This list includes the top downloaded papers on AI in Law posted in Q1 2026.  

• Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI by Eric A. Posner (University of Chicago – Law School) and Shivam Saran (University of Chicago – Law School) 

• The Artificial in “Artificial Intelligence”: How Imagination Shapes AI Regulation by Claudio Novelli (Yale University – Digital Ethics Center), Luciano Floridi (Yale University – Digital Ethics Center; University of Bologna- Department of Legal Studies), Stefan Larsson (Lund University – Department of Technology and Society) Mariarosaria Taddeo (University of Oxford – Oxford Internet Institute) and Steven L. Winter (Wayne State University Law School)  

• Code Is Not Law by Carla Reyes (Southern Methodist University – Dedman School of Law), Andrea Tosato (Southern Methodist University – Dedman School of Law) and Andrew Hinkes (New York University School of Law) 

• Power Steering, Not a Brake: How Boards Should Actually Govern AI by Henk de Jong (IESE Business School), Robert Maciejko (Board AI Institute; INSEAD AI (alum-led) ), Sampsa Samila (University of Navarra, IESE Business School) and Christoph Wollersheim (Egon Zehnder) 

• Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI by Noam Kolt (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Nicholas Caputo (Oxford Martin School), Jack Boeglin (University of Pennsylvania Law School), Cullen O’Keefe (Institute for Law & AI; Centre for the Governance of AI), Rishi Bommasani (Stanford University), Stephen Casper (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ), Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Stanford Law School), Noah Feldman (Harvard Law School), Iason Gabriel (School of Advanced Study University of London), Gillian K. Hadfield (University of Toronto; Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence; OpenAI; Center for Human-Compatible AI), Lewis Hammond (University of Oxford), Peter Henderson (Princeton University – Program in Law & Public Policy), Atoosa Kasirzadeh (Carnegie Mellon University), Seth Lazar (Australian National University (ANU)), Anka Reuel (Stanford University), Kevin Wei (RAND Corporation; Harvard University – Harvard Law School), Jonathan L. Zittrain (Harvard Law School; Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Harvard University – Harvard Kennedy School (HKS); Harvard University – Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society)  

• Buying Blind: Corruption Risk and the Erosion of Oversight in Federal AI by  Jessica Tillipman (George Washington University – Law School)  

• Questioning the Digital Markets Act’s Legality by Thibault Schrepel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Stanford University’s Codex Center) and Godefroy de Boiscuille (University of Côte d’Azur; Paris-Panthéon-Assas University & CRED) 

• Alignment Whack-a-Mole : Finetuning Activates Verbatim Recall of Copyrighted Books in Large Language Models by Xinyue Liu (Stony Brook University), Niloofar Mireshghallah (Carnegie Mellon University), Jane C. Ginsburg (Columbia University – Law School) and Tuhin Chakrabarty (Stony Brook University)  

• Liberal AI by Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School; Harvard University – Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)) 

• Ethnonationalism by Algorithm by Spencer Overton (George Washington) University – Law School  

To read more about AI in Law, subscribe to SSRN’s Artificial Intelligence – Law, Policy, & Ethics Research Updates or view other papers here.