Postdoctoral or Assistant Professor position in Law and AI

Postdoctoral or Assistant Professor position in Law and AI

The Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, is seeking applications for a Postdoc or Assistant Professor position. The position forms an integrated part of the research project LEXplain (funded by the Research Council of Norway) which focuses on AI support for justificatory explanations in legal decisions but also entails knowledge dissemination in collaboration with Aalborg University and the Algorithms, Data and Democracy (ADD) project.

The position is available from 1 March 2025 and will be for the duration of 4 years.

Introduction
The purpose of the research project LEXplain is to investigate the possibilities and limitations of using artificial intelligence to make legal decisions in public administration with a specific focus on the requirement to provide justificatory explanations for the decisions made. If the technology used in the case processing does not support the legal justification requirement, it cannot be used in a manner that is satisfactory under the rule of law. LEXplain will investigate how AI technology can be adapted to case processing and decision making in a way that ensures compliance with the legal obligation to provide justificatory reasons.

The project is set up as a collaboration between the University of Bergen and the University of Copenhagen and involves both legal and computational research. The Postdoc/Assistant Professor will be employed at the Faculty of Law, at the University of Copenhagen, but the position requires occasional research stays in Bergen.

The purpose of ADD is to conduct research and disseminate knowledge about the role of AI in Society. In regards to law, this raises several questions about the legal basis for applying AI to support legal decisions and what conditions the AI Act requires of such AI based support.

About the position
The Postdoc or Assistant Professor will be responsible for researching how AI systems may challenge and possibly transform how legal decision-making work is performed in public administrative practice. A semi-structured interview approach has to be performed to gain information about how legal caseworkers in the tax and welfare administration in Denmark and Norway perceive the explainability requirement and how they implement it in their day-to-day work.

Collaborating with a legal tech company, the project envisages an experimental setting in which case workers will try out an AI solution, which will assist in generating decision drafts. The Postdoc/Assistant Professor will be responsible for coordinating and evaluating the test set-up with the company who makes the AI system available. The Postdoc/Assistant Professor will also be required to assess how such kind of AI systems used to support legal decision making in public administration can be made compliant with the AI Act’s requirements relating to transparency (art. 13) and human oversight (art. 14).

Applicants are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the faculty's research areas and education programmes by visiting the Faculty’s website: www.jura.ku.dk.

The position includes a teaching obligation of approx. 20% of full-time. It is an advantage if the candidate is able to teach one or more of the mandatory BA level courses.

The faculty actively supports the effort of learn Danish for those who do not already speak the language.

Further information about the position can be obtained from Prof., dr. jur., Henrik Palmer Olsen. See contact details below.

Required qualifications
The position requires academic qualifications PhD, JSD or equivalent degree in law, economics or social science. All applicants are expected to be able to use English as the working language (written and spoken). Successful candidates will demonstrate a clear potential to deliver high quality peer-reviewed research publications.  

In the overall assessment, emphasis will be placed on the applicant’s research and teaching potential. Special emphasis will be placed on the applicant’s ambition to develop and implement new research ideas, which may have an international impact. Furthermore, the Faculty places emphasis on the applicant’s interest and preferably, prior experience, in working with other researchers to conduct collective research and teaching activities and welcomes the applicant’s proven ability to make a valuable contribution in this regard.

For further details about the qualification requirements for assistant professorships, please read the Job Structure for Academic Staff at Universities 2019 here:

Ministerial Order on Job Structure for Academic Staff at Universities

Assessment criteria
Applicants chosen for assessments will have their academic and personal qualifications assessed according to the following criteria:

• Research qualifications, including the degree of originality and scope of peer-reviewed scientific production; the development potential in the applicant’s research plan; active participation in research environments; and scientific breadth and depth in relation to the position’s academic profile.
• Teaching qualifications, including running relevant research-based courses and interest in developing their own pedagogic competencies (e.g. documented didactic training).
• Experience and competencies in the dissemination of research, external partnerships, and other forms of social impact in the form of media contributions, advice, and knowledge-sharing in the public sphere.
• Experience of contributing to organisational work, working with others, and generating a vibrant academic environment.
• Experience of research management, (participation in) applications for external research funding and plans to apply for external funding.

Applicants are asked to describe as precisely as possible how their competencies match the above criteria.

For more information about the University of Copenhagen’s general criteria for the employment of assistant professors and credit transfers, visit:  

UCPH criteria and the criteria for recognizing merit for assistant professors.

Applicants are invited to familiarise themselves with the faculty’s strategy on: Strategy 2030 – University of Copenhagen (ku.dk)

Salary and terms of employment
The appointment is temporary and will be made in accordance with the agreement between the Danish Ministry of Finance and the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations (Akademikernes Centralorganisation, AC). In addition to the basic salary, you will receive an annual supplement per month and a total contribution to your pension fund equal to 17.1 % of your salary and annual supplement is paid. It is possible to negotiate further salary supplements. 

Application
Letter of motivation, appendices and the submitted research publications (including papers, articles and books), must be written in English. The application will be rejected if not all the required documents are submitted.

It is essential that you fill out all the mandatory fields in the electronic application even though the info is already stated in your CV, application, publication or other material you may find relevant to upload. The completed fields will be screened during the shortlisting and assessment process and in order to generate your final assessment, which we will send to you after the assessment work is finalized.

The application MUST include the following elements:

1. Letter of motivation (a one-page document explaining the reasons for applying).
2. Curriculum vitae.
3. Research project. Applications should include a proposal for a research project to be completed during the post-doctoral or assistant professor period. Proposals should be four to five pages long. The proposal should demonstrate the capacity to develop a postdoctoral project, identifying the relevant methodological tools to achieve the outlined LEXplain and ADD project. 
4. Diplomas, PhD or JSD diploma or alternatively a document showing that the applicant submitted or will submit a dissertation.  
5. Publication list. (Complete, numbered list of publications).
6. Teaching portfolio, including documentation for teaching qualifications as well as a brief statement of the applicant's teaching visions within the research area. For more information regarding the teaching portfolio, please see the related guidelines.
7. Academic references, if available (please upload under “other relevant material”).
8. A maximum of five (5) scientific publications that the applicant wishes to have included in the assessment, of which no more than one (1) may be a monograph. Applicants, who have written a PhD or JSD thesis or equivalent, must always submit the complete thesis (if the thesis is written in Danish, English, Swedish or Norwegian) and the written assessment of the thesis as a part of submitted publications.
9. If citing work where the applicant has been a co-author, a co-author declaration, which addresses the applicant's share of these works, must be submitted. Material that has not yet been published can be submitted. However, please indicate if this is the case.

In addition to the material which the applicant wishes to be included in the assessment, the Assessment Committee may require further material to assess the applicant. It is the applicant’s responsibility to provide such supplementary material, should this be requested.

Application procedure
Upload letter of motivation, appendices and the research publications electronically using the link below. We advise you to have the above-mentioned documents ready before you begin to fill out your online application, and it is essential that all required documents are enclosed.

Applications must be addressed to the Associate Dean of Research and uploaded electronically.

An automatically generated message is sent out acknowledging receipt of the uploaded application.

Applicants will be kept informed about the process of the application procedure on a regular basis via email.

Following the application deadline, the Associate Dean of Research selects applicants for assessment on the advice of the Appointments Committee. Applicants are selected on the basis of an overall assessment of the applicants that best match the recruitment needs of the faculty as described in this advertisement for the post. This is compared with the applicant's research and teaching profile as set out in the application, CV incl. list of publication, teaching portfolio and any research/development plan. All applicants are then immediately notified whether their application has been passed for assessment by an expert Assessment Committee. Selected applicants are notified of the composition of the committee and when the committee has completed its assessment, each applicant has the opportunity to comment on the part of the assessment that relates to the applicants themselves.

The University of Copenhagen wishes to reflect the surrounding society and therefore encourages all interested parties regardless of personal background to apply for the position.

Questions about the project can be addressed to Prof., dr. jur. Henrik Palmer Olsen, henrik@jur.ku.dk  

Further information about the recruitment process is available from HR, hrsc@hrsc.ku.dk. Please refer to ID number 211-2079/24-2I #1.

The application deadline is 30 January 2025, 23:59 CET.

Applications received after the deadline has expired will not be accepted.

If your application does not include all the required supporting documents your application can be rejected and not be considered by the assessment committee.