The 117th Annual Conference of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) took place from 2 to 4 September 2026 at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The conference featured more than 100 parallel sessions across 28 thematic groups/sections, a dedicated programme for early-career researchers (including the SLS mentorship scheme), a friendly atmosphere at social events between and after session-specific debates, and ample opportunities to discuss contemporary legal challenges in the UK and beyond.
Beyond thought-provoking subject-specific discussions, academics reassessed the role of contemporary legal educators and discussed approaches to collaborating with target groups without a legal background during the plenary sessions. Challenges related to AI in legal education and practice were at the forefront of all discussions, with educators debating the best ways to incorporate AI tools into research, teaching and learning to support high-level student performance and post-graduation career resilience.
The intense presentation schedule was matched by engaging, lively social activities. This year offered an informal dinner at the Sainsbury Centre on the UEA campus, an SLS Running Club get-together, and a drinks and dinner reception at the Norwich Assembly House. The latter event included announcing the recipients of the Peter Birks Book Prize and the Margaret Brazier Book Prize. These SLS prizes are awarded for outstanding legal scholarship to early- and mid-career scholars, respectively.
CREATe was represented by two academics at the SLS: Zihao Li and Liana Japaridze.
Zihao presented his ongoing research funded by a UKRI Metascience AI Fellowship in the Cyber Law section. His presentation, titled “Too Restrictive, Too Permissive: How UK Copyright and Data Protection Law Shape AI for Science”, explored how UK legislation structures legal conditions for the AI deployment for scientific projects. In his presentation, Zihao explained that the current framework simultaneously under-protects and overregulates AI usage in science, creating legal uncertainty that constrains legitimate research while failing to deliver adequate safeguards for data subjects and rightsholders. His analysis shows that while recent changes to UK copyright and data protection legislation promise greater flexibility for organisations, they largely preserve the status quo that makes large-scale, mixed-purpose AI training extremely difficult, especially with sensitive and/or inferential data. To solve this problem, Zihao offered an alternative regulation model that would extend copyright and data protection exemptions to cover both public and private AI research up to the point of market entry, subject to strict internal governance, purpose limitation, retention, security and oversight requirements, while shifting more intensive obligations toward the deployment phase, including transparency, licensing and accountability for downstream harms.
Liana presented her research in the EU and Competition Law section. Her work, titled “Supporting Effective Operation of Regulatory Sandboxes – what Competition Law and Policy can (and should) do”, explored the relationship between regulatory sandbox design and operation, market competition and consumer well-being. In her presentation, Liana explained why the competition law toolbox is relevant for regulatory sandbox design from both market/competition and consumer perspectives. She elaborated on how competition law and policy can support the effective operation of regulatory sandboxes at three levels: during sandbox design and engagement; during the sandbox incubation period; and in the post-sandbox environment, when newly developed products and services are launched into existing markets. The conclusion was that competition law engagement at each stage remains limited across multiple countries worldwide and a closer alignment between competition and regulatory sandbox frameworks is required to ensure emerging (state-supported) innovation delivers market and societal benefits.
Besides CREATe, the University of Glasgow Law School was strongly represented at the conference, both by up-and-coming and experienced researchers. The presented works belong to Katarzyna Chalaczkiewicz-Ladna, Iain MacNeil and Irene-Marie Esser (in the Company Law section); Alan Brown (Family Law section); Qingqin Zhang (Labour Law section); Mat Campbell (Tort Law section); Pier Mario Lupinu and Alberto Pagliari (Contracts, Commercial and Consumer Law section). The highlight of the conference was the fact that SLS awarded our colleague Louise Kennefick the Margaret Brazier Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career Scholarship for her book The Boundaries of Blame: Towards a Universal Partial Defence for the Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2025). We are all happy and proud of her!
A special ‘thank you’ is due to Professor Claudina Richards (SLS president 2025-2026, UEA) and the entire organising team for this year’s conference. Their dedication and effort made the event informative, engaging and enjoyable.
Next year, from 7 to 9 September 2027, the 118th annual SLS conference will be hosted by Queen’s University Belfast. We hope CREATe and the University of Glasgow Law School will also be strongly represented there.