Holli Sargeant
I am a Research Fellow in Law at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD in the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, supervised by Felix Steffek, Lars Vinx, and Måns Magnusson. My thesis, Machine Learning in Consumer Credit: Legal, Economic, Ethical & Policy Implications, examined the interaction between AI systems and consumer finance. It offered recommendations for regulation by analysing the economic incentives for using new technology alongside the normative and legal implications for consumers and other stakeholders. I completed part of my research as a doctoral exchange student at Harvard Law School and an affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. My doctoral research was funded by a General Sir John Monash Scholarship.
My research focuses on the critical intersection of law and artificial intelligence. I study how algorithmic systems deployed in high-stakes decision making impact fairness, discrimination, and accountability, and how legal frameworks can adapt to ensure responsible and ethical AI governance, including how to build robust frameworks for responsible AI design and deployment. I also explore AI's role in legal research and access to justice, including projects evaluating biases in legal datasets and the use of AI-assisted legal practice, and judicial decision-making. My work is inherently interdisciplinary and integrates doctrinal and comparative legal analysis, law and economics, normative theory, and statistical and machine learning methods, to address questions of equality, transparency, and governance.
News
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🏆 July 2026 — Yorke Prize for the PhD Thesis
The Cambridge Faculty of Law has awarded the Yorke Prize to my PhD thesis, Machine Learning in Consumer Credit: Legal, Economic, Ethical & Policy Implications. The prize recognises doctoral theses of exceptional quality that make a substantial contribution to a field of legal knowledge. [Request access ↗︎] -
📄 May 2026 — New Article in the Modern Law Review
From Estimation to Discrimination examines predictive uncertainty in machine learning systems under UK anti-discrimination law. It argues that deliberate modelling choices introduce epistemic uncertainty that can produce discriminatory outcomes, and that legal analysis should attach to those design choices rather than to model outputs alone. [Read the article ↗︎] -
📄 December 2025 — New Article in Computer Law & Security Review
On the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 that weakens UK GDPR-style safeguards for automated decision-making. [Read the article ↗︎] [Read the summary blog post ↗︎] -
🏆 November 2025 — EMNLP Senior Area Chair Highlight Award
Awarded to the top 2.5% of accepted papers for a “seminal contribution.”
Our paper, Detecting Legal Citations in United Kingdom Court Judgments, introduces a new dataset and method for recognising citation structure in UK judgments, with applications for legal search, retrieval, and AI-assisted reasoning. [Award announcement ↗︎] [Read the paper ↗︎] -
📄 October 2025 — OECD Policy Paper on Access to Justice for SMEs
Published with Felix Steffek as principal authors.
Supporting Businesses Through Better Justice Systems: A Focus on SMEs and Entrepreneurship sets out principles for improving SMEs’ access to justice and proposes a Code of Dispute Resolution for Businesses. [Read the policy paper ↗︎] -
🎓 October 2025 — Appointed Research Fellow in Law, St John’s College, Cambridge
St John’s College announced the election of new Research Fellows. [Read the announcement ↗︎]
Recent publications
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From Estimation to Discrimination: Algorithmic Bias, Predictive Uncertainty, and Anti-Discrimination Law.
The Modern Law Review (2026).
Holli Sargeant. -
Mind the Gap: Securing Algorithmic Explainability for Credit Decisions Beyond the UK GDPR.
Computer Law & Security Review, 60, 106247 (2026).
Holli Sargeant. -
Prompt Governance? On Governing Technologies Governed by Natural Language.
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT), 6466 - 6509.
Anna Neumann, Holli Sargeant, Jatinder Singh. -
Detecting Legal Citations in United Kingdom Court Judgments.
Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 26798–26824 (2025).
Holli Sargeant, Andreas Östling, Måns Magnusson. -
Formalising Anti-Discrimination Law in Automated Decision Systems.
Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT), 181-194 (2025).
Holli Sargeant, Måns Magnusson. -
Classifying Hate: Legal and Ethical Evaluations of ML-Assisted Hate Crime Classification and Estimation in Sweden.
Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT), 195-208 (2025).
Holli Sargeant, Hannes Waldetoft, Måns Magnusson.
Recent talks
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Encoding Equality: The Incompatibility of Algorithmic Logic and Substantive Law — AI Alignment Seminar
University of Bergen — May 2026 [Recording ↗︎] -
AI and the Future Legal Profession: Why Study Law in the Age of AI?
University of Cambridge — November 2025 [Event page ↗︎]