wijnand van Woerkom attended the Tübingen Conference for AI and Law, jointly hosted by the University of Tübingen and the CZS Institute for AI and Law. Wijnand contributed a poster on ‘Applications of A Fortiori Case-Based Reasoning in AI and Law’, the topic of this recently published PhD thesis, to the conference. We are proud of Wijnand for representing our Group in Tübingen.
October 2025
Artificial Justice goes Max Planck Law
From 20-21 October 2025, Katharina Isabel Schmidt, Oskar von Cossel, and Wijnand van Woerkom attended the annual Max Planck Law Conference at Berlin’s Harnack Haus, where they connected with legal researchers from other Max Planck Institutes. The conference theme this year was “Diversity,” which gave Katharina the chance to present her work-in-progress on the controversy surrounding attempts to automate the British Nationality Act 1981. We enjoyed our time in Berlin and look forward to being back next year.
Wijnand van Woerkom defends his PhD thesis
On 15th October 2025, Wijnand van Woerkom, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Artificial Justice Group, defended his dissertation at Utrecht University, where he was affiliated with the Hybrid Intelligence Centre. His PhD thesis, A Fortiori Case-Based Reasoning: Formal Studies with Applications in Artificial Intelligence and Law, was supervised by Henry Prakken, Davide Grossi and Bart Verheij. It is available online here. We congratulate Wijnand on the successful completion of his doctorate. We couldn’t be more grateful that he has chosen to share his expertise in logic, mathematics, and computer science with the group.
April 2025
The CodeX Future Law Conference 2025 / Stanford Law School
In March, our doctoral fellow Oskar von Cossel travelled to Palo Alto, California, for the CodeX Future Law Conference 2025, held at Stanford Law School. We are grateful to Oskar for sharing his impressions with us: "Participants and speakers fell into three categories, and it was exciting to watch them trade blows. On the one side, there were proponents of purely neural approaches, e.g. ChatGPT. This group emphasized the flexibility and scalability of their methods. Opposing them were representatives of more traditional symbolic approaches to law and AI. This group emphasized the logical value of working with deductive structures like decision trees. A third group, of which I consider myself a part, tried to mediate by making a case in favor of hybrid “neuro-symbolic” approaches to law and AI. I will be curious to see where these approaches will take us in the next few years. Beyond the theoretical discussions, it was interesting to witness the field’s close entanglement with technology and business. The American entrepreneurial spirit was at full display in the heart of Silicon Valley, as discussions frequently revolved around venture capital funding, newly founded corporations, and the latest start-up in the field. I look forward to going back next year.”