Speaker Series of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group "Artificial Justice" - Virtual Lecture with Corinna Coupette

"Toward a Computational Theory of Legal Systems"

 Wednesday, 3 December 2025, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. (CET)

About the Speaker:

Corinna Coupette is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University, where they head the Telos Lab conducting research in the intersection of law, computer science, and complex systems. From January 2026 onward, they will be leading the ERC Starting Grant Project CompLex: Toward a Computational Theory of Legal Complexity. The overarching goal of Corinna's research is to understand how we can combine code, data, and law to better model, measure, and manage complex societal systems. Currently, they are particularly interested in computational legal theory – with implications for how we approach challenges like regulating AI, protecting democratic institutions, and realizing the sustainability transition. Corinna's interdisciplinary research is enabled by their undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate education in law and computer science, including PhDs in both subjects completed at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

About the Topic:

From "legal technology" to "computational legal studies" and "digital law", there are many opportunities to build bridges between law and computer science. However, most work in the intersection of these disciplines has taken an internal point of view, motivated by the practical challenges of legal work or by specific doctrinal and empirical research questions. As a result, the capacity of computer science to inform external perspectives on legal systems, as commonly adopted in legal theory and comparative law, has remained relatively underexplored. Setting out to change that, in this talk, I develop my vision for a computational theory of legal systems (computational legal theory). Drawing on examples from my own prior and ongoing work, I sketch how concepts and techniques from computer science and network science can help us build legal theory that is both ontologically and methodologically computational: allowing us to understand legal systems as computational systems, using computational tools.

About the Speaker Series:

The Speaker Series of the new Minerva Fast Track Research Group "Artificial Justice" is organized by Katharina Isabel Schmidt. The Series invites guest speakers who work at the intersection between law, computer science, and the humanities. Neither technical nor juristic knowledge is a prerequisite for participation—the Series is aimed at anyone with an interest in critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on “Law and AI”. The event takes place on Zoom and is scheduled to last one hour.