The University of Chicago recently announced that Eric Posner, the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law and the Arthur and Esther Kane Research Chair, will deliver the 2026 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture. The event will take place on April 16 at the David Rubenstein Forum. Registration will open in early March.

Since 1972, the University's annual Ryerson Lecture has stood as a revered tradition recognizing UChicago faculty members whose scholarship has made research contributions of lasting significance. 

Posner, a prominent legal scholar whose work has shaped debates on constitutional and international law, has been on the Law School faculty 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. Posner joins only a handful of UChicago Law faculty members who have delivered the lecture. They include Geoffrey R. Stone in 2015, Martha C, Nussbaum in 2008, and Cass R. Sunstein in 1996. 

A version of this story was originally published on the UChicago News website.