When Bots Enforce The Law

Artificial intelligence and big data have made near-total surveillance and rule enforcement technically and economically feasible, unsettling generations of legal theory premised on enforcement scarcity. Examining a case study from online privacy, we show how automation can transform rules that were rarely applied into systems of near-perfect compliance. Yet full enforcement changes the role of law itself. It reveals three dangers: laws written for selective enforcement being applied fully, enforcement systems that escalate beyond legislative control, and automated compliance that erodes the human freedom law was meant to protect. As enforcement becomes ubiquitous, law itself must recalibrate: courts should temper automated excess, and legislatures must anticipate full enforceability.

Jakob Merane is a Senior Research Associate at the ETH Center for Law & Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and earned both his Bachelor and Master of Law (summa cum laude) from the University of Basel, with study visits at Humboldt-University of Berlin and University of Zurich. He concluded the Zurich bar exam with the highest honors and holds a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Applied Statistics from ETH Zurich. He was a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (2025) and at  Harvard Law School (2023), and held a postdoctoral position at the Faculty of Law, University of Lausanne in 2025.

In addition, Jakob is a member of the Swiss Study Foundation and received the Young Scholar Prize from the German Law and Economics Association in 2024. Before academia, he worked at Homburger, co-founded Open Auditorium supporting refugee students in Switzerland, and was a board member of Amnesty International.  To learn more about Jakob, visit https://lawecon.ethz.ch/group/scientific-team/merane.html.

Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

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