Call for Papers: 6th ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (CS&Law 2027), Chicago, USA [23-25 March 2027; ACM Proceedings]

The 6th ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (CS&Law 2027) will be held on 23-25 March 2027 at Northwestern University (Downtown Chicago), Illinois, USA.

The organisers describe the symposium as the flagship conference for the emerging field of computer science and law. It brings together scholars, practising lawyers and computing professionals who are fluent both in computational thinking and its mathematical formalisms and in legal scholarship with its own principles, methods and goals. The central aim is a body of scholarship on the co-design of law and computing technology to promote social goals.

The General Chair for 2027 is Talia Gillis (Columbia University). The Programme Committee is chaired by Aniket Kesari (Fordham University) and Kobbi Nissim (Georgetown University).

The symposium seeks interdisciplinary papers that combine rigorous technical computer-science reasoning with rigorous legal analysis. A submission should address a problem of interest to both fields, engage with the literature of both, and integrate the two disciplines.

Submissions may be original research or systematizations of knowledge (SoKs), that is, papers that evaluate, systematise and contextualise existing knowledge, offer new viewpoints, challenge long-held beliefs or devise useful taxonomies. SoKs comparing educational methods and experiences at the nexus of computer science and law are also welcome.

• Intellectual property rights in new computing technologies
• Systems and doctrines for evidentiary reliability
• Cybersecurity regulation, digital espionage and cyberwar
• Auditing and trustworthiness of software
• Broadening access to data and decision-making
• Computer crime, online law enforcement and digital forensics
• Encryption, privacy and lawful surveillance
• Fairness and bias in machine learning, data analytics and automated decision-making
• Freedom of speech in digital and networked settings
• Telecommunications network architecture, measurement and regulation
• Legal aspects of open-source software
• Mechanization and automation of legal reasoning
• Antitrust law and online market-structure regulation
• Content moderation, community governance and platform regulation
• Privacy-enhancing technologies and data protection
• Legal aspects of public ledgers, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts
• Artificial intelligence regulation and liability
• New paradigms for integrating computer science and law
• Programming languages for legal applications
• Novel educational methodologies combining computer science and law

The list is not exhaustive. Papers may be rejected at the PC chairs' discretion as out of scope, and authors unsure about scope are encouraged to ask the PC chairs in advance.

• Full archival papers: presented at the symposium and published in the proceedings. They must not be already published, accepted, or under submission to a conference or workshop with published proceedings. Simultaneous submission of a substantially expanded version to a refereed journal (including student-run law reviews) is allowed, so a 15-page archival version of a paper headed for the February 2027 law-review window may be submitted.
• Full non-archival papers: presented without publication in the proceedings (only a one-page summary appears). They must not have been published elsewhere more than two years before the symposium, should be substantially complete, and should be publicly available on a platform such as the author's website, SSRN or arXiv.
• Posters with lightning talks: a one-page summary with at least a one-paragraph abstract on recent or partial results, work in progress, open problems or work published elsewhere. Accepted posters are displayed during poster sessions and authors give a 3-minute lightning talk. Early-stage work should go to this track. Poster submission instructions will be released later.

The PC may offer authors of an archival submission a non-archival presentation instead.

• Use the ACM Small single-column template (LaTeX or Word).
• Full papers may run to 15 pages, excluding references and appendices. Appendices can be of any length but reviewers are not required to read them.
• Review is single-blind, and papers are judged particularly on how truly interdisciplinary their contribution is.
• Authors get a chance to send brief responses to the preliminary reviews before final decisions are made.
• Papers that might raise ethical concerns must show that proper procedures (such as IRB approval or responsible disclosure) were followed.
• Submissions are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including the policy on research involving human participants. All authors should obtain an ORCID iD.

Proceedings will be published in digital form only in the ACM Digital Library, and the papers will be free to read through an ACM OpenTOC on the symposium website.

At least one author of each accepted full paper must present the paper in person. Remote presentation of papers and posters is not supported.

The organisers say they hope to provide financial support to a limited number of people who wish to attend but do not have adequate funding. No further detail on this support has been published yet.

The call does not mention a submission fee. The conference registration fee for 2027 has not yet been announced on the official website.

Full papers (archival and non-archival) are submitted through the symposium's HotCRP submission system at cslaw27.hotcrp.com. Submissions opened on 22 September 2026, and the full-paper deadline is 20 October 2026, Anywhere on Earth (the HotCRP site shows this as 21 October 2026, 7:59:59 AM EDT).

The call does not give a contact email. Authors who are unsure whether their paper is in scope are encouraged to ask the Programme Committee chairs, Aniket Kesari (Fordham University) and Kobbi Nissim (Georgetown University), in advance. Updates and organiser details are on the official symposium website, computersciencelaw.org.