Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher and legal scholar with interests in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Law at King’s College London and Program Director of King’s online LLM in Digital Law.

Dr Zerilli started off his career as a judicial clerk and spent three years as a lawyer before changing careers, earning a Ph.D. in cognitive science and philosophy, and then carrying out research at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. He was called to the Sydney bar in 2011. Dr Zerilli was the recipient of a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholarship to undertake the Cambridge LLM (2008), wrote the highest-ranking thesis of his year at Cambridge (2009), and won the Lucy Firth Prize (valued at $1000) for best publication in philosophy at Sydney University (2010).

He has published numerous articles, canvassing law, political economy, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, as well as two books, The Adaptable Mind (Oxford University Press, 2020) and A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2021). His work appears in such journals as Philosophy of Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Synthese.

Dr Zerilli is a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Research Interests

Dr Zerilli works on various aspects of digital law, including copyright and patent law, and has a special interest in both the law of obligations (particularly torts) and administrative law. With his background in philosophy, Dr Zerilli occasionally draws on the "toolkit" assembled by analytic philosophers over the course of the twentieth century. His major influences are B. Russell, N. Chomsky, D. Dennett, K. Sterelny, P. Godfrey-Smith, L. Shapiro, E. Jablonka, and M. L. Anderson.