ICAIL 2026 - First Call for Papers

21th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Yong Pung How School of Law at the
Singapore Management University (SMU)
8-12 June 2026
https://site.smu.edu.sg/icail-2026

Since 1987, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) has been the foremost international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law. It is organized under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL) in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
The IAAIL Executive Committee has decided to make ICAIL an annual conference from the 2025 edition onwards. The 21st edition will be the first time an ICAIL will be held a year after the previous edition. For this edition, ICAIL will be in Asia for the first time, hosted by the Yong Pung How School of Law at the Singapore Management University (SMU).
All the ICAIL proceedings have been published by ACM in the conference proceeding series. We invite submissions of papers, technology demonstrations, as well as proposals for workshops and tutorials.

Organization

• Yong Pung How School of Law at the Singapore Management University (SMU)
• Program Chair: Enrico Francesconi (IGSG-CNR, Italy), enrico.francesconi@cnr.it
• Local Chair: LIM How Khang (Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University), hklim@smu.edu.sg
• Local co-Chair: Dirk Hartung (Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University), dirkhartung@smu.edu.sg
• IAAIL Secretary-Treasurer: Michał Araszkiewicz (Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland),michal.araszkiewicz@uj.edu.pl

Call for Papers

We invite submission of original papers on Artificial Intelligence & Law, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Argument mining on legal texts

• Classification and automatic summarization of legal text
• Computational methods for negotiation and contract formation
• Computer-assisted dispute resolution
• Computable representations of legal rules and domain specific languages for the law
• Decision support systems in the legal domain
• Deep learning on data and text from the legal domain
• Dialog systems in the legal domain
• e-discovery and e-disclosure
• e-government, e-democracy and e-justice
• Empirical research (quantitative and qualitative analysis) on the use of AI systems in legal practice (for example in law courts, lawmaking, legal education and legislative/normative or adjudicative activities in public administration)
• Innovative applications in AI and Law
• Philosophical and legal-theoretical analysis of the significance and implications of methodologies or technical features of AI systems (particularly in applications to Law) with respect to fundamental legal concepts and ethical issues.
• Systems and methods designed for compliance checking with respect to normative principles, rules and standards (legal or ethical)
• Methodologies for the technical design in AI systems of compliance with normative principles, rules and standards of trustworthy or responsible AI
• Explainable AI for the legal domain
• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning (e.g., argumentation, case-based reasoning), including deontic logics
• Formal and conceptual modeling of fundamental legal concepts
• Formal and computational models of evidential reasoning
• Formal models of norms and norm-governed systems
• Information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Information retrieval, question answering, and literature recommendation in the legal domain
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for forensics
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including related applications of natural language processing, argument, and data mining
• Knowledge representation, knowledge engineering, and ontologies in the legal domain
• Legal design involving AI techniques
• Machine learning and data analytics applied to the legal domain
• Natural language processing of legal text, including law-specific standard NLP tasks (e.g., Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Role Labeling, Translation, etc.)
• Applications of generative AI systems (LLMs) to the legal domain in connection to machine learning systems or knowledge representation systems
• Normative reasoning by autonomous agents
• Neuro-symbolic approaches in the legal domain
• Open and linked data in the legal domain
• Smart contracts and application of blockchain in the legal domain
• Visualization techniques for legal information and data

Paper Submission

Papers (up to 10 pages including references for long papers, up to 5 pages including references for short papers) should present contributions from relevant topics. To maintain ICAIL’s relevance in the larger rapidly-moving field at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence, all papers must make clear their relation to legal information, reasoning, or processes. There should be a statement about the novel scientific contribution. The relation to prior work must be well-developed. The paper ought to report a full and satisfying discussion of its findings.
Papers on generative AI, machine learning or data mining should include discussions of the data, methodology, results, and analysis in sufficient depth beyond merely reporting metrics.
Submissions focusing on the reproduction, validation, constructive scrutinization, and extension of previously published works, datasets, and benchmarks are strongly encouraged.
Papers proposing formal or computational models should provide examples and/or reproducible simulations.
Papers on applications should describe the motivations, techniques, implementation, and evaluation.
All papers should include some discussion about the relevance to legal theory, practice, use of legal information, or impact on processes.
It is highly recommended that code and data be published alongside the papers for all submissions to facilitate reproducibility. Program committee members will be instructed to take data and code sharing into account in their reviews.
Paper must be formatted using the ACM sigconf template (for LaTeX) or the interim template layout.docx (for Word), both at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. All papers should be converted to PDF prior to electronic submission. Papers that do not adhere to these conditions will be rejected without review.
Submissions should be uploaded to the conference support system (to be supplied soon) by the submission deadline.
Reviewing will be double-blind. Papers submitted for review must not include names and affiliations of the authors and not include an acknowledgments section. Any identifying text in the body of the paper (e.g. citing “our work”) should be removed or rephrased to be non-identifying. These aspects can be added at the camera-ready stage. Therefore, prior to submission, the authors should first register the paper on the conference support system in order to receive an ID number for it. Then, in order to submit the paper, it should be revised so that the ID number of the paper replaces the names and affiliations of the authors. The references should include relevant published literature, including previous works of the authors, though care should be taken in the style of writing in order to preserve anonymity. References to code and data intended to be published alongside the papers are to be phrased such that anonymity is preserved.
Submitted papers may not be published as open access preprints before acceptance notifications have been sent.
Papers submitted not adhering to the page limitation or the anonymity requirements may be rejected without review.

Registration and Participation

At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the conference to be included in presentation and publication in proceedings.
At least one author of an accepted paper must present the work at the conference in person.
Please consider that ICAIL 2026 is an in-presence event; remote participation is exceptional and is to be motivated.

Ethics and policies

Use of Generative AI tools to draft papers: For ICAIL 2026, we adhere to the principles and guidelines included in the ACM Policy on Authorship specifically about “Criteria for Authorship” regarding the use of Generative AI technologies for authoring papers: “Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc.). If you are uncertain about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work. (…) Basic word processing systems that recommend and insert replacement text, perform spelling or grammar checks and corrections, or systems that do language translations are to be considered exceptions to this disclosure requirement and are generally permitted and need not be disclosed in the Work. As the line between Generative AI tools and basic word processing systems like MS-Word or Grammarly becomes blurred, this Policy will be updated.”
Authorship: All individuals, and only those, who have made significant contributions to a paper should be listed as authors in the submission system. We will not permit adding or removing authors to a paper after the submission deadline. Please also ensure that the order of authors is correct at submission time. Disputes about authorships and misconduct should be negotiated and resolved by parties to the dispute. IAAIL and ICAIL do not accept responsibility to adjudicate or resolve any such disputes, and submitted papers will be reviewed.
Research reported at ICAIL should avoid harm, be honest and trustworthy, fair and non-discriminatory, and respect privacy and intellectual property.
Please note that the submission of contributions may also be subject to other policies if the ACM introduces or updates them.
Submitting a work to the conference implies acceptance of all the conditions in the call for papers.
Paper assessment: Decision about acceptance/rejection of a paper is under the exclusive responsibility of the Program Chair, and no dispute will be admitted.

Demonstrations

A session will be organized for the demonstration of creative, robust, and practical working applications and tools. Where a demonstration is not connected to a submitted paper, a two-page extended abstract about the system should be submitted for review, via the conference support system and following the instructions on paper submission. Accepted extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. For those demonstrations that are connected to a submitted paper, no separate statement about the demonstration needs to be submitted, but the author(s) should send an email to the Program Chair by the demo submission deadline to register their interest in demonstrating their work at this session.

Workshops & Tutorials

ICAIL 2026 will include workshops and tutorials on Monday, June the 8th and Friday, June the 12th. Tutorials should cover a broad topic of relevance to the AI and Law community and should have one or more designated organizers/speakers. Workshops are intended for informal discussion and should have one or more designated organizers as well as an organizing and programming committee. Proposals must contain enough information to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and community interest. Proposals should be 2 to 4 pages and include at least the following information:
The workshop or tutorial topic and goals, their significance, and their appropriateness for ICAIL 2026
The intended audience, including the research areas from which participants may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their names, if known), and plans for publicizing the workshop
Organization of the workshop or tutorial, including the intended format (such as invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, or other methods for ensuring an interactive atmosphere) and the expected length (full day or half day)
Organizers’ details: a description of the main organizers’ background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable)
Proposals for workshops and tutorials must be submitted in a filling form (to be supplied soon), by the submission deadline.

Trevor Bench-Capon Doctoral Consortium

ICAIL 2026 will feature a Trevor Bench-Capon Doctoral Consortium aiming to promote the exchange of ideas from PhD researchers in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Law and to provide them with an opportunity to interact and receive feedback from leading scholars and experts in the field. Details about the consortium’s program and timeline will be published separately from this call for papers. Since 2025, the Doctoral Consortium bears the name of Trevor Bench-Capon, one of the pillars of the AI and Law community, who was one of the greatest supporters of the DC initiative.

Awards

IAAIL has established three different awards, to be presented at the conference banquet.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper
The best student paper award is in memory of Donald H. Berman, a professor of law at Northeastern University, who was a co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2027. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted using the facility provided by the submission system, and any non-student co-authors should provide a statement by email to the Program Chair that affirms that the paper is primarily student work.

Carole Hafner Award for Best Paper
The best paper award is given in memory of Carole Hafner, an associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University. She was one of the founders of the ICAIL conference and a co-founding editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Peter Jackson Award for Best Innovative Application Paper
The best innovative application paper award is dedicated to the memory of Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters’ Chief Research Scientist, who was a strong supporter of the ICAIL conferences and a significant contributor to the development of advanced technologies in AI and Law.

Relevant dates

Workshop and Tutorial Proposals Submission: 05 December 2025
Registration opens: 02 January 2026 (tentative)
Paper Submission deadline: 16 January 2026
Demonstration Submission including extended abstracts: 23 January 2026
Rebuttal period: 2 - 6 March 2026
Notification of acceptance for Papers and Demonstrations: 23 March 2026
ACM metadata reporting deadline: 27 March 2026
Camera Ready papers due: 20 April 2026
Conference: 08-12 June 2026