Merane, Jakob

Biography

Jakob is a Senior Research Associate at the ETH Center for Law & Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and is now working toward his habilitation. He earned both his Bachelor and Master of Law (summa cum laude) from the external page University of Basel, with study visits at external page Humboldt University of Berlin and external page University of Zurich. He passed the Zurich bar exam with distinction and holds a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Applied Statistics from ETH Zurich. He was a Visiting Researcher at the external page Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (2025) and at external page Harvard Law School (2023), and held a postdoctoral position at the external page Faculty of Law, University of Lausanne (2025).

In addition, Jakob was a member of the external page Swiss Study Foundation and received the Young Scholar Prize from the external page German Law and Economics Association in 2024. Outside academia, he worked at external page Homburger, co-founded external page Open Auditorium, an initiative supporting refugee students in Switzerland, and was a board member of the Swiss Section of external page Amnesty International.

Research Overview

Jakob's research examines the use of artificial intelligence in the enforcement and application of law. He works with computational, empirical, and experimental methods and publishes in legal and computer science venues.

His first line of work concerns the automated enforcement of legal claims. In his dissertation, he and his co-authors built and field-tested a machine learning system that detects data protection violations at scale and found that automated enforcement substantially improves compliance. He now studies how such enforcement should be regulated and where compliance-by-design is the better route.

His second line evaluates large language models in law: how well they perform legal tasks such as translation (external page SwiLTra-Bench) and answering law exam questions (external page LEXam), and whether they comply with the law when advising or acting for users (FraudBench).

His third line concerns AI in the courts. As scientific coordinator of the SNSF-funded project external page Responsible AI for the Swiss Judiciary, he works with the project team to develop and experimentally test AI tools for judicial work. He studies how judges and clerks reason with such tools, how tools can encourage critical thinking while preserving judicial independence, and how judicial use of AI affects trust in the courts. He is also interested in what a rise in self-represented litigants means for courts.

He also builds open legal datasets, including the external page Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset.

Teaching

Jakob has been teaching the course Law & Tech since 2020 (with A. Stremitzer), with a focus on AI regulation. He has supervised case studies in ETH’s Master in Science, Technology & Policy at the Albert Einstein School of Public Policy and co-supervised bachelor’s and master’s theses by computer science students exploring legal aspects of technology. Students interested in projects combining law and computer science are welcome to reach out.