Event Details
SMU Centre for Digital Law was honoured to host the 21st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2026) – held in Asia for the very first time – bringing together more than 250 scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and industry experts from across the globe for an intense week of intellectual exchange.
Spanning workshops, tutorials, conference sessions, demons and poster presentations, ICAIL 2026 showcased recent developments in a rapidly evolving field, with discourse ranging from legal reasoning and AI governance to explainability, legal data science, and applications of generative AI and AI agents in legal research and practice.
The conference featured three distinguished keynote addresses that anchored the week's discussions:
• Professor Weixing Shen (Tsinghua University) opened the conference with an invited talk on "Legal Knowledge at the Core: Enhancing and Evaluating AI Systems in Law," emphasising the importance of structured legal knowledge and logic as the foundation for reliable and trustworthy legal AI.
• The Honourable Justice Aidan Xu (Judge of the General Division of the High Court and Judge in Charge of Transformation and Innovation at the Singapore Judiciary) delivered a keynote on "Designing Digital Justice,” offering an institutionally grounded, techno-realist perspective on responsible AI adoption in judicial systems – addressing both its transformative potential and its inherent risks.
• Professor Ken Satoh (Director of the Center for Juris-Informatics, Japan) delivered a keynote on "Neuro-Symbolic Legal Reasoning: Reasoning by PROLOG, Rule and Fact Extraction by LLM," demonstrating how the integration of symbolic reasoning and large language models may advance the development of transparent legal AI applications.
Hosting ICAIL 2026 reflects our commitment to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship at the frontier of law and computer science, and to fostering global dialogue on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in the legal domain.
We are grateful for all participants, speakers, and partners who made this milestone event possible. We look forward to continuing the conversations and collaborations in the years ahead.
🔗 For more information, visit: https://site.smu.edu.sg/icail-2026
ICAIL is hosted by the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), in cooperation with ACM-SIGAI and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), together with SMU Yong Pung How School of Law.
