With their newly funded ERC Starting Grant project CompLex, Prof. Dr. iur. Dr. rer. nat. Corinna Coupette aims to develop a computational theory of legal systems that will help researchers, policymakers, and the general public to better understand and address the difficulties experienced by legal systems around the world.
Societies worldwide are facing an unprecedented confluence of urgent and fundamental challenges. Legal systems play a key role in addressing these challenges, but many of them are struggling to respond effectively.
Coupette’s team will combine concepts and method-development techniques from computer science and network science with expertise in foundations of law. “We need to make our legal systems more robust, resilient, and adaptive. To achieve this, we must be able to model, measure, and monitor them – just like other complex systems. CompLex will provide the theoretical framework and the methodological toolkit to make this happen,” Coupette explains.
The research ideas now funded by the ERC trace back to Coupette’s doctoral dissertation in law, which introduces legal network science to German legal discourse and was completed at the Institute in 2018. “At the Institute, I was given the exceptional freedom to study computer science while working on my legal dissertation. This allowed me to gain deep expertise in two very different disciplines, and it completely changed my academic trajectory,” says Coupette, who is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University but maintains ties with the Institute as a Research Affiliate. “I hope that my ERC project will inspire more budding scientists to pursue truly interdisciplinary careers!”
Biography:
Corinna Coupette (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University in Finland, a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and a Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. They studied law at Bucerius Law School and Stanford Law School (2010–2015) and Computer Science at LMU Munich and Saarland University (2015–2020). Coupette completed their PhD in law (Dr. iur., summa cum laude) at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (Dr. iur. 2018, summa cum laude) and their PhD in Computer Science at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Dr. rer. nat. 2023, summa cum laude). They received the Best Dissertation Award from Bucerius Law School (2018) and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2020) for their legal dissertation, and their interdisciplinary research profile was awarded the Caroline von Humboldt Prize for outstanding female junior scientists (2022).
In their research, Coupette investigates how we can combine code, data, and law to better model, measure, and manage complex systems (e.g., contemporary information societies). To this end, they explore novel ways of connecting computer science and law, such as using algorithms to collect and analyze legal data as networks, or formalizing and implementing legal and mathematical desiderata for responsible machine learning with relational data. Currently, they are particularly interested in computational legal theory – i.e., (1) designing computational methods to build a data-driven theory of legal systems and (2) understanding legal systems as computational systems –, with implications for how we approach challenges like regulating Artificial Intelligence, protecting democratic institutions, and realizing the sustainability transition.
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September 2025