Yonathan Arbel is the William Alfred Rose Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he directs the AI Legal Studies Initiative. He is a co-director and founder of CLAIR, the Center for Law and AI Risk, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law and AI. His research focuses on how legal systems should govern autonomous AI agents, manage systemic AI risk, and integrate AI into legal institutions. He is also a leading scholar of private law, with sustained contributions to contract theory, consumer protection, and defamation.
Arbel is a pioneer in computational legal methodology. He developed a number of methods to use generative AI to assist judicial decisionmaking, regulatory analysis, and litigants. His work on generative contract interpretation, co-authored with David Hoffman, was among the first to demonstrate how AI systems read contracts and what that means for legal doctrine. His broader research agenda spans AI entity governance, AI and catastrophic risk, and the application of economic and empirical methods to private law questions.
His scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and has shaped policy conversations at Lawfare, Bloomberg Law, and AI Frontiers. He has published or has work forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, NYU Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, North Carolina Law Review, Colorado Law Review, BYU Law Review, Connecticut Law Review, Arizona State Law Journal, Washington University Law Review, Florida State University Law Review, SMU Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Chicago Law Review Online, and the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and International Review of Law and Economics.
Arbel holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School and a master’s degree from Stanford Law School. He earned his law degree summa cum laude from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before entering academia, he clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel and held postdoctoral and visiting faculty appointments at Harvard Law School and Villanova University. He also co-founded and led an international legal policy consultancy advising the European Union and national governments until selling his stake in 2017. He has received five awards for distinction in teaching.
His full publication list and a machine-readable research corpus are available at yonathanarbel.com and works.battleoftheforms.com.