Law, artificial intelligence and access to justice
I am an Assistant Professor in Law & AI at Maastricht University’s Maastricht Law and Tech Lab. My research examines artificial intelligence and law, with a particular focus on legal reasoning, access to justice, and the design of useful legal decision-support systems.
I also contribute to research at the Brightlands Institute for Smart Society and am a Fellow of the Cyberjustice Laboratory at Université de Montréal. My earlier work includes leading the JusticeBot project and postdoctoral research at McGill University.
Research
- Artificial intelligence and legal reasoning
- Access to justice
- Generative AI in law
- Legal decision-support systems
- Legal analytics and the responsible use of AI
The selected work page introduces JusticeBot, JusticeCreator and other projects. Publications are collected with their available resources.
Teaching
My teaching at Maastricht University includes Advanced Legal Analytics, Legal Data Analysis and Ethics, and coordination of the Master’s programme in Law & AI.
Teaching · Talks and presentations
Download my curriculum vitae
Selected publications
2025Conference paper
Hannes Westermann, Vern R. Walker, Jaromir Savelka
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Mapping legal criteria to the language of adjudicatory decisions with large language models.
2024Conference paper
Hannes Westermann, Jaromir Savelka
AI for Access to Justice Workshop at JURIX 2024
Exploring multimodal language models for analyzing images of legal documents and supporting access to justice.
2023Conference paper
Hannes Westermann, Karim Benyekhlef
Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
A methodology for building augmented-intelligence tools that help laypeople access justice.
All 46 publications · Download bibliography