prof.mr.dr. Sofia Ranchordás

Bio

Sofia Ranchordas is a Full Professor of Administrative Law at Tilburg Law School. She also holds a part-time appointment as a Professor of Public Law, Innovation, and Sustainability at Luiss Guido Carli in Rome. In 2022, she was awarded a five-year NWO-Vidi project to conduct research on vulnerability in the automated state from a comparative perspective. Ranchordas is interested in the power asymmetries between government and citizens, how digital technology can exacerbate or create new vulnerabilities in the interactions between citizens and governments, and how to empower individuals either through more empathic approaches to law or to technology. Her scholarship has been published in leading law journals, such as Computer Law & Security and Duke Law Journal, as well as with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University. Ranchordás’ forthcoming book Introduction to Law and Regulation, 2nd edition (with Karen Yeung) will be published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press.

Expertise

Sofia Ranchordás is a leading expert in the regulation of the digital transformation in the public sector (including AI systems) and its equity challenges. She has also published extensively on innovation policy, experimental regulations and regulatory sandboxes. She has received several awards and grants for her work, including a Niels Stensen Fellowship and fellowships from the Knight Foundation, WASP-HS (Sweden), NWO (Vidi), KNAW. Her research has often been cited by international courts as well as by both national and international media, including the Wall Street Journal, Le Temps, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NRC, RTL News, and Diario de Noticias. She has advised several governmental bodies (e.g., European Commission, Dutch Ministries of Interior and Infrastructure, RLI)

Expertise: 

• Administrative law, digital government, and automation;
• AI regulation (AI Act);
• Big Tech regulation;
• Smart cities;
• Regulatory sandboxes and experimental regulation;
• Regulatory studies.

Teaching

• Global Law LLB: Administrative Law (English);
• LLM in Dutch Law/Master Rechtsgeleerdheid: Verdiepend staats- en bestuursrecht (Dutch);
• Bachelor Rechtsgeleerdheid: Rechtsbescherming tegen overheid (gespecialiseerde hoorcolleges)

Courses

• Legal Protection against the Government
• GLB: Administrative Law
• Advanced Constitutional and Administrati

Collaboration

Ranchordas is currently co-PI of a large WASP-HS project on the automation of the social welfare state, where she collaborates with different colleagues at Lund University. For the duration of the project (2023-2028), she is a Visiting Professor at the department of Sociolegal Studies, Faculty of Sociology, Lund University. She has been a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University Law School (2014), a Visiting Professor at the Université de Cote d’Azur (2021), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2021), and, more recently, at the University of Virginia University Law School (2023) and the Bok Visiting International Professor at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and an Affiliate Researcher of the Penn Regulation Programme (2024), where she taught courses on smart cities, automation and the regulation of Big Tech to graduate students. She was a Resident Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School and she is still an Affiliated Fellow of the same institute.

Recent publications

1. Vulnerability

   Beck, M., & Ranchordás, S. (Accepted/In press). Vulnerability. In M. Kaufmann, & H. M. Lomell (Eds.), Handbook of digital criminology De Gruyter.

2. The invisible citizen in the digital state - Administrative law meets…

   Ranchordás, S. (Accepted/In press). The invisible citizen in the digital state: Administrative law meets digital constitutionalism. In J. De Poorter, C. Oirsouw, & G. van der Schyff (Eds.), European yearbook of constitutional law

3. Regulatory sandboxes and innovation-friendly regulation - Between col…

   Vinci, V., & Ranchordás, S. (Accepted/In press). Regulatory sandboxes and innovation-friendly regulation: Between collaboration and capture. Italian Journal of Public Law, 1.

4. Introduction to law and regulation

   Yeung, K., & Ranchordás, S. (Accepted/In press). Introduction to law and regulation. (2nd ed.) Cambridge University Press.

5. Regulation and NLP (RegNLP) - Taming large language models

   Goanta, C., Aletras, N., Chalkidis, I., Ranchordas, S., & Spanakis, G. (2023). Regulation and NLP (RegNLP): Taming large language models. In H. Bouamor, J. Pino, & K. Bali (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 8712-8724). Association for Computational Linguistics.