JURIX 2026 — 39th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

JURIX 2026 is the 39th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, the longest-running academic gathering devoted to artificial intelligence and law. It takes place from 8 to 10 December 2026 in Toulouse, France, hosted at the University Toulouse Capitole with organisational support from the IRIT computer-science laboratory, the Toulouse School of Law and the AIDAL chair. Convened each year by the Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX), the conference is the principal European meeting point for researchers, doctoral students and practitioners working at the intersection of computer science, legal theory and the practice of law.

What JURIX is, and who it is for

Since the late 1980s, JURIX has tracked the evolution of legal informatics from rule-based expert systems to today's data-driven and generative methods. The conference is squarely academic: it publishes peer-reviewed full papers, short papers and demonstrations, typically issued as an open-access proceedings volume, and it remains the reference venue for the AI-and-law community in Europe alongside the biennial ICAIL series. It suits computer scientists, computational linguists, legal scholars, knowledge engineers, and increasingly the legal-technology teams inside law firms, courts and public administrations who want to follow rigorous, evidence-based work rather than vendor marketing.

For a doctoral student, JURIX is a place to find a research community and an early outlet; for an academic, it is where the canonical work on legal argumentation and knowledge representation is debated; for a practitioner, it is a chance to separate durable methods from passing trends before committing them to a courtroom or a compliance pipeline. That mix of audiences is part of what keeps the conference grounded — claims about legal AI are tested against both formal computer science and the demands of real legal reasoning.

2026 themes: LLMs meet legal reasoning

The JURIX programme spans the enduring pillars of the field together with the questions that large language models have forced to the surface. Recurring and emerging topics include:

• Legal knowledge representation, ontologies and rule modelling, including formalisations of legislation and contracts;
• Argumentation, case-based reasoning and models of legal interpretation;
• Natural language processing for legal text — statute and case-law analysis, information extraction, summarisation and retrieval;
• Large language models in legal practice: retrieval-augmented generation over case law, drafting assistance, hallucination and citation-faithfulness, and benchmarks for legal question answering;
• Explainability, accountability and the governance of automated decision-making in justice and administration;
• Computational tools for compliance, regulatory technology and access to justice.

What makes the 2026 edition distinctive is the maturing conversation around generative AI. After several years in which LLM demonstrations drew attention, the community is concentrating on reliability, evaluation and the legal-theoretic limits of statistical models — how to ground generated text in authoritative sources, how to measure faithfulness, and where symbolic reasoning still outperforms or must complement neural approaches. Expect substantial discussion of evaluation methodology and of the responsibilities that attach to deploying AI in courts and legal services.

Why it matters in 2026

The stakes have changed since LLMs entered everyday legal work. Lawyers now draft with generative assistants, courts field automated case-summary tools, and well-publicised incidents of fabricated citations have made faithfulness and verifiability a professional, not merely academic, concern. JURIX is one of the few venues where those questions are examined with methodological care rather than marketing optimism — measuring when retrieval-augmented systems actually cite the law correctly, and where the formal guarantees of symbolic reasoning remain irreplaceable. For an audience deciding whether and how to trust AI in legal practice, that evidence base is the value the conference adds.

Format, surrounding programme and attending

JURIX traditionally pairs a main technical track with a rich fringe. The opening day, 8 December, is given over to co-located workshops and the Doctoral Consortium, where early-career researchers present work in progress and receive mentoring from senior figures in the field. The main conference follows on 9 and 10 December with paper sessions, invited keynotes from leading academics in AI and law, and demonstration sessions where research prototypes are shown in action. The workshops are a notable draw in their own right, often covering specialised themes such as legal text processing, AI for legislation, and methods for legal data and explainable systems.

Registration, the full call for papers, accepted-paper lists and the detailed schedule are published on the official conference site as the event approaches. Toulouse is well connected by air and by France's high-speed rail network, and December placement makes JURIX a natural close to the academic year. For anyone serious about legal AI — whether building systems, studying their effects on the rule of law, or evaluating tools for real legal work — the 39th JURIX in Toulouse is the gathering that sets the European research agenda.