Mirac Suzgun,
Stanford University (USA)
Date: 10.12.2025, 6:30 p.m.
Venue: Room L619, 6th floor | Faculty of Law | Sigmund Freud University | Lassallestraße 3, 1020 Vienna
Contemporary U.S. Supreme Court practice confronts unprecedented outside advocacy, with nearly 2,000 amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs filed annually. Comprehensive analysis spanning over a century reveals systematic patterns: a small oligopoly of repeat-player organizations dominates participation, forming stable coalitions that align or oppose each other with remarkable consistency across cases. Business-conservative, civil-rights-progressive, government, and libertarian blocs supply untested empirical assertions on contentious policy questions—abortion’s effects, educational outcomes, regulatory costs—that embed contested premises into constitutional doctrine. The findings illuminate structural risks to judicial fact-finding and propose calibrated reforms balancing access with reliability safeguards for high-stakes adjudication.
Please register until 10.12.2025: konrad.lachmayer@jus.sfu.ac.at
Biography
Mirac Suzgun is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University, co-advised by Professors Dan Jurafsky and James Zou, and a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School. His research examines the capabilities and limitations of modern language models, focusing on reasoning, hallucination detection and mitigation, and societal applications. He also conducts legal scholarship on constitutional law, administrative law, and AI governance and regulatory policy, and works closely with Professor Daniel E. Ho at the Stanford RegLab. He graduated from Harvard College with a joint degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and a secondary field in Folklore & Mythology, receiving the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for his undergraduate thesis. His work has appeared in leading venues including Nature Machine Intelligence, The Lancet Digital Health, Journal of Legal Analysis, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and NeurIPS. He has worked at Google Brain, Microsoft Research, Meta’s GenAI/Llama team, and OpenEvidence, and has served as a legal intern at the Administrative Conference of the United States and as a litigation summer associate at WilmerHale. His graduate studies have been supported by the Google Ph.D. Fellowship, Stanford HAI-SAP Fellowship, and Stanford Law School Fellowship.
The Vienna Lecture Series on Comparative Constitutional Law and Theory is organised by:
▪ Prof. Markus Böckenförde, Central European University
▪ Prof. Iris Eisenberger, University of Vienna
▪ Prof. András Jakab, University of Salzburg, European Court of Human Rights
▪ Prof. Konrad Lachmayer, Sigmund Freud University
The Vienna Lecture Series on Comparative Constitutional Law & Theory aims to organise a high-level exchange on current and fundamental questions in constitutional law from an international, comparative, interdisciplinary or theoretical perspective. International scholars are invited to present their current research. The Lecture Series takes place four times a year at one of the involved universities and welcomes everyone interested in this area of law.