Riikka Koulu

Assistant professor (Social and Legal Implications of AI) at the faculties of Social Sciences and Law at the University of Helsinki, the director of University of Helsinki Legal Tech Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub specialised in law and digitalisation. Affiliated researcher of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin, Germany,  of the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), and of research consortium Autonomy through Cyberjustice Technologies (ACT) directed by the Cyberjustice Laboratory, University of Montreal, Canada. 

I have conducted research on law, technology and dispute resolution since 2009, first drawn to the field by my interest in digitalisation of conflict management and court procedures. I defended my doctoral dissertation "Dispute Resolution and Technology - Revisiting the Justification of Conflict Management" in September 2016. Combining procedural law, law, tehnology and society research, and legal theory, my dissertation focused on the implications of technological change on conflict management. My current research interests continue my earlier work on technological change, including technological governance and public policy making, computational methods for empirical legal research, legal conceptulisations of algorithmic decision-making particularly in the context of public administration, conflict management in digital environments, and automation of legal practices. 

My earlier publications cover a broad area of different aspects of technological change in law, for an updated list see publications on this page. 

For more information about the University of Helsinki Legal Tech Lab, see: www.legaltechlab.fi. 

My international mobility includes research exchanges at HIIG, Cyberjustice Laboratory of Montreal and University of Barcelona.