CSS @ IP-Paris The Computational Social Science group of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris Post-doctoral Position: Computational Analysis of Judicial Decisions (CREST/CNRS-Ecole polytechnique) 1 June 2026 Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting July 1st, 2026. The position will remain open until filled. The CREST department (ENSAE/CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique) is hiring a Computational Linguist or a Computational Social Scientist with a solid background in NLP for a post-doctoral position. The contract can be up to 36 months (PDF). The position is funded by Incognito Justice, a Horizon Europe-funded project bringing together several leading research institutions and NGOs. The project investigates the consequences of the anonymization of court decisions on judicial independence by drawing on a diverse methodological toolkit (computational analysis, causal inference, randomized experiments). The successful candidate will join the Computational Social Science group within the CREST department and will collaborate actively with the broader consortium, including legal scholars, economists, and computational social scientists. The successful candidate will contribute to the project's work on judicial writing for France. The core question is whether anonymization alters judicial decisions in terms of tone, writing style, degree of personalization, and citation of legal precedents. The main objective is therefore to advance the empirical study of judicial reasoning by leveraging both: - Recent developments in Natural Language Processing to extract, classify, and analyze content from large collections of legal texts, and - A large-scale database of French judicial decisions, which the team will curate as part of the project. Given the exploratory nature of the work, the methodological pipeline will evolve iteratively as the corpus is explored and new empirical questions emerge. Applicants should therefore demonstrate versatility and a capacity to adapt different methods to the needs of the project, rather than narrow specialization in any single NLP technique. This post-doctoral position is available for up to 3 years, starting in September 2026 or later. Benefits include paid annual leave, flexible working hours, funding for workshops and international conferences, and 1 day per week reserved for their own research. Partial remote work is encouraged. The successful candidate will be an integral member of the research team and of the CREST laboratory. Profile: Candidates with a Ph.D in Computational Linguistics (with strong social science practice), or with a Ph.D. in the Social Sciences (with a solid NLP experience) are encouraged to apply. Strong (if possible demonstrated) interest in the empirical analysis of legal institutions. Coding proficiency is required (Python). Fluency in French and English. Conditions: Contract type: Fixed-term contract (CDD) of up to 36 months. Monthly salary of ¤3,400 to ¤4,400 (gross income), depending on experience. Working hours: full-time (37h30/week) Start date: Fall 2026. 20 % of the work time can be used for personal work. Workplace: the office will be based on the Palaiseau campus of ENSAE Paris. Presence is expected, but partial remote work encouraged on selected days. Contact: Please send your applications to erc.crest@ensae.fr, including: a resume, a one-page cover letter, as well as two written texts (articles, completed dissertation or book chapters). The dissertation report, if available, should also be included. Please also provide two potential academic references who may be contacted. For further information about the position, feel free to contact Etienne Ollion (etienne.ollion@polytechnique.edu) and Teodora Groza (teodora.groza@polytechnique.edu). In their application, candidates should include in the title of the email [INCOGNITO JUSTICE-COMPUTATIONAL]. Benefits: As a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole polytechnique, you will enjoy the following benefits: Paid vacation Up to 75% reimbursement of public transportation costs Services: access to the school cafeteria, library and online resources, postal services, and other facilities. Sports facilities (swimming pool, gym, etc.) and a variety of sport activities if you register with the school's sport association. Partial remote work is possible, although weekly on site presence is expected. Computer and access to High Performance Computing for specific needs. Incognito Justice is a Horizon Europe-funded project, bringing together a consortium of eight universities and NGOs. It aims to assess the impact of judicial anonymization on litigants, legal stakeholders, judges, the media, and the public. At CREST, the postdoctoral researcher will focus on large-scale, granular text analysis of judicial decisions using NLP techniques. This includes classification tasks (outcomes of appeals, types of reasoning, etc.), analyses of the style, tone, degree of personalization, and degree of abstraction of judicial decisions, as well as the development of tools to automatically structure and analyze judicial reasoning. CREST - CNRS 5 av. Henry Le Chatelier 91120 Palaiseau, France