Associate Professor Christian Turner currently serves as the leader of the School of Law’s AI Committee, which is developing a plan to train “complete, modern lawyers” who combine analog deep thinking skills with fluency in cutting-edge technology.

As a legal scholar with a Ph.D. in mathematics, Turner’s scholarship has taken an exciting new turn with the explosive progress of generative artificial intelligence. He previously sought to understand law’s conceptual architecture and the varied mental models people bring to legal argument. But since 2022, he has expanded his focus to research AI architectures, build a multi-model research application (enTalkenator) and develop a technical course for law students where they work with AI chatbots and cooperate on large projects using coding agents.

This past summer, Turner served as an AI and Society Fellow at the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco, where he conducted research in AI governance. While there, he collaborated with academics in law, economics, international relations and other fields. He also spent a week at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, Georgia, to train faculty and staff and help develop AI policy.

Turner’s recent scholarship includes “Artificial Legal Agents and the Alien Stance,” which is forthcoming, and “Attorneys and AI: How Lawyers Use Artificial Intelligence and Analyze Its Impacts” in Proceedings of the ACM on the Human-Computer Interaction. The latter piece is the product of a Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant for which Turner served as the principal investigator.