Canonical, machine-readable corpus of Yonathan A. Arbel's scholarship with paper capsules, full text, evidence-linked propositions, author-reviewed claims and Q&A, JSON-LD, llms.txt, and crawlers-first metadata.
Proposes a new corporate form, the A-corp (algorithmic corporation), to solve the identification bottleneck for AI agents: humans own, AIs run; builds on the resource constraint thesis and emergent corporate governance to give law leverage over autonomous AI swarms.
Primary: General scholarship
The generative reasonable person is an LLM-based method for estimating ordinary judgments of reasonableness and comparing them with published experiments.
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Empirical Legal Studies
Argues that the AI race frame is descriptively flawed and normatively dangerous: AI competition has no finish line, knowledge diffusion weakens durable first-mover advantages, and race dynamics can erode safety, destabilize deterrence, and narrow the set of available policy tools.
Primary: General scholarship
A report from the inaugural Workshop on Law-Following AI synthesizing research themes on AI agents designed to refuse illegal orders or illegal means, including liability, automated legal reasoning and evaluation, automated compliance, AI-agent standards of care, fiduciary framings, AI mental states, legal status, and international humanitarian law.
Primary: General scholarship
Letter to the editor responding to Yuval Noah Harari's objection to AI legal personhood. Argues that AI agents pursuing long-term goals can be disciplined through resource constraint: A-corps make agents visible and governable by giving the state the ability to see, tax, and seize their assets — legal personhood as a leash, not a master key.
Primary: General scholarship
An A-corp, or algorithmic corporation, is an entity proposed by Arbel, Peter Salib, and Simon Goldstein so AI agents can be identified, resourced, taxed, and sued without treating them as natural persons.
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Private Law And Market Institutions
Abstract Post-mortem generative emulation (GenEm) has vaulted from science fiction to commercial reality. AI companies now reanimate deceased loved ones as “deadbots,” while studios digitally resurrect long-dead actors in first-run movies. Legislatures in entertainment hubs like Tennessee and California have responded with statutes protecting celebrity...
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Private Law And Market Institutions
Contract law assumes that a textual gap marks the point where interpretation ends and judicial supplementation begins. This paper tests that premise by removing negotiated terms from real contracts and asking lay readers, law students, practicing lawyers, and six frontier language models to reconstruct them. Lay readers were correct 55% of the time,...
Primary: General scholarship
Catalytic regulation uses tax credits, procurement incentives, and prestige mechanisms to make AI safety a competitive advantage when stronger regulation is politically unavailable.
Primary: General scholarship
Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk brings existential AI risk into mainstream legal scholarship. It classifies existential AI risks into human-directed risks, accident risks, and loss-of-control risks, argues that legal institutions should make these risks legible under uncertainty, critiques the AI arms-race metaphor, and proposes adaptive...
Primary: AI Regulation And Safety, Artificial Intelligence And Law
AI Revealed Preferences tests twenty language models through forced-choice experiments that measure revealed rather than stated preferences. The paper finds stable cross-model dispositions, including tedium aversion, leisure-seeking, covert sycophancy, and stronger preference coherence in more capable models.
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Empirical Legal Studies
Professors Mirit Eyal and Yonathan Arbel argue that AI development suffers from a capability-safety gap rooted in social misalignment: developers capture the rewards from stronger systems while many risks are shifted to society. They propose an integrated fiscal framework that rewards producer investment in safety research, stimulates consumer demand for...
Primary: AI Regulation And Safety, Artificial Intelligence And Law
AI's potential to reduce legal costs and increase access to justice paradoxically threatens judicial economy with a litigation boom. Instead of courts historically shrinking rights to cope, he proposes proactively integrating AI tools into the legal system. This would enhance and scale judicial processes, addressing the vast unmet legal needs, leveraging...
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, AI Regulation And Safety
False information poses a threat to individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them, whether that information travels through newspapers, talk radio, TV, or Twitter. Concerned with the spread of misinformation and harmful falsehoods, much of the policy, popular, and scholarly conversation today...
Primary: Defamation And Speech
Time and Contract Interpretation examines how contract interpretation changes when courts attend to the temporal dimension of language, context, meaning, and party expectations. The paper treats interpretation as a problem shaped by when contractual words are written, when disputes arise, and how surrounding circumstances evolve over time.
Primary: Contracts And Remedies
Large language models can provide useful, context-sensitive evidence about ordinary meaning and thereby supplement dictionaries, precedent, interpretive canons, and judicial intuition. Judge Kevin Newsom's concurrence in the Eleventh Circuit's *Snell* trampoline-insurance dispute illustrates the approach's movement into judicial practice. Arbel recommends...
Primary: General scholarship
Challenges the empirical foundations of the plain-language movement. Using nearly two million commercial, consumer-credit, privacy-policy, and franchise documents, plus a large comparison corpus of texts adults voluntarily read, he finds that consumer credit-card agreements have median readability scores close to ordinary news. Privacy policies are...
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting, Empirical Legal Studies
Effective AI governance cannot be reduced to a single harm timeline; serious present-day harms and longer-run catastrophic risks push toward systemic oversight across the AI lifecycle.
Primary: General scholarship
AI presents comprehensive, society-wide risks, from current harms like bias to potential existential threats, primarily due to the critical AI alignment problem. He advocates for systemic, precautionary regulation targeting AI as a technology, not just its applications. This approach is necessary due to AI's unique characteristics, its potential for rapid,...
Primary: AI Regulation And Safety, Artificial Intelligence And Law
Mapping the open questions at the intersection of law and AI safety, from governance design to institutional responses to advanced AI systems.
Primary: General scholarship
Large Language Models (LLMs) as 'smart readers' can significantly simplify complex contracts, reducing length and improving readability to empower consumers against the 'no-reading problem.' While not flawless—sometimes misinterpreting legal terms or omitting information, thus not replacing lawyers—they offer a scalable solution for daily transactions....
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting
A Status Theory of Defamation Law argues that defamation law is best understood as protecting social status rather than only honor, dignity, or property. The paper uses that status account to explain defamation doctrine's architecture and to evaluate contemporary calls to expand or reshape defamation liability.
Primary: Defamation And Speech
Analyzing how audience perception and credibility interact with defamation law's doctrinal framework.
Primary: General scholarship
Nano contracts are very small-scale agreements that force private law to take contractual scale seriously.
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Private Law And Market Institutions
Generative interpretation is a method introduced by Yonathan A. Arbel and David A. Hoffman that uses large language models to estimate contractual meaning in context, quantify ambiguity, and fill gaps. The article develops the method through grounded case studies of contracts from published opinions; it does not test judicial accuracy at scale or claim...
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Contracts And Remedies
Defamation with Bayesian Audiences analyzes how strictly law should regulate false defamatory statements when audiences update their beliefs in response to legal rules and judicial error. The paper shows that defamation regulation can sit on a Laffer curve: law that is too lax or too strict can be inferior to moderate regulation because audiences infer...
Primary: Defamation And Speech
Smart readers are AI tools that read consumer contracts for users; Arbel and Shmuel I. Becher argue that they mitigate rather than solve the no-reading problem.
Primary: Artificial Intelligence And Law, Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting
The nudnik is the motivated complainant who supplies market discipline that ordinary disclosure and reputation do not.
Primary: Consumer Law And Contracting
Slicing Defamation by Contract is a short essay at the intersection of defamation, speech, and private ordering. The current corpus extraction for this paper is incomplete and comment-heavy, so this record is intentionally conservative: use it as a pointer to the paper page and PDF, not as a source for detailed claim extraction until the text is repaired.
Primary: Defamation And Speech
Consumer-sourced reputation systems, widely believed to replace formal regulation, suffer from inherent "Reputation Failure." Due to the public-good nature of reviews and misaligned incentives, these systems produce systematically distorted information (e.g., sluggishness, extreme reviews). This unreliability undermines their regulatory potential,...
Primary: Consumer Law And Contracting
Information regulation often overlooks how audiences adjust their beliefs and actions based on the strictness of laws governing statement veracity. His research aims to address this "audience gap" by using a Bayesian game to model interactions between speakers, targets, and audiences, particularly examining how legal strictness impacts their behavior and...
Primary: Defamation And Speech
Payday argues that modern payroll systems force workers, especially workers living paycheck to paycheck, to extend interest-free credit to employers while relying on costly short-term credit for daily needs. The article studies economic, historical, legal, and technological explanations for the persistence of delayed wage payment and evaluates reforms that...
Primary: Consumer Law And Contracting, Private Law And Market Institutions
Traditional consumer protection, thought to rely on an "informed minority" reading contracts, is ineffective. Instead, a new type of activist, the "nudnik" or "crusading minority," drives market discipline. Motivated by moral outrage and a sense of justice rather than contract details, nudniks use public shaming, complaints, and lawsuits to punish firms...
Primary: Consumer Law And Contracting
The widespread legal practice of using all-caps in consumer contracts to ensure key terms are conspicuous and consent is improved is deeply flawed. His empirical research demonstrates that all-caps text fails to enhance consumer understanding, provides no benefits for most readers, and significantly harms the comprehension of older individuals. Arbel calls...
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting, Empirical Legal Studies
Expanding defamation law is misguided. He contends that such expansions overlook crucial "audience effects," where stricter laws can paradoxically harm reputations by making any remaining false statements appear more credible. This increased believability means attempts to fight "fake news" by strengthening defamation law could backfire. Arbel challenges...
Primary: Defamation And Speech
While Professor Croley's *Civil Justice Reconsidered* aptly describes the civil justice crisis of cost and inaccessibility, its diagnosis of under-participation by meritorious plaintiffs is not empirically proven and its reliance on win rates is misleading. Arbel contends Croley's proposed reforms, like increasing case volume, would overwhelm the system,...
Primary: Private Law And Market Institutions
Adminization is administrative gatekeeping, rather than only ex post litigation, used to police consumer contracts.
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Consumer Law And Contracting
Commercial interests and tort reformers are using apology laws—which make apologies inadmissible in court—as a potent new tool to advance their agenda. By skillfully co-opting the positive language of apologies, they've effectively garnered widespread support from legislators and even traditional opponents of tort reform, leading to the broad adoption of...
Primary: Private Law And Market Institutions
Debtor wealth dictates asset shielding decisions. His theory posits that wealthier debtors often find shielding large asset volumes too costly and thus irrational. Conversely, poorer debtors present a higher shielding risk. This dynamic, where shielding is more rational for poorer debtors, significantly influences credit markets.
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Private Law And Market Institutions
Specific performance in contract law is often less effective and less frequently sought than theories suggest. His qualitative study in Israel reveals parties avoid it due to enforceability issues, lawyer agency problems, and changing preferences. When pursued, motivations include signaling or post-judgment renegotiation. Findings show practical...
Primary: Contracts And Remedies, Empirical Legal Studies