Funding

Grants

Selected grants supporting the lab's research on AI, law, and economics — present and past.

ERC Starting Grant · funded by SERI · since 2022

Principal Investigator Elliott Ash · ETH Zurich

The lab's founding grant. TAILSS develops artificial-intelligence tools for research on law and social science: new measurements of fairness and bias in judicial decision-making, natural-language methods for legal and political texts, and transparent machine systems that can help detect and mitigate bias where human decision-makers are subject to political pressure or prejudice. Awarded in the ERC Starting Grant 2021 call (panel SH2); because Switzerland was not associated to Horizon Europe at the time, the grant is funded directly by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

Center for Law & Economics announcement ↗SERI-funded ERC grants list (PDF) ↗ERC 2021 Starting Grant results (PDF) ↗
CHF 1.66mdirect funding from SERI — ERC Starting Grant 2021, panel SH2
2022grant start at ETH Zurich

Awarded

New and ongoing

Grants starting or underway beyond TAILSS.

02

Responsible AI for the Swiss Judiciary

How can AI tools for courts be designed to improve judicial decision-making without endangering institutional trust? The project connects legal science, computer science, and behavioural economics: it develops concrete prototypes, tests them in field experiments with courts, and evaluates the impact on the quality and consistency of rulings. With Stefan Bechtold, Alexander Stremitzer, Cordula Lötscher (Basel), Christoph Engel, and Antoine Bosselut (EPFL); scientific coordinator Jakob Merane.

Swiss National Science Foundation · CHF 3.4 million · from May 2026 · Principal Investigator · ETH Zurich, University of Basel, EPFL

Project site ↗

Support

Other funding

The lab's work has also been supported by these funders and programs.

  • European Research Council
  • Swiss National Science Foundation
  • Swiss Data Science Center
  • U.S. National Science Foundation
  • The Alan Turing Institute
  • Washington Center for Equitable Growth
  • Swiss AI Initiative — Scientific Lead, Human-AI Alignment horizontal