Date: December 16, 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 11am – 12pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Gilad Abiri (Associate Professor & Co-Director of the Program on Law and Innovation, Peking University School of Transnational Law)
AI systems don’t just assist—they rule. They decide who gets seen and who gets silenced online, who gets hired and who gets rejected, who receives benefits and who gets flagged for scrutiny. The technologists tell us not to worry: they’re making these systems “aligned,” safe, accurate. But that’s not the problem.
The problem is legitimacy. A perfectly aligned AI can still provoke a full-blown crisis of authority if people don’t accept its right to govern them. We’ve seen this movie before with social media. The platforms worked beautifully—unprecedented reach, democratized speech, creative explosion. Yet they triggered a legitimacy crisis that continues to this day. Why? Because delivering benefits isn’t the same as earning the right to rule.
This paper offers a theory of AI legitimacy grounded in political sociology. Three principles emerge: AI power must beintegrated into institutions we already recognize as authoritative; its rules must be familiar, presented in forms we can understand and debate; and its decisions must be contestable through genuine review.
Gilad Abiri is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Program on Law and Innovation at Peking University School of Transnational Law, an Affiliated Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and a Senior Research Affiliate at Singapore Management University’s Digital Law Centre. His research examines the intersection of law and technology, with particular focus on AI regulation, platform governance, and the legitimacy of digital information systems. His recent scholarship on artificial intelligence and digital platforms has appeared in leading journals including the Georgia Law Review, BYU Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Stanford Technology Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Michigan Technology Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
Prior to his current appointments, Abiri served as a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he co-taught Modern Constitutional Theory and earned his J.S.D. (2020) and LL.M. (2016). He completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International Studies as the Joseph C. Fox Fellow and at NYU Law School’s Center for Law and Philosophy as a Global Postdoctoral Fellow.
Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=104087.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.