Status: early and incomplete. This page replaces a more detailed working document that contains private comments and planning notes. It is meant to show the shape of the candidate list without exposing sensitive discussion.
The list below is not an endorsement, acceptance decision, or final prioritization. It mixes legal scholarship, law-and-policy work, and adjacent regulatory research that helped us think about what a legal-scholarship pilot might cover. Some entries are stale or may now be deprioritized because of publication status, limited expected value from another review, or weak fit with the legal-evaluation model.
Candidate examples
| Paper or topic | Why it was relevant | Current public note |
|---|---|---|
| Copyright Policy Options for Generative Artificial Intelligence | AI copyright policy is a concrete legal-regulatory issue where scholarship could affect litigation, legislation, licensing norms, and AI-governance debates. | Previously considered; may be less useful as a pilot if journal publication or existing attention already supplies enough review and visibility. |
| Frontier AI Regulation | An adjacent AI-governance paper with legal and institutional design implications. | Useful as a comparison case for deciding whether the pilot should evaluate legal scholarship narrowly or broader governance research. |
| Machine learning predicts which rivers, streams, and wetlands the Clean Water Act regulates | Environmental law and regulatory interpretation can have large practical consequences, and technical tools can affect legal implementation. | Adjacent to legal scholarship; probably more relevant for post-publication review or curation than as a first legal-theory pilot. |
| Randomized Regulation: The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Health Markets | Regulatory design and enforcement evidence can inform law, policy, and institutional choices in global health. | Borderline legal/economic evidence; useful for thinking about practitioner relevance and regulatory impact. |
| Banning wildlife trade can boost demand for unregulated threatened species | Animal welfare, conservation, and legal restrictions can interact in ways that matter for policy design. | Relevant to an animal-welfare-law or regulation-focused pilot, though not necessarily legal scholarship in the narrow academic sense. |
| Privacy Regulation and Firm Performance | Privacy regulation is an example of legal policy where empirical evidence could affect regulators, firms, and governance design. | Adjacent case; helps separate legal scholarship from empirical policy research we might evaluate through the standard model. |
Candidate themes
- AI liability, tort law, and catastrophic-risk incentives.
- Law-following AI and the legal status or obligations of AI agents.
- Compute governance, monitoring authority, and administrative law.
- Copyright, privacy, and information-law questions created or intensified by AI systems.
- Biosecurity governance, laboratory regulation, and international legal institutions.
- Animal welfare law, wildlife trade restrictions, and international legal frameworks.
- Deepfakes, election integrity, speech, and democratic resilience.
Labels to test
The curation-first version should let contributors label papers in a simple way before we commission full evaluations.
- High expected impact.
- Influential but possibly flawed.
- Needs legal scholar review.
- Needs practitioner review.
- Too broad or too policy-commentary-like.
- Good post-publication review candidate.
- Not a good fit for The Unjournal.