Research

Understanding law in practice and helping people navigate legal institutions.

I combine legal analysis, computational methods and the evaluation of working systems to study legal reasoning and improve access to justice.

Computational analysis of legal data

My empirical and qualitative research explores patterns across large legal corpora: from landlord–tenant decisions and computer-assisted annotation with CAESAR to specialist legal annotation and thematic analysis with language models.

Related work connects structured representations of legislation to the application of legal criteria in decisions, and examines the European Court of Human Rights’ use of external legal authority. Throughout, computational analysis supports—not replaces—substantive legal interpretation.

Computational insights for access to justice

I conceptualised and led the development of JusticeBot, which turns legal rules and decisions into guided pathways for people without legal training. My work also investigates how AI can interpret layperson narratives, images of legal documents and legally relevant videos.

Other projects explore semi-structured reasoning and drafting with DALLMA, AI-assisted communication with LLMediator, language models as mediators and intake in civil legal services. These working systems provide a setting for evaluating whether people understand legal guidance and can act on it.

Browse all publications and their resources

Funding

Selected funded projects, as listed in my CV. Amounts below are project grants, not personal funding shares.

  • Lawnotation — PDI-SSH, 2026, €225,634. Grant co-recipient; principal investigator: Gijs van Dijck.
  • Bridging the Digital Divide: Open, Scalable, and Accessible Software for Legal Data — Open Science NL, 2026, €249,793. Grant co-recipient; principal investigator: Gijs van Dijck.
  • LegalBlocks: FAIRified Lego-Style Application Development for Legal Research Software — NWO Thematic Digital Competence Centre, 2026; approved 24-month project. Project co-recipient; project lead: Shashank Chakravarthy.
  • Am AI Right? — NWO-SGW Open Competition Law and Administration, 2024–2029, €839,146. Co-recipient; principal investigator: Gijs van Dijck.