Man with short brown hair in a white button down shirt and gray blazer, standing in front of a wall of window behind tables and chairs

Elliott Ash

Paul, Weiss Distinguished AI Scholar in Residence

Visiting Faculty and Scholars in Residence

Education

Ph.D. (Economics), Columbia University, 2016
J.D., Columbia Law School, 2010
LL.M., University of Amsterdam, 2010
B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2007

Areas of Study

Artificial Intelligence and Technology Law

Areas of Specialty

Law and Artificial Intelligence
Law and Economics

Elliott Ash ’10 LAW, ’16 GSAS, a pioneering scholar of AI and the law, is an associate professor of law, economics, and data science at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). Ash’s research and teaching focus on empirical analysis of the law and legal systems using computational methods from econometrics, natural language processing, and machine learning. His scholarship measures judicial behavior, maps legal language, and builds tools with the aim of making legal analysis more rigorous and accessible. He has received grants for his research from the Alan Turing Institute, the European Research Council, Swiss Data Science Center, Swiss National Science Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Ash launched his academic career as a fellow at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He joined the faculty of ETH Zurich in 2018 and was awarded tenure in 2024. He has also been a visiting scholar in residence at New York University School of Law and an instructor at the New York University Center for Data Science.

Beyond academia, Ash serves as scientific lead for the Swiss AI Initiative, the largest open science/open source effort for AI foundation models worldwide, and he is a fellow at the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, which is committed to shaping the future of AI in Europe by pushing the scientific and technological boundaries for human-centered, beneficial, and safe AI. He is also the founder and developer of Tracelaw, a legal document verification and review platform for U.S. law.

Ash will begin a three-year appointment as Paul, Weiss Distinguished AI Scholar in Residence in January 2027, teaching courses focused on AI.

Publications

Journals

Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu. “Ideas have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice.” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2026).
Elliott Ash, Caterina Chiopris, Robert Mahari, Suresh Naidu. “Continuity and change in US legal tradition: Evidence from judicial citation communities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026).
Philine Widmer, Clementine Abed-Meraim, Sergio Galletta, and Elliott Ash. “Media Slant is Contagious.” Economic Journal (conditionally accepted).
Elliott Ash, Heiner Mikosch, Aleixs Perakis, Samad Sarferaz. “Seeing and hearing is believing: The role of audiovisual communication in shaping inflation expectations.” European Economic Review (2026).
Elliott Ash, Massimo Morelli, and Matia Vannoni. “More Laws, More Growth? Evidence from U.S. States.” Journal of Political Economy (2025).
Elliott Ash, Sergio Galletta, and Tommaso Giommoni. “A Machine Learning Approach to Analyze and Support Anti-Corruption Policy.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2025).
Elliott Ash, Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Sandeep Bhupatiraju, Daniel L. Chen, Tanaya Devi, Christoph Goessmann, Paul Novosad, Bilal Siddiqi, “In-group bias in the Indian judiciary: Evidence from 5 million criminal cases.” Review of Economics and Statistics (2025).
Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, Arianna Ornaghi. “Gender Attitudes in the Judiciary: Evidence from U.S. Circuit Courts.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2024).
Elliott Ash and W. Bentley MacLeod. “Mandatory Retirement Reforms for Judges Improved Performance on U.S. State Supreme Courts.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2024).
Elliott Ash, Johann Kruemmel, and Jonathan B. Slapin, “Gender and reactions to speeches in German parliamentary debates.” American Journal of Political Science (2024).
Elliott Ash, Sergio Galletta, Matteo Pinna, and Christopher Warshaw. “From Viewers to Voters: Tracing Fox News Impact on American Democracy.” Journal of Public Economics (2024).
Shivam Adarsh, Elliott Ash, Stefan Bechtold, Barton Beebe, and Jeanne Fromer. “Automating Abercrombie: Machine-Learning Trademark Distinctiveness”. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2024).
Elliott Ash, Christoph Goessmann, and Suresh Naidu, “Scaling laws: legal and social complexity in US localities.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2024).
Elliott Ash and Stephen Hansen, “Text Algorithms in Economics.” Annual Review of Economics (2023).
Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta. “How Cable News Reshaped Local Government.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2023).
Elliott Ash and Michael Poyker, “Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Fox News Channel.” The Economic Journal (2023).
Elliott Ash, Germain Gauthier, and Philine Widmer, “Relatio: Text Semantics Capture Political and Economic Narratives.” Political Analysis (2023).
Elliott Ash, Dominik Stammbach, and Kevin Tobia, “What is a person? Evidence on mind perceptions from natural language.” Cognition (2023).
Elliott Ash, Sergio Galletta, Dominik Hangartner, Yotam Margalit, and Matteo Pinna. “The Effect of Fox News on Health Behavior during COVID-19.” Political Analysis (2023).
Dominik Stammbach, Boya Zhang, Elliott Ash, “The Choice of Textual Knowledge Base in Automated Claim Checking.” Journal of Data and Information Quality (2023).
Elliott Ash, Daniel Sgroi, Anthony Tuckwell, Shi Zhuo, “Mindfulness reduces information avoidance.” Economics Letters (2023).
Tinghua Yu and Elliott Ash, “Political Polarization and Judicial Selection.” Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy (2023).
Benjamin Minhao Chen, Zhiyu Li, David Cai, and Elliott Ash. “Detecting the Influence of Chinese Guiding Cases: A Text Reuse Approach.” Artificial Intelligence and Law (2023).
Gloria Gennaro and Elliott Ash, “Emotion and Reason in Political Language.” Economic Journal (2022).
Elliott Ash and W. Bentley MacLeod, “Reducing Partisanship in Judicial Elections Can Improve Judge Quality: Evidence from U.S. State Supreme Courts.” Journal of Public Economics (2021).
Moritz Osnabruegge, Elliott Ash, and Massimo Morelli, “Cross-Domain Topic Classification for Political Texts.” Political Analysis (2021).
Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Sergio Galletta. “Measuring Judicial Sentiment: Methods and Application to U.S. Circuit Courts.” Economica (2021).
Matia Vannoni, Elliott Ash, and Massimo Morelli. “Measuring Discretion and Delegation in Legislative Texts: Methods and Application to U.S. States.” Political Analysis (2020).
Allison Harris, Elliott Ash, and Jeffrey Fagan. “Fiscal pressures and discriminatory policing: Evidence from traffic stops in Missouri.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (2020).
Elliott Ash, Massimo Morelli, and Matia Vannoni. “Divided Government, Delegation, and Civil Service Reform.” Political Science Research and Methods (2020).
Elliott Ash and Miguel Urquiola. “A research-based ranking of public policy schools.” Scientometrics (2020).
Yu Cao, Elliott Ash, and Daniel L. Chen. “Automated fact-value distinction in court opinions.” European Journal of Law and Economics (2020).
Carina Hausladen, Marcel Schubert, and Elliott Ash. “Text classification of political ideology labels in judicial opinions.” International Review of Law and Economics (2020).
Jessica Van Parys and Elliott Ash. “Sequential Decision-Making with Group Identity.” Journal of Economic Psychology (2018).
Elliott Ash, “Comment: Emerging tools for a ‘driverless’ legal system,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (2018).
Elliott Ash, Massimo Morelli, and Richard Van Weelden. “Elections and divisiveness: Theory and evidence.” Journal of Politics (2017).
Elliott Ash and Bentley MacLeod. “Intrinsic Motivation in Public Service: Theory and Evidence from State Supreme Courts.” Journal of Law and Economics (2015).
Frans van Winden and Elliott Ash. “On the Behavioral Economics of Crime.” Review of Law and Economics (2012).

Conference Proceedings

Project Apertus, “Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments.” ACL (2026).
Jingwei Ni, Fan, Y., Zouhar, V., Rooein, D., Hoyle, A. M., Sachan, M., Leippold, L., Hovy, D., Elliott Ash. “Can Reasoning Help Large Language Models Capture Human Annotator Disagreement?” EACL (2026).
Hauke Licht, Rupak Sarkar, Patrick Y. Wu, Pranav Goel, Niklas Stoehr, Elliott Ash, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, “Measuring scalar constructs in social science with LLMs.” EMNLP (2025).
Yu Fan, Yang Tian, Shauli Ravfogel, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle. “The Medium Is Not the Message: Deconfounding Document Embeddings via Linear Concept Erasure.” EMNLP (2025).
Chenfei Xiong, Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan, Vil m Zouhar, Donya Rooein, Lorena Calvoé Bartolome, Lorena Calvo-Bartolome, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Markus Leippold, Dirk Hovy, Mennatallah El-Assady, Elliott Ash, “Co-DETECT: Collaborative Discovery of Edge Cases in Text Classification.” EMNLP System Demonstrations (2025).
Afra Amini, Tim Vieira, Elliott Ash, Ryan Cotterell, “Variational Best-of-N Alignment.” ICLR (2025, poster).
Jingwei Ni, Tobias Schimanski, Meihong Lin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash, Markus Leippold, “DIRAS: Efficient LLM Annotation of Document Relevance in Retrieval Augmented Generation.” NAACL (2025).
Dominik Stammbach, Philine Widmer, Eunjung Cho, Caglar Gulcehre, Elliott Ash, “Aligning Large Language Models with Diverse Political Viewpoints.” EMNLP (2024).
Joel Mire, Maria Antoniak, Elliott Ash, Andrew Piper, Maarten Sap, “The Empirical Variability of Narrative Perceptions of Social Media Texts.” EMNLP (2024).
Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, Lena Song, and Dominik Stammbach, “Translating Legalese: Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Legal Summarizers.” ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (2024).
Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, Elliott Ash, Alex Pentland, “LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judicial Citations to Precedent.” ACL (2024).
Maria Antoniak, Joel Mire, Maarten Sap, Elliott Ash, Andrew Piper. “Where do People Tell Stories Online? Story Detection Across Online Communities.” ACL (2024).
Jingwei Ni, Minjing Shi, Dominik Stammbach, Mrinmaya Sachan, Elliott Ash, Markus Leippold. “AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators.” ACL (2024).
Tobias Schimanski, Jingwei Ni, Mathias Kraus, Elliott Ash, Markus Leippold. “Towards Faithful and Robust LLM Specialists for Evidence-Based QuestionAnswering.” ACL (2024).
Maria Lerner, Florian Dorner, Elliott Ash, Naman Goel. “Whose Preferences? Differences in Fairness Preferences and Their Impact on the Fairness of AI Utilizing Human Feedback.” ACL (2024).
Elliott Ash, Naman Goel, Nianyun Li, Claudia Marangon, and Peiyao Sun, “WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts.” NeurIPS (2023).
Dominik Stammbach, Vilem Zouhar, Alexander Hoyle, Mrinmaya Sachan, and Elliott Ash, “Revisiting Automated Topic Model Evaluation with Large Language Models.” EMNLP (2023).
Florian Dorner, Momchil Peychev, Nikola Konstantinov, Naman Goel, Elliott Ash, Martin Vechev, “Human-Guided Fair Classification for Natural Language Processing.” ICLR (2023).
Yan Liu, Yan Gao, Zhe Su, Xiaokang Chen, Elliott Ash, Jian-Guang Lou. “Uncovering and Categorizing Social Biases in Text-to-SQL.” ACL (2023).
Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, Elliott Ash, and Alex Pentland, “The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects.” EMNLP Findings (2023).
Emmanuel Bauer, Dominik Stammbach, Nianlong Gu, Elliott Ash, “Legal extractive summarization of U.S. court opinions.” LIRAI (2023).
Nianyun Li, Naman Goel, and Elliott Ash, “Data-Centric Factors in Algorithmic Fairness,” AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (2022).
Nianlong Gu, Elliott Ash, and Richard Hahnloser, “MemSum: Extractive Summarization of Long Documents using Multi-step Episodic Markov Decision Processes.” ACL (2022).
Dominik Stammbach, Maria Antoniak, and Elliott Ash, “Heroes, Villains, and Victims, and GPT-3: Automated Extraction of Character Roles Without Training Data.” Workshop on Narrative Understanding (2022)
Dominik Stammbach and Elliott Ash, “DocSCAN: Unsupervised Text Classification via Learning from Neighbors.” KONVENS (2022).
Malte Ostendorff, Elliott Ash, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp, Julian Moreno-Schneider, and Georg Rehm, “Evaluating Document Representations for Content-based Legal Literature Recommendations.” International Conference on AI and Law (2021).
Elliott Ash, Malka Guillot, and Luyang Hang, “Machine Extraction of Tax Laws from Legislative Texts.” Natural Legal Language Processing (2021).
Elliott Ash, Jeff Jacobs, Bentley MacLeod, Suresh Naidu, and Dominik Stammbach. “Unsupervised Extraction of Workplace Rights and Duties from Collective Bargaining Agreements.” International Workshop on Mining and Learning in the Legal Domain (2020).
Lazar Peric, Stefan Mijic, Dominik Stammbach, and Elliott Ash. “Legal Language Modeling with Transformers.” Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Text (2020).
Dominik Stammbach and Elliott Ash. “e-FEVER: Explanations and Summaries for Automated Fact Checking.” Truth and Trust Online (2020).
Roland Friedrich, Mauro Luzzatto, and Elliott Ash. “Entropy in Legal Language.” NLLP @ KDD (2020).

Law Reviews

Daniel Walters and Elliott Ash, “If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing the Potential of the Nondelegation Doctrine to Curb Congressional Abdication.’” Cornell Law Review (2022).
Elliott Ash and Omri Marian. “The making of international tax law: Empirical evidence from tax treaties text.” Florida Tax Review (2020).
Jeffrey Fagan and Elliott Ash. “New Policing, New Segregation: From Ferguson to New York.” Georgetown Law Journal Online (2017).

Chapters

Elliott Ash, “AI Alignment and Legal Reasoning,” in: Decision (2026). Law, Behavior, and Decision (2026).
Elliott Ash, Claudia Marangon, Yabra Muvdi, Stephen Hansen, “Large Language Models in Economics,” in: New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2024).
Elliott Ash, “Judge Language Choices,” in: Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behaviour (2024).
Arun Advani, Elliott Ash, David Cai, and Imran Rasul, “Race-related research in economics and other social sciences,” in: Econometric Society Monograph Series (forthcoming).
Nischal Mainali, Liam Meier, Elliott Ash, and Daniel L. Chen. “Automated Classification of Modes of Moral Reasoning in Judicial Decisions,” in: Computational legal studies: The promise and challenge of data-driven research (2020).
Elliott Ash and Daniel L. Chen. “Case Vectors: Spatial Representations of the Law using Document Embeddings,” in: Law as Data (2019).

Honors and Awards

“American Economic Review” Excellence in Reviewing Award

2025

Activities and Affiliations

Service Positions

Journal of Law and Economics, Editor (2025–present)
The Economic Journal Associate, Editor (2021–2027); Guest Editor, Special Issue on AI Measurement in Applied Economics (2024–2026)
Association of Computational Linguistics, Senior Area Chair (2025–present)
NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks, Area Chair (2026)
Artificial Intelligence and Law, Section Editor, AI for Empirical Legal Research (2022–2025)

Professional Memberships

European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Fellow, ELLIS Unit Zurich (2026-present)
Swiss AI Initiative Academic Lead (2024-present)
Center for Economic and Policy Research, Research Affiliate Political Economy (2024-present)
Bocconi Pericles Research Fellow (2021–present) ETH AI Center Core Faculty (2020–present)
Monash SoDa Labs Research Affiliate (2020–present)
University of Warwick CAGE Research Associate (2018–present)