Cambridge Forum on AI: Law and Governance publishes content focused on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) from law, rules, and regulation through to ethical behaviour, accountability and responsible practice. It also looks at the impact on society of such governance along with how AI can be used responsibly to benefit the legal, corporate and other sectors.

Following the emergence of generative AI and broader general purpose AI models, there is a pressing need to clarify the role of governance, to consider the mechanisms for oversight and regulation of AI, and to discuss the interrelationships and shifting tensions between the legal and regulatory landscape, ethical implications and evolving technologies. Cambridge Forum on AI: Law and Governance uses themed issues to bring together voices from law, business, applied ethics, computer science and many other disciplines to explore the social, ethical and legal impact of AI, data science, and robotics and the governance frameworks they require.

Cambridge Forum on AI: Law and Governance is part of the Cambridge Forum journal series, which progresses cross-disciplinary conversations on issues of global importance.

The journal invites submissions for the upcoming Themed Issue: Computational Legal Studies, Guest Edited by Dirk Hartung, Jerrold Soh, and Daniel Martin Katz. 

Papers will be accepted on a rolling basis up until a final deadline of end of January 2026.

Legal research is experiencing a “computational turn”, following similar trends observed in social sciences and digital humanities. As legal datasets grow in scale and complexity, emerging computational approaches can complement traditional legal analysis by surfacing previously undetectable patterns and relationships in large legal datasets. This themed issue examines how emerging computational tools, particularly network analytics and machine learning, can enhance our understanding of legal systems. The issue poses three key questions:

1. What novel insights and hypotheses could the application of computational lenses to legal phenomena reveal?
2. How might computational methods be meaningfully developed and deployed to empirically test legal theories?
3. How might artificial intelligence, natural language processing and network science augment legal research and practice?

The issue aims to showcase work which applies cutting-edge computational analysis to fundamental legal questions. Submissions will be assessed both on technical rigour and legal sophistication. They should meet scientific standards for methodology and replicability while sensibly addressing the nuances of the legal domain. Topics of special interest include, without limitation and in no particular order:

• Analysis of legal entity, document, citation, and other networks
• Application of Complexity Science to legal phenomena and systems
• NLP for studying legal texts, reasoning, interpretation, argumentation, etc.
• Legal information extraction and retrieval, particularly when extracted information is applied to shed light on important legal questions
• Resources for computational legal studies, especially evaluation metrics, methods, code libraries, and datasets tailored for the legal domain
• Review and position papers on computational legal studies and related fields, including without limitation discussions of how emerging computational methods and resources may shape the future of legal scholarship, practice, and/or education
• Applications and demonstrations of computational techniques used in real world legal technologies

The issue seeks to advance dialogue between computer scientists, legal scholars, and practitioners about the potential and implications of computational methods in legal research. 

Submission guidelines Cambridge Forum on AI: Law and Governance seeks to engage multiple subject disciplines and promote dialogue between policymakers and practitioners as well as academics. The journal therefore encourages authors to use an accessible writing style.

Authors have the option to submit a range of article types to the journal. Please see the journal’s author instructions for more information.

Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal.

All submissions should be made through the journal’s online peer review system. Author should consult the journal’s author instructions prior to submission.

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information. 

Related Workshop on Computational Legal Studies

In parallel to this Call for Papers, the Centre for Digital Law at Singapore Management University is organizing a hybrid workshop on Computational Legal Studies from 8-9 September 2025. Colleagues may find this workshop helpful for obtaining feedback on their work, though participating in the workshop is neither necessary for nor a guarantee of acceptance in this Themed Issue. Please see the workshop’s full Call for Abstracts, available here, for details.

Contacts 

Questions regarding submission and peer review can be sent to the journal’s inbox at cfl@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com.