LLM as a Law Professor: Having a Large Language Model Write a Commentary on Freedom of Assembly

Date: October 10, 2025 (Friday)

Time: 3pm – 4pm

Venue: Room 824, 8/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Christoph Engel (Professor Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods)

In many jurisdictions, academia is at the service of legal practice. Law professors write commentaries that summarize the state of the art of doctrine, chiefly of jurisprudence. In the spirit of a proof of concept, using the guarantee of freedom of assembly in the European Convention on Human Rights, we show that this task can be completely outsourced to large language models. Using standard NLP metrics and an LLM as a judge approach, we develop an evaluation pipeline that works without costly human annotation. The commentaries fully written by GPT 4o, Gemini 2.5 flash or Kimi K2 Instruct are on par with their best human written competitor, the Guide provided by the Court itself.

Christoph Engel is Professor Emeritus and founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, where he has been a Scientific Member since 1997. He is also a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the ETH Zurich Center for Law and Economics and a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. A pioneering figure in the field of empirical legal studies, his research examines the behavioral foundations of law, which he tends to interpret as a tool for governing society. He earned his doctorate and habilitation from the Universities of Tübingen and Hamburg respectively. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Copenhagen University as well as a lifetime achievement award by the European Association of Law and Economics.

Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=102765. Papers will be circulated in advance and attendees will be expected to have read the papers before the seminar.

This event is free of charge. We are applying for a CPD point with the Law Society of Hong Kong.