I’m a researcher and educator working at the intersection of Empirical Legal Studies, Law & Economics, and Legal AI. This has brought me to work at institutions across Europe, including the European University Institute in Italy, the Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales (CEPC) in Spain and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Law in Germany, interspersed with shorter teaching spells at Sciences Po Paris, University of Toulouse-Capitole and Maastricht University. I am currently Professor at the KU Leuven and Managing Director of the Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence.
My work has focuses on judicial decision making, European (legal) integration, legal reasoning and argumentation and quantitative and AI methods for legal research. I have collaborated with economists, psychologists, mathematicians and political scientists to explore law and related phenomena. My ERC-funded EUTHORITY Project delved into the dynamics of conflict and cooperation within the EU’s multilevel legal system. My current research interests encompass deceptive persuasion, behavioural comparative law (COMPASS Project), and inter-group biases in litigation. My research lab in Leuven has promoted the use of empirical, experimental and machine learning methods in the legal field, organising workshops and training sessions (including Summer School in AI and Empirical Legal Methods) along with conferences (most notably the first two Conference in Empirical Legal Studies in Europe).
My path to academia has been an unconventional one. (Un-)raised by radicals, I only knew the first letter of my name (“A majuscule“) when I was removed from preschool. Moving house more than twenty times across isolated parts of Britanny, the Cรฉvennes and upper Provence, living in semi-abandoned dwellings with an expanding cohort of siblings, sometimes under a tent, without running water or electricity. Education, in any structured form, basically absent. I only discovered I could read and write when, aged ten, I was entrusted to a complete stranger with the bizarre name of “Bonnefoy” (French for Good Faith) who took me on an eight-month ride through the middle of the Sahara desert and bits of West Africa. Only to run out of money and battling malaria as he fell out with my genitors and I refused to return. Christmas, as an exorbitant bourgeois ritual, had been abolished. Or so I thought. Estranged relatives gifted me the 1990 Quid encyclopedia, whose pages I must thank for my basic education. And so, after self-study, sometimes cribbing notes from textbooks in bookshops, and fifteen years hiding from school inspectors, I first stepped into a classroom in college. There, I chose science and higher education as the opposite of ignorance. Nerds as a family. And academia, imperfect as it often is, as a form of freedom.