Advice for the young at heart
Some thoughts about life as an early-career researcher
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! I hope you are doing well before the Summer/Winter break (hang in there!). This week, I wrapped up my academic year with some grading and participation in a fascinating workshop put together by Elaine Fahey on “A Future for Binding Law in Global Data Governance?” There, I presented the current (still early) stage of my research on AI regulatory monocultures and met people I knew only as names in footnotes.1 I might come back to the topic on a future newsletter, but today’s issue focus, instead, on research practices.
More specifically, I’ll try to articulate a few thoughts on life as an early-career researcher, drawing from conversations I’ve had recently. After that, the usual: reading recommendations, opportunities, and otters.
Wear sunscreen
So far, I have enjoyed greatly life as a researcher. While my foray into the job market after the PhD was very stressful, I eventually landed a postdoctoral position where I am flourishing, and before that I had a PhD position and pre-doctoral research positions that were very well suited to the person I was at the time. To a large extent, I owe that to factors outside my control, such as the kindness of strangers and the support of mentors and friends and family members, not to mention the role that luck (or the lack thereof) plays in an academic career. So, I always feel awkward whenever I am approached for advice on some aspect of how to be a scholar. Still, I have also faced my share of adversities, and have done things (some of which failed, of course) to make the best of my advantages. Today I want to talk about some of those which might be useful to others.
I do not mean that my approach to life as a scholar is particularly replicable. For one, it is based on a sample of N=1, as I am mostly talking about what worked or did not for me. There are people with much more informed opinions about life as a scholar: from time to time, I share Raul Pacheco-Vega’s amazing resources on academic writing and work organization, and recently I have enjoyed greatly Catherine E de Vries’s newsletter on academic writing. What I write below should not be taken as generalizable advice,2 but as the sketch of a case study that might or not be relevant in some aspect for your own experience.
That said, I think that such individual narratives have their value. One of my favourite things about Twitter (RIP) was that I got to see the human side of scholarship: people I admire being enthusiastic about new writings, angry whenever people say ignorant stuff, discussing their own failures…and, of course, sharing cute animals and funny videos. I am nowhere that degree of achievement—heck, I don’t even have a permanent employment contract—but I surely have my share of trial and error. So, I share these notes in the hopes that you find something useful and appropriate it to your own processes, discarding whatever seems awkward or wrong to you.
There’s life outside your apartment
As a rule, the kind of person that is drawn to academia can be described as a huge nerd. They might not be geeks, mind you,3 but they tend to be passionate about the pursuit of knowledge in a way that very few people care about, to the extent of foreclosing other, more profitable career paths. That passion might be eventually lost on the daily grind of work, and it might not be directed towards a single cohesive object or world view, but it is often what draws somebody to a PhD and beyond.4 Consequently, it can be pretty easy to dedicate every available waking hour to research—or, at least, to feel guilty when doing anything else, especially if that is a pleasurable thing.
Academic research takes a lot of time and has its psychological toll. Each area has its own peculiarities, but at the very least it requires you to step into areas where nobody has clear-cut answers for your question.5 For most of us, at least, it is not like an essay that can be gloriously produced in an evening full of caffeine, but more like a marathon in length. But, unlike in a marathon, you can and should benefit from outside help in order to preserve your mental health during the process.
Part of that effort towards mental health involves seeking professional help, which can take a variety of forms. Formal and informal mentorship can give you some support with the specifics of research life. Help may also concern aspects of your life such as nutrition, getting enough exercise, or pursuing psychological and/or psychiatric help to address issues both with work and with your life more generally. I am not qualified to say whether and how you should pursue help, but I just want to acknowledged I have benefitted from all that during my PhD trajectory.
I also benefitted from having activities that have little to do with my work. Some of my leisure activities, such as reading, can easily be co-opted by the pressure to always do something related to research. When I am walking with Winnie, I must pay attention to the world around me, leaving less time for intrusive thoughts thinking about work. When I am painting my Warhammer miniatures, I focus so much on not making a mess that I manage to get research out of my conscious mind. For other people, different activities might be useful for tuning out: my wife and many friends of mine find some kind of physical activity essential for their rest, while others try different kinds of artistic activity, or volunteer work…there are many options. But, if you find something that works for you, it can not only help recharge your mind but also contribute to thinking about things from different angles.
Tools of the trade
Nowadays, researchers have lots of tools that support academic work—or at least claim to. There are methodologies to help you come up with ideas, keep track of what you’ve been reading, do your citations in the proper format, among many other applications. After large language models became a thing, scholars have been told that those tools can be used to automate large chunks of work. Natually, this amplifies the good old fear of missing out.
My strategy, here, is one of satisficing. There are people out there with highly optimized methods for work that meet all of their needs. However, they had to spend a considerable amount of time learning out what suits them and fine-tuning existing approaches. I try to minimize the time I spend in that kind of work, while keeping myself open to things that can make my life easier. At various points in my life, I tried to use methodologies such as Zettelkasten and tools with loads of functionalities. Nowadays, I use Zotero to keep track of my references and adjust citation styles, Word for editing, and Obsidian to keep notes in plain-text format with minimal tagging and internal links, and that’s it. In the end, keeping my writing process simple helps me more than making the most of what is out there.
On novelty
As scholars, we are expected to produce new insights. To ensure we deliver our value to society, we should not simply rehash what has been said before, but make sure we are actually adding something to the conversation. How to do that?
At the end of the day, novelty is in the eye of the beholder. A publication might contribute to scholarly debates if it recasts existing arguments in a new way. Conversely, a contribution might pass as novel because nobody in a given community is reading the people who have been writing about the same topic for decades.6 The latter is incredibly likely, for a variety of reasons: the sheer volume of publications about some topics, lack of knowledge about what has been discussed in a discipline in the past, friction from differences in the jargon of scholarly communities, language barriers…not all of those can be mitigated, especially considering the time, resource, and professional conditions under which academic work is developed. But, at the very least, we can be honest about the limits of our claims to novelty.7
Recommendations
Isabel Barberá and Murielle Popa-Fabre, ‘Privacy and Data Protection Risks in Large Language Models (LLMs)’ (Consultative Committee of Convention 108 2025).
Jessica Breaugh, Gerhard Hammerschmid and Simona Stockreiter, ‘The Prevalence of Public Values in Public Private Partnerships for Government Digitalisation: A Systematic Review of the Literature’ (2025) 42 Government Information Quarterly 102048.
Martijn van den Brink and Mark Dawson, ‘The European Union’s Fantastical Constitution’ [2025] Verfassungsblog.
Clementine Collett, ‘The Hustle: How Struggling to Access Elites for Qualitative Interviews Alters Research and the Researcher’ (2024) 30 Qualitative Inquiry 555.
Rita Gsenger and Marie-Therese Sekwenz (eds), Digital Decade: How the EU Shapes Digitalisation Research (Nomos 2025). Useful intros to EU digital regulation
Bernard Keenan, Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks (The MIT Press 2025).
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, ‘Accidental Neoliberalism: Democratic Accountability in the Making of the Euro, 1957–92’ [2025] Contemporary European History 1.
Atte Ojanen, ‘Technology Neutrality as a Way to Future-Proof Regulation: The Case of the Artificial Intelligence Act’ [2025] European Journal of Risk Regulation 1.
Opportunities
The Europa Institute at Universiteit Leiden is looking for an Assistant Professor European Human Rights Law. Applications are due by 19 July 2025.
Claudine Bonneau at the Université du Québec au Montreal is hiring a postdoctoral researcher on algorithmic imaginaries. Applications are due by 31 July 2025 for start in January or July 2026.
The University of Luxembourg is hiring an Assistant Professor in Public International Law and Space Law. Applications should be sent before 15 September 2025 for full consideration.
Finally, the otters
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Do not hesitate to hit “reply” to this email or contact me elsewhere to discuss some topic I raise in the newsletter. Likewise, let me know if there is a job opening, event, or publication that might be of interest to me or to the readers of this newsletter. Hope to see you next time!
Also, I had some time to buy Warhammer! Any recommendations of places to buy second-hand minis next time I’m in London?
My generalizable advice is that, if you can recognize the source of this section’s title, you should start thinking about the passage of time.
I myself lack enthusiasm for much of the pop culture associated with current geekdom, as well as for the completionist mindset often associated with fandom.
My interests are fragmentary, and I would not say that AI is at the centre of them, despite my publication record so far. But I guess that, if you squint your eyes hard enough, you can find an interest on how to tame the exercise of power in democratic societies as a unifying thread in what I’ve been intereseted in.
Even when one is working on fields where such an answer is eventually achievable.
See, e.g., how often economists rediscover some branch of social sciences, or how the recent European debates on digital sovereignty often
Perhaps even better if we relied on other benchmarks for evaluating the contribution of a research item, but I won’t hold my breath on that.