Undergraduate alumnus from Edinburgh Law School receives historic recognition at the IRIS conference
Wed 27 March 2024

A paper jointly written by an Edinburgh Law School undergraduate student, PhD student, and established academic was one of the top ten papers shortlisted for the LexisNexis IRIS24 Best Paper award. This is the first time a paper by an undergraduate student as first author has been recognised in this manner.
Internationales Rechtinformatik Symposion (IRIS) is the largest conference on law and technology in Europe; this year, 128 papers were accepted for the conference after rigorous peer review. The paper, ‘Formalisation memories: Towards a pattern approach to legal design’, was written by Leon Qiu, Yiwei Lu, and Professor Burkhard Schafer. It brings together ideas from automated translation, legal drafting, and legal AI to argue for a new infrastructure in the development of legal technology that facilitates the sharing and reuse of formal modes of the law through ‘pattern libraries’, which is an approach inspired by ‘translation memories’ on the one hand and ‘pattern languages’ in architecture on the other. The paper will be published soon in the IT and law journal Jusletter IT.
Leon Qiu graduated from Edinburgh Law School with a First Class honours degree in 2023; his thesis was supervised by Scott Wortley. He is now pursuing further studies at UCL, while also turning his undergraduate dissertation into practice by working with the Legislative Drafting Office of Jersey. Yiwei Lu is a PhD student at the SCRIPT Centre working on intelligent methods for facilitating the collaboration and communication between legal and engineering communities in the context of AI. His PhD is supervised by Professor Burkhard Schafer and Dr Lachlan Urquhart.