Tomáš Koref’s Remarkable Achievement: Research at the Intersection of Law and AI Accepted by a Prestigious Academic Journal

Tomáš Koref, a doctoral student in the joint Ph.D. programme at the Faculty of Law of Charles University and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, achieved a significant success together with his international colleagues in late May. Their academic article, “Mining Legal Arguments to Study Judicial Formalism,” has been accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence and Law, a leading journal in the field.

This achievement is the result of long-term interdisciplinary research examining how Czech courts work with legal arguments and the extent of their formalism. The project uses large language models alongside traditional machine-learning methods to analyse more than 300,000 court decisions from 1997 to 2024. The research places strong emphasis on reproducibility and openness. The researchers use open-source AI models and make all their data, annotation guidelines, models, and code publicly available. The article is available in the arXiv repository; further insight into the research is provided in an interview Tomáš Koref gave to UK Forum.

Tomáš Koref also succeeded with another paper in progress within the Student Scientific and Professional Activities (SVOČ) programme, winning the doctoral category with his paper “Interpreting Statutes in the Heart of the Continent.” He has also recently presented his research at Cornell Law School, the ACM CS&Law conference in Berkeley, and a seminar organized by the Max Planck Law.

Tomáš Koref also applies his international experience at the Faculty of Law of Charles University, where – thanks to a SYLFF scholarship and the support of Ivan Habernal from Ruhr University Bochum – he has built a student research team and actively involves students in research activities. The success of this approach was demonstrated, for example, in the master’s-level Student Scientific Work Competition (SVOČ) in the Political Science and Legal Theory section, where team member Matyáš Barták won first place with his thesis “The Shadow of Precedent: Empirical Analysis of Reasoning with Previous Decisions at the Czech Supreme Court,” supervised by Tomáš Koref.

The research also has practical applications beyond academia. The team is currently collaborating with the High Court in Prague on the UX4TRIAL project, aiming to apply artificial intelligence to selected tasks directly within judicial practice while carefully considering key risks. Connecting scientific research with the needs of the judiciary can bring practical benefits both to the functioning of the courts and to the development of legal scholarship.