Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law

Judging by Algorithm: Socialist Core Values and China's “Trustworthy” Judicial AI

Daniel Sprick
University of Cologne
 

Monday, 19 October 2026, at 5 p.m. (CEST)

About the Speaker:

Daniel Sprick is a senior lecturer for Chinese Legal Culture at the University of Cologne, where he specializes in Chinese criminal justice, AI regulation, and the legal architecture of authoritarian governance. He was awarded the Hanenburg-Yntema Prize for the best thesis on Chinese law by a European Union citizen, for his work on Chinese competition law and received his doctorate from the University of Cologne for his thesis on the limits of self-defense in Chinese criminal law. He has advised the European Parliament on China’s International Commercial Courts and approaches to Investor-State Dispute Resolution, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a human rights project, and the EU Commission on China’s foreign-related rule of law. His recent publications have covered topics including the influence of Chinese media on criminal proceedings, predictive policing in China, value alignment of China’s judicial AI, and the layered governance framework for the regulation of AI. His current research on Socialist Core Values and China's foreign-related rule of law is funded by the DFG and the German Ministry of Research.

About the Topic:

In November 2024, China's Supreme People's Court launched the Faxin Legal Foundation LLM, a large language model trained in part to uphold the 'Socialist Core Values' that Chinese courts are required to apply in judicial reasoning. This talk considers what it means to develop 'trustworthy AI' for a judicial system whose trustworthiness is defined by the party-state rather than by procedural pluralism. Using China's judicial AI regulations, technical security standards for generative AI and the ecosystem that benchmarks Chinese LLMs for political reliability as examples, the talk illustrates how value alignment, typically considered a safeguard against bias and harm, becomes a means of embedding party-led morality directly into judicial decision-support tools. In doing so, the talk aims to contribute to the global discourse on trustworthy and ethical AI by demonstrating how the same vocabulary can be exploited for illiberal purposes.

About the Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law: 

The “Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law” was established in 2002 as a series of guest lectures from notable legal scholars and legal practitioners, who engage in research stays at the Hamburg Institute. It aims to provide insight into legal fields under development in the People’s Republic of China and which are thus attracting great international interest.