Merane, Jakob

Biography

Jakob is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich and at the Faculty of Law at the external page University of Lausanne. He holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and earned both his Bachelor and Master of Law (summa cum laude) from the external page University of Basel, with study visits at external page Humboldt-University of Berlin and external page 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 is currently a Visiting Researcher at the external page Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and was a Visiting Researcher at external page Harvard Law School in 2023.

In addition, Jakob is a member of the external page Swiss Study Foundation and received the Young Scholar Prize from the external page German Law and Economics Association in 2024. Before academia, he worked at external page Homburger, co-founded external page Open Auditorium supporting refugee students in Switzerland, and was a board member of external page Amnesty International.

Research Overview

Jakob’s research explores the application of artificial intelligence in legal enforcement and legal technology. He draws on a multidisciplinary toolkit of computational, empirical, and experimental methods. His doctoral dissertation specifically examined the enforcement of small claims by using an automated web crawler and a machine learning pipeline to systematically detect data protection violations. This research demonstrated significant compliance improvements resulting from automated enforcement, while also raising important policy implications. Building on these insights, Jakob contributed to Compliance-by-Design approaches.

Currently, his research centers on evaluating the capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in legal contexts. Specifically, Jakob assesses their effectiveness in managing complex legal tasks, such as translating multilingual legal texts (SwiLTra), answering sophisticated legal exam questions (external page LEXam), and examining their adaptability and cultural alignment with the Swiss legal context. He also develops Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based tools for judicial institutions.

Furthermore, Jakob conducts quantitative analyses of legal datasets, examining topics like gender distribution among attorneys and multilingual citation patterns using the external page Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD). He also researches topics such as liability risks associated with AI-assisted medical decisions, the regulation of new digital advertising formats, and legal considerations in using conversational data for further AI training.

Teaching

Jakob has been teaching the course Law & Tech since 2020 (with A. Stremitzer), focusing particularly on AI regulation. He has also supervised case studies within ETH's International Science and Technology Policy (ISTP) program. Additionally, Jakob has co-supervised bachelor’s and master’s theses by computer science students exploring legal aspects of technology. Students interested in interdisciplinary projects combining law and computer science are encouraged to reach out for supervision opportunities.