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.
Before my doctoral studies, I practised as a solicitor at Herbert Smith Freehills and was seconded to the Australian Human Rights Commission, where I contributed to the Human Rights and Technology Project. I hold an LLB (Hons) and BIR from Bond University, and a GDLP from the College of Law Australia.
News
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📄 May 2025 — Article accepted for FAccT 2026
We examine whether system prompts can reliably function as governance instruments, given misalignments between how researchers describe their effects and how policymakers treat them as control mechanisms. [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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Mind the Gap: Securing Algorithmic Explainability for Credit Decisions Beyond the UK GDPR.
Computer Law & Security Review, 60, 106247 (2026).
Holli Sargeant. -
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. -
Topic Classification of Case Law Using a Large Language Model and a New Taxonomy for UK Law.
Artificial Intelligence and Law (2025).
Holli Sargeant, Ahmed Izzidien, Felix Steffek.
Upcoming talks & events
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Prompt Governance? On Governing Technologies Governed by Natural Language — ACM FAccT 2026
ACM FAccT Montreal — June 2026 -
Encoding Equality: The Incompatibility of Algorithmic Logic and Substantive Law — AI Alignment Seminar
University of Bergen — May 2026 [Event page ↗︎]