Jacob Livingston Slosser

I am Dr. Jacob Livingston Slosser, Director of Research at the Sapien Institute, which I founded in 2025.

Previously, I served as a Postdoc then Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Law from 2018 to 2025, at both the iCourts Centre of Excellence for International Courts and the Centre for European, Comparative, and Constitutional Legal Studies, including a Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2019 to 2022.

My work sits at the intersection of cognition, law, and artificial intelligence. I investigate how linguistic framing shapes judicial interpretation and how AI systems interpret and apply normative frameworks. I examine how agents (human, AI, or hybrid) navigate rules, principles, and standards in context, with particular attention to rule-of-law values like transparency, consistency, and reviewability.

This includes methodologies such as:

• deliberative normative choice experiments with AI agents
• modelling how linguistic framing affects judicial interpretation
• coding and analysing legal text with tools from cognitive linguistics
• conceptualising cooperative intelligence decision making models, among others

I am actively engaged in shaping AI policy through service on advisory committees for AI legislation and human rights observatories. Though most of my work has come as a legal academic, I approach questions as what I am at heart: a weird and nerdy generalist.

My work and interests span a broad range of fields that cover the phenomenon of meaning making, technology, and human behaviour. Which makes sense, as I have bounced around faculties, countries, and aisles at the bookstore trying to make sense of it all. My academic journey has taken me from Los Angeles (where I am from) to Sydney to Brussels to Copenhagen, with some stops in Boston and Port-Au-Prince in between. I have worn a few hats in my life: ghostwriter, touring musician, construction worker, tutor, pizza delivery boy, advertiser, aid worker, career counsellor, terrible graphic designer, and something that got called “special projects manager” because I like trying new things. However, over the past decade, I have more firmly established myself as a researcher, educator and policy adviser.

Further interests include: empirical legal studies, digitalization and culture, conceptual ontogenisis, and feminist legal studies.

I also have two cats.