Together with Dr Katja de Vries, I am editor of the Routledge AI, Law and Society book series.
Background
AI is a field of technologies rapidly growing in use and impact in society. At times it is envisioned as responding to pressing problems and human concerns, and at other times it is perceived as a probing problem and threat to humanity. The transition in a range of areas towards the implementation of AI technologies – for example in legal tech, med-tech, reg-tech, automated decision-making, consumer goods, and warfare technology – has fundamentally changed the social and political landscape in which legal norms emerge and are implemented. It has also changed how legal and political governance is designed, carried out and put under scrutiny. While scholars and practitioners disagree on the use, usefulness and problematics emerging through this transition, most agree that AI is not an a-political technology. Rather, it comes with its own political and legal normativity, as well as with demands for new types of regulatory frameworks governing – and indeed curbing – its legal and political power and impact. Moreover, AI has moved the legal imaginaries of what subjectivity, agency and legal personhood is or can be. The latter include areas of artistic practice as well as the question of what the defining elements of what and artificially intelligent system is – and therefore also what a human or non-human non-AI agent in contrast is or can be.
While AI is often understood as a question mainly concerning tech-intensive societies and such areas of political and legal normativity its increased use and implementation also carries with it renewed concerns about global extraction of resources – such as mineral and metals – from parts of the globe already made vulnerable through colonialism, global economic inequalities. This also includes the labour conditions through which extraction is carried – conditions that are for the most part illegal in the jurisdictions where the goods of the technologies enabled by such labour are enjoyed. The social and political implications of AI are thus affective on a global and even extra-planetary scale.
The present series invites new ways of thinking about the various connections between AI, law, politics, and society. More broadly the series is concerned with addressing the normative fields of the emergence, use, regulation, experience, and impact of AI and related emerging technologies.
Series Focus
AI, Law and Society adopts an open approach to AI. This means that the series welcomes analyses of AI and related technologies and technological phenomena – such as blockchain, DAOs, and digital twins – from any institutional setting. This is inclusive of technological, political, legal, financial, and governmental designs of which AI is part.
Proposals can be theoretical, analysing conceptually the use, regulation, experience, and the socio-political impact of AI; they can be historical, outlining changes in how AI and related technologies have emerged and are governed; they can be material-empirical oriented, tracing or mapping the geo-political legal realities and labour embedded in AI; and they can assume a more contemporary-diagnostic approach, exploring, for example, the emergence of post-national or post/hyper-capitalist AI-governed spaces, agencies, and new subjectivities. The series is committed to inviting proposals that discuss AI-human-non-human links and formations, not only from “Western” perspectives and legal traditions, but also from de-colonial, TWAIL, and related perspectives.
The series focuses on the following themes:
- Legal, social, and political implications of AI
- Legal and political organisation of societies through and in resistance to AI
- Embedded normativities in AI
- Embodied and environmental normativities and AI
- Posthuman, new materialist, decolonial, TWAIL, critical race, feminist, and other critical legal approaches to AI
- AI, automation and decision-making in law and governance
- AI, law, and the changing politics of digital and cyber space
- AI, digital twining, and the regulatory and experiential challenges they give rise to
- AI, human and more-than-human rights
- AI, law, and robotics
- AI in trans-national and international law
- AI, law, and artistic praxis
Disciplinary Location
The book series is intended as a critical interdisciplinary series, at the interface of law, social and political theory, and AI studies. Given the interdisciplinary framing, as well as the inclusive definition of “AI”, some titles are more likely than others to approach AI technologies in a direct sense (or the regulation thereof). Other titles will concern related technologies, and broader histories, or socio-political theoretical concerns of which the development of AI is part.
The series interest in the social and political implications of AI in relation to law and normative power suggests a re-thinking of what and where law is, as well as what role AI plays – or indeed should play – in the making of law, politics, and society.
The series does not prescribe particular methodological approaches but invites and encourages a plurality of methodological strategies that can shed light on the intersection of law and AI and related emergent technologies: from socio-legal to posthuman and theological approaches.
Editorial Structure
The series is edited by Associate Professor Matilda Arvidsson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The series is also be supported by an international, interdisciplinary Advisory Board. Its members are Virginia Dignum, Fleur Johns, Daniel Joyce, Riikka Koulu, Andrea Leiter, Connal Parsley, Kangle Zhang, and Roxana Vatanparast.
Prospective Series Books
The series consists of sole authored short or full length monographs, joint authored monographs and collective or edited books. We anticipate 3–5 proposals a year.
Interested in submitting a book proposal for the series?
Proposals are sent directly to the series editor (matilda.arvidsson@law.gu.se) and should follow the general instructions for book proposals availed by Routledge as well as Routledge’s proposal guideline.
Published and forthcoming books in the series
Artificial Intelligence, Humans and the Law (forthcoming 2025) ed. by Henrik Palmer Olsen, Jacob Livingston Slosser, Salome Addo Ravn, Johan Eddebo, Jonas Hultin Rosenberg
The Routledge Handbook on AI, Law and Society (forthcoming 2026), ed. by Matilda Arvidsson and Kieran Tranter
Dr Matilda Arvidsson 