Prof. Eric Posner, a prominent legal scholar whose work has shaped debates on constitutional and international law, will deliver the University of Chicago’s 2026 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture.
The lecture will take place at 5 p.m. on April 16 in Friedman Hall at the David Rubenstein Forum. Since 1972, the annual Ryerson Lecture has stood as a revered tradition recognizing UChicago faculty members whose scholarship has made research contributions of lasting significance. The event is free and open to the public.
The Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, Posner has been a UChicago faculty member since 1998. His scholarship spans antitrust law, financial regulation, constitutional and international law, with a recurring focus on how legal institutions respond to broader societal change. In recent years, Posner has turned his attention to artificial intelligence and its implications for legal decision-making.
Posner said his Ryerson Lecture will examine how advances in large language models (LLMs) are reshaping long-standing assumptions about judgment, accuracy and authority in the law.
“AI is the most important technological development in many years,” Posner said. “It offers both promise and risks. I am interested in how AI can both help us understand the law and how it can help us improve the legal system.”
Drawing on emerging research, including his recent work assessing the performance of LLMs in judicial decision-making, Posner will explore evidence suggesting that AI systems may outperform human judges on certain measures.
However, he cautions, those findings raise deeper questions about what courts are for—both as an arbiter of disputes and a stabilizing force in democratic society.
“LLMs are less likely than human judges to make factual and legal errors and more likely to be objective,” Posner said. “But it doesn’t follow that they can perform the social and political functions of the judiciary, one of which is to modify the law without seeming to.”
The Ryerson Lectures originated through a bequest from Nora and Edward Ryerson, the latter a former chair of the University’s Board of Trustees. Other recent lecturers have included economist James A. Robinson, philosopher Jonathan Lear, cosmologist Wendy Freedman and paleontologist Neil Shubin.
Registration to attend the free Ryerson Lecture either virtually or in-person will open in early March.
