Čufar, Kristina

I am a Teaching Assistant at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law with the department for Legal Theory and Sociology of Law. I hold a Ph.D. from the European University Institute and was awarded grants to spend periods as a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.

My research intertwines philosophy of law, critical legal theory and socio-legal approaches to investigate law’s complicity in the perpetuation of social inequalities, as well as the potentialities of socio-legal transformations.

I have published texts on the subversive and conservative potential of legal theory and on the impacts of abstract legal concepts on lived realities and legal consciousness. I am currently involved in an Erasmus Strategic Partnership for Higher Education ‘RECOGNISE’ dedicated to developing an interdisciplinary training curriculum and a handbook on legal reasoning and cognitive science, including topics like heuristics and biases in adjudication, cognitive structure of legal concepts, artificial intelligence and law and emotions. I am also interested in the impacts of contemporary technologies – so called artificial intelligence – on law and societies.

One of the key concerns of my research is the problem of automated bias, techno-solutionism and mystification of technology that lead to the reproduction of social inequalities and destructive attitudes towards human and non-human existence. I am also interested in the social networks’ algorithmic architecture and its impact on public debates, especially the regulation of illegal and inappropriate forms of expression online, which further destabilizes the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’. I am currently involved in a Slovenian Research Agency research project ‘Development and use of artificial intelligence in the light of negative and positive obligations of a State to ensure the right to life’. In this context, I continue to address legal, ecological and social concerns relating to development and use of artificial intelligence.

Area(s) of expertise: Sociology of Law, Philosophy of Law, Critical Legal Theory, Law and Technology