Center for Law, Design & AI

The Center for Law, Design, and AI within Convergence AI builds upon the interdisciplinarity and collaborative strengths of Erasmus University Rotterdam and TU Delft to explore new research opportunities at the intersection of legal and design processes, exploiting the latest innovations in AI. The Center will develop new concepts, tools, and workflows to enrich, optimize, and democratize legal systems, services, and practices. Our aim is to make the law more accessible and transparent for a more equitable society.

The Center explores various themes for research, including the following topics:

• Design and the EU AI Act. Development of design-driven, legally supported tools and practices to help organizations exploring AI technology to assess potential risks and comply with the new EU AI act.
• AI and access to justice. Exploration of possible ways in which AI systems can help democratize access to justice while enhancing the representation of vulnerable or disenfranchised groups of people.
• Empathy-centered design. Development of empathy-centered approaches to AI applications within the legal sector, in areas such as intake in the legal aid sector, the judiciary and online dispute resolution.
• Trust in Legal-AI networks. Rethinking the concept of trust in the legal AI actor network. Is it possible to use increasing trust-issues in the context of legal AI applications to further bolster current approaches to trust in the legal sector.
• AI-mediated legal systems. Investigation of the impacts of AI technology in transforming the architecture and functioning of the legal system (courtrooms, textbooks, etc.), leading to potentially new understandings of the philosophy and practice of law, as well as its societal role.
• Legal transhumanism and the future of the law. Application of speculative and prototyping techniques to reimage the future of legal practice in alternative scenarios, for instance, when AI attains full rights comparable to humans.