Call for Papers: ICAIL 2027, 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Vienna, Austria [5-9 July 2027; ACM Proceedings]

The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) has been the leading global conference on research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and law since 1987. It is organised under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL). The series moved from a biennial to an annual schedule in 2025.

The 22nd edition, ICAIL 2027, marks the 40th anniversary of the series. It will be held from 5 to 9 July 2027 at the Juridicum, Faculty of Law, University of Vienna, Austria. It follows the 2026 edition in Singapore. Alongside the main programme, ICAIL 2027 hosts the Trevor Bench-Capon Doctoral Consortium and the Karl Branting Industry Meeting.

Original research papers on the foundations, concepts, methods, systems, tools and applications of AI and law are invited, grouped into four areas (the list is not exhaustive):

• Foundations, knowledge representation and computational legal theory: logic and argumentation, normative modelling, rule- and case-based reasoning, agent systems and norm emergence, neuro-symbolic integration, legal ontologies and data standards.
• Legal data science, information retrieval and generative AI: legal NLP, legal information retrieval and network analysis, argument mining, predictive analytics and empirical methods, LLM applications with rigorous evaluation, benchmarking and hallucination management.
• Technical governance, legal risk analysis and normative alignment: regulatory compliance engineering, algorithmic fairness and bias, law-based AI safety and guardrails, legal risk assessment and auditability, operationalising accountability and human oversight.
• Legal technologies: human-in-the-loop legal workflows, access to justice and public interest technology, Rules as Code and e-government, online dispute resolution and negotiation, smart contracts and distributed ledgers, legal process mining, digital forensics and legal education.

Submissions must be relevant to AI and law. To keep ICAIL's character, the organisers will not accept papers focused exclusively on the regulation of technology, on policy or on legal doctrine. Scholarly work on legal concepts and processes is welcome when it is framed in a computational or technical context.

Papers that merely apply off-the-shelf LLMs to hand-picked simplistic cases, without systematic methodology, scalable benchmarking and legal-domain depth, will also not be accepted.

• Long papers: up to 10 pages, including references.
• Short papers: up to 5 pages, including references.
• Demonstrations (extended abstracts): up to 2 pages, including references.

Every paper must state its novel scientific contribution clearly and discuss its relationship to prior work, including work at ICAIL, JURIX and the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal. Formal models should include concrete examples and clear syntax and semantics; machine-learning and generative AI papers should use authentic legal data and discuss the legal background, method and results; human evaluations must be done or validated by qualified legal professionals, with inter-annotator agreement reported. Authors are strongly encouraged to publish code, data and non-confidential prompts, and studies using closed commercial LLMs should also benchmark at least one comparable open-weights model.

Review is double-anonymised. Submitted papers must carry no author names, affiliations or acknowledgements, and self-references must be phrased to preserve anonymity. Authors first register the paper on the conference support system to receive a paper ID, which then replaces the author details in the PDF. Papers may not be posted as open access preprints before notifications are sent.

Papers must use the ACM sigconf template (LaTeX) or the interim ACM layout.docx template (Word), and be submitted as PDF. Papers that break the page limits or anonymity rules may be rejected without review. The organisers state that the submission platform will be announced on the call for papers page in good time before the deadline.

ICAIL proceedings have traditionally been published by ACM in its conference proceedings series. From 2026, all ACM conference papers are subject to mandatory open access. The open access fee is not included in the conference registration fee and is not sponsored by IAAIL. Many universities have ACM Open agreements that waive it; otherwise the authors pay it, though ACM may offer regional subsidies or hardship waivers. The registration fee itself has not yet been published.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference. ICAIL 2027 is an in-person event: remote participation is accepted only in exceptional circumstances, and at least one author must present the paper in Vienna.

ICAIL 2027 follows the ACM Policy on Authorship. Generative AI tools may not be listed as authors; their use to create content is permitted but must be disclosed, for example in the acknowledgements. Basic spelling, grammar and translation tools are exempt. Submissions are subject to ACM publications policies and the ACM Code of Ethics, and acceptance decisions rest with the Programme Chair.

The Trevor Bench-Capon Doctoral Consortium gives PhD researchers in AI and law a chance to present their work and get feedback from leading scholars. Its programme and timeline will be published separately from this call. PhD students with questions can write to contact@icail-vienna-2027.org.