I did not come to AI governance through technology. I came through a courtroom.
For ten years I practiced criminal and immigration law in Spain. Before that, I studied law in Romania, then homologated my degree in Spain, then completed a Master’s in Legal Practice at UNED. My thesis was on the right to privacy and telephone interception in comparative law — how states justify listening to private conversations, and what legal limits exist to protect the people on the other end of the line.
At the time, that felt like a fairly contained subject. One call, one warrant, one judge deciding whether the interception was lawful. I had no idea I was studying the foundational question of the next decade of law.
Then I moved to New York.
Living in the United States changes how you see certain things. One of them is speed. The conversation about AI here is not theoretical — it is immediate, practical, and happening inside institutions that affect people’s lives directly: courts, immigration agencies, police departments, hiring systems. Algorithms are already making decisions about who gets bail, who gets deported, who gets flagged at the border, who gets the job interview.
And most lawyers — on both sides of the Atlantic — are not prepared for it.
I was not prepared for it either. So I decided to do something about that.
The problem I ran into immediately: there was no single resource for what I needed to learn. There were technical papers written for data scientists. There were policy documents written for regulators. There were scattered law review articles. But there was no structured guide for a practicing lawyer — someone who understands courts and clients and constitutional arguments — who needs to get up to speed on AI regulation without a computer science degree.
So I decided to build it myself, in public, as I learn.
That is what this blog is. It started as a book outline. Then I realized that writing it as a blog — module by module, chapter by chapter — serves two purposes at once: it forces me to understand each topic well enough to explain it clearly, and it creates something useful for every other lawyer who is in the same position I was.
This blog is for you if you are a lawyer, a law student, or a legal professional who knows that AI regulation is becoming unavoidable in your practice — and who wants to understand it seriously, not just superficially.
It is especially for you if you work in criminal or immigration law, because those are the fields where algorithmic systems are already making the highest-stakes decisions, with the least oversight, and where your clients have the most to lose.
You do not need a technical background. I do not have one. What you need is what you already have: the ability to read a law carefully, understand what problem it is trying to solve, and figure out how to use it for your client.
That is exactly what we are going to do here.
Constantin Razvan Gospodin
Attorney admitted in Spain | AI Governance & Regulatory Compliance
New York City
guiltyalgorithm.com
