Legal Scholarship Candidates

About this tool

Why legal scholarship? Scholarship can shape legislation, court reasoning, agency action, and policy design — and judicial use of legal scholarship is substantial and rising. Yet most legal scholarship circulates as SSRN drafts and law-review articles selected by student editors, with no expert peer review. The Unjournal's model — paid, public, citable expert evaluations — could add unusual value here. Read the initiative page →

Exploratory prototype (June 2026). The legal scholarship initiative is currently paused pending leadership from senior legal scholars; this dashboard is an exploration of what automated discovery and prioritization could look like. Scores are AI-generated and not yet calibrated against human prioritization decisions (unlike the main dashboard). Treat them as rough triage, not verdicts.

How it works: Papers are discovered from legal research sourcesCurrently scanning: top law reviews and law & economics journals (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago law reviews etc., plus JLS, JLE, JELS, JLA, ALER), dedicated animal law journals (Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, Global Journal of Animal Law, Derecho Animal, LEOH), NEP-LAW (RePEc's weekly editor-curated "Law and Economics" report), OpenAlex (law journals, repositories, and SSRN — the main channel where legal drafts circulate before publication), Semantic Scholar law-field searches, and the team's public candidate list. Themed searches target the initiative's candidate themes: AI liability, law-following AI, compute governance, biosecurity, animal welfare law, and deepfakes/information integrity., then scored by AI against legal-specific prioritization criteria. Scores reflect evaluation priorityHow strongly we would recommend commissioning an independent expert evaluation. This considers: (1) Does it address AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, global health, rule of law, or catastrophic risk? (2) Could it influence courts, regulators, policymakers, or advocacy organizations? (3) Does it advance legal reasoning or institutional design? (4) Does it make specific, assessable claims? A high score does NOT mean the work is good — it means expert evaluation would be particularly valuable.—the expected value of commissioning an evaluation—not an assessment of quality.

Priority themes

AI liability and tort law for catastrophic risk
Law-following AI and AI agents under the rule of law
Compute governance, monitoring, and regulatory authority
Biosecurity governance, international institutions, and liability
Animal welfare and international legal frameworks
Deepfakes, information integrity, and democratic resilience
Plus: rule of law & institutions, global health law, and welfare-relevant law & economics

Scoring criteria (0–10 each)

Criterion	What it measures	Weight
Global impact	Does it address AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, global health, rule of law, or catastrophic risk?	~35%
Influence potential	Could it affect courts, regulators, legislators, or advocacy organizations? Is there a live policy or litigation window?	~25%
Contribution & evaluability	Does it advance legal reasoning or institutional design, with specific claims experts can assess?	~20%
Prominence	Venue, author, citations, attention. Note: law-review prestige does not imply expert review.	~10%
Timing	Draft stage and open policy windows. Softer penalty than economics: published law-review articles have still never had expert review.	~10%

Score interpretation

Range	Action	Meaning
75–100	Prioritize now	Clear theme fit + influence path + evaluable claims. Worth putting before the team.
50–74	Monitor	Relevant but borderline on theme fit, influence, or evaluability.
25–49	Deprioritize	Legal scholarship, but weak connection to the priority themes.
<25	Out of scope	Case notes, narrow doctrinal commentary, legal-tech engineering, op-eds.

Caveat: the main dashboard's scores are calibrated against 353 human prioritization decisions; no such dataset exists yet for legal scholarship. Building one (via the rating buttons on each card) is part of the point of this prototype.

Comment directly on this page using the Hypothes.is sidebar (the < tab on the right edge). Or use the rating buttons on each paper card — human ratings are how we will calibrate these scores.

Suggest research for this list

Know of high-impact legal scholarship we should consider — or other work this tool should be doing? Useful suggestions and prioritization notes are exactly what this pilot needs. Leave an email if you're open to follow-up discussion; if we later introduce compensation for useful contributions, earlier contributors will be grandfathered in.

Status & next steps

The Unjournal explored a legal scholarship evaluation track in 2025 (with substantial earlier work by Ziyi Wang on candidate themes) and paused it pending operational capacity and a senior legal-scholar champion. This dashboard tests the discovery-and-prioritization half of that idea automatically. If you are a legal scholar interested in this initiative, or have feedback on the selection criteria, contact contact@unjournal.org.