University of Tübingen

Chair of Law and Artificial Intelligence

Writing Workshop on the European AI Act

Call for Abstracts

Tübingen, 11 July 2025

With the European AI Act being enacted on 13 June 2024, the EU has ushered in a new era of governing digital technology. The new regulation aims to build a trustworthy environment for commercialising AI systems, setting the stage for better development and use of this technology (Commission 2023). Since the Commission’s initial proposal, literatures in law have underlined its resemblance to a product safety regime based on standardisation and market surveillance (Veale and Borgesius 2021; Almada and Petit 2025), with comparably less focus of the regulation on the protection of fundamental rights (Palmiotto 2025).

This workshop sets out to discuss four contributions to the bourgeoning literature on the AI Act, a year after its gazette publication. Participants are expected to engage in conversations about their works. Its aim is to offer an opportunity to early-stage researchers (PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, assistant professors) to receive feedback on their research from their peers as well as from the rest of the attending audience, and to allow them to know more about what aspect(s) of the AI Act each other are working on.

The workshop will follow the approach developed by the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School. Key to this method is that participants are expected to present each other’s drafts instead of their own. The workshop will be composed of four participants providing their work and will be moderated by a faculty member of the Chair of Law and AI of the University of Tübingen. Each participant is assigned a paper to present and is required to have read all the papers being presented at the workshop to offer valuable feedback. Of course, all papers will be circulated well in advance to allow attendees to read them in due time.

If you are interested in presenting your work, please submit an abstract (max 300 words) and a brief bio (max 100 words) by 16 May 2025 (at 23:59 CEST) to Tommaso Fia (tommaso.fia@uni-tuebingen.de). Content-wise, the only requirement is that the submission engages with the European AI Act. We encourage authors to embrace a diverse range of methodologies and perspectives, welcoming original and creative accounts. Whether the chosen approach is doctrinal, critical, normative, socio-legal, empirical, or interdisciplinary, all submissions are equally welcome and will be taken into consideration on equal footing. Although the focus is on EU law, non-Eurocentric perspectives are gladly received.

Selected participants will be notified by late May. They will be asked to send their draft papers (6,000-8,000 words) by mid-June, to read others’ papers in advance and come to the sessions prepared to offer feedback on each piece. Stipends will be available to cover travel expenses and one night of accommodation in Tübingen. Participants will be offered lunch on the day of the workshop.