Dr. Pierpaolo Vivo, PhD

Reader in Disordered Systems

King’s College London (UK)

Pierpaolo Vivo studied Physics at the Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy), where he also graduated in Theoretical Physics cum laude in 2005. He then moved to Brunel University (West London), where he obtained his PhD in 2008. He spent three years as Postdoctoral Fellow at Abdus Salam ICTP – Trieste (Italy), where he worked in the Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics group. During the period 2011-2014 he worked as a research scientist at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS) in Orsay, (France). He has been a permanent member of the Disordered Systems group at King’s College London since September 2014, where leads the Quantitative and Digital Law Lab in the Department of Mathematics at King’s College London, a team of five people supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship that promotes a quantitative approach to issues around the complexity of legal systems. In this role, he collaborated on two guest-edited collections: “The physics of the law: legal systems through the prism of complexity science” (Frontiers in Physics, 2021) and “A complexity science approach to law and governance” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2024).

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Prof. Daniel Martin Katz, JD, PhD

Professor of Law @ Illinois Tech – Chicago Kent College of Law (USA)

Academic Director, Bucerius Center for Legal Technology & Data Science (Germany)

Professor Katz is a scientist, technologist and professor who applies an innovative polytechnic approach to teaching law – to help create lawyers for today’s biggest societal challenges.  Both his scholarship and teaching integrate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Professor Katz has published or forthcoming work in a wide variety of academic outlets, including Science, Plos One, Scientific Reports, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Journal of Statistical Physics, Frontiers in Physics, Physica A and Artificial Intelligence & Law. In addition, his work has been published in legal journals including Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, Emory Law Journal, Virginia Tax Review, Iowa Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Journal of Law & Politics, and Journal of Legal Education. Professor Katz is currently working on two book projects including an edited volume entitled Legal Informatics (Cambridge University Press – 2021) and a book on technology + innovation in law. 

Professor Katz received his Ph.D. in political science and public policy with a focus on complex adaptive systems from the University of Michigan. He graduated with a Juris Doctor cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School and simultaneously obtained a Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.  During his graduate studies, he was a fellow in Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Michigan Law School and a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow at the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

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Prof. J.B. Ruhl, JD, PhD

David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law

Director, Program on Law and Innovation

Vanderbilt Law School (USA)

J.B. Ruhl is an expert in environmental, natural resources and property law, focusing his research on climate change adaptation, ecosystem services, and adaptive governance. His research on governance focuses on the implications of complex adaptive systems attributes of legal systems.  He was named director of Vanderbilt’s Program on Law and Innovation in 2014 and co-directs the Energy, Environment and Land Use Program.  Before he joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty as a David Daniels Allen Distinguished Professor of Law in 2011, he was the Matthews & Hawkins Professor of Property at the Florida State University College of Law, where he had taught since 1999. His influential scholarly articles relating to climate change, ecosystems, governance, and other environmental and natural resources law issues have appeared in the California, Duke, Georgetown, Stanford, and Vanderbilt law reviews, the environmental law journals at several top law schools, and leading peer-reviewed scientific journals including Science and PNAS. Over the course of his career, he has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and George Washington University Law School and has taught in summer terms at the University of Texas Law School, Vermont Law School, and Lewis and Clark College of Law. He began his academic career at the Southern Illinois University School of Law, where he taught from 1994 to 1999 and earned his Ph.D. in geography. Before entering the academy, he was a partner with Fulbright & Jaworski (now Norton Rose Fulbright) in Austin, Texas, where he also taught on the adjunct faculty of the University of Texas School of Law.

Dr. Giovanni Piccioli, PhD

Research Associate

King’s College London

Giovanni Piccioli is a postdoctoral researcher in the QuantLaw group at King’s College London. He studied physics at Sapienza Università di Roma and graduated in 2020 with a thesis on high dimensional inference in the angular synchronization problem. He earned his PhD from EPFL in 2024. During his PhD, he focused on developing algorithms for sampling, inference, and optimization in disordered systems. His PhD work included Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian learning in neural networks, optimization techniques for multi-commodity routing on graphs, and message-passing algorithms for graph alignment. In his current research, he applies quantitative techniques from computer science and physics to study complex legal systems and other interdisciplinary applications.

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