Legal Engineer · PhD Law & Neuroscience

Ruben Knehans

A jurist who ships. I research law and neuroscience at PhD level, taught myself to code and publish an iOS app, and apply AI responsibly to legal work — bridging analytical rigour and real, working outcomes.

See my work Read my story

Innovation & Skills

Four ways of turning complexity into usable work.

Law, productivity, neuroscience and communication are not separate lanes here. They are the toolkit behind a Legal Engineer mindset: rigorous analysis, built systems, scientific literacy and language that lands.

View the work page

01Law

Regulating neurotechnology where doctrine runs out of easy answers.

My legal work starts with difficult technologies and ends in frameworks that courts, policymakers and practitioners can actually use.

Dutch criminal law · ECHR · EU regulation
Coerced non-invasive brain stimulation
Right to silence and procedural safeguards

Dissertation

Neurointerventions in Dutch Criminal Justice: Conceptual, Technological and Normative Challenges in Regulating Coerced Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation to Reduce Aggression.

PhD dissertation · Maastricht University · 2026

A legal and normative analysis of whether brain stimulation could ever be permissible as a criminal justice intervention.

Co-authored book

U bent niet tot antwoorden verplicht, maar…

Boom Juridisch · 2021 · ISBN 9789462900004

Empirical and legal insights into the right to remain silent from Dutch legal practice.

Open link

02Productivity

Curiosity, turned into shipped tools.

Claude CodeCodexGitHubSwiftXcodeNext.js

Version-controlled product work
UI and workflow design from real user feedback

Reference automation

PoCo — Polish & Complete

AI · Automation

A deterministic, local-first tool that cleans and completes academic reference libraries. No LLM, no hallucination: every change is a scoped rule with a source, a confidence tier, and a before/after — shown for review before anything is exported. You stay in control.

Open link Open source · GitHub

iOS · Swift · 2026

GetitDone — a productivity app, shipped

App Store

Designed, built and published an Eisenhower-matrix iOS app on the App Store — the full product cycle, solo.

Open link

Writing · AI newsletter

Agent Mindset

Read it

My notebook on how LLMs work and a curated, signal-over-noise digest on legal AI and the field.

Open link

03Neuroscience

Scientific method for questions law cannot answer alone.

My psychology and neuroscience work lets me test legal assumptions against what the evidence actually says about behaviour, aggression and brain stimulation.

Lead author of a peer-reviewed Brain Sciences review
Evidence synthesis across 11 experimental NIBS studies
Translation between forensic, clinical and legal domains

Peer-reviewed article

Modulating Behavioural and Self-Reported Aggression with Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation: A Literature Review

Brain Sciences · 12(2), 200 · 2022

A systematic review of experimental studies using tDCS and cTBS to modulate behavioural or self-reported aggression.

Open link

Invited presentation

Law & neuroscience for neuroscientists at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Harvard Medical School

Neuroscience and Law lecture context

A cross-disciplinary talk translating legal and ethical questions around neurotechnology for a neuroscience audience.

04Teaching & Communication

The right language for the room.

I have explained law, neuroscience and technology to students, judges, lawyers, scientists, journalists and the general public.

5+ years university teaching · evaluations up to 4.6 / 5
Training for judges and lawyers on fair-trial rights
National media communication on law and neurotechnology

Teaching

University teaching, judicial training and public explanation.

The same material can become a seminar, a judicial workshop, a media explanation or a scientific lecture when the language is tuned to the people in front of it.

NOSNPO Radio 1BNR NieuwsradioNew ScientistHarvard Medical School

01 · Law

Legal and technological innovation happens outside of the box.

Outside the box — the work itself

Neurointerventions in Dutch Criminal Justice.

PhD dissertation · Maastricht University · 2026

U bent niet tot antwoorden verplicht, maar…

Co-authored · Boom Juridisch · 2021

02 · Neuroscience

Thinking in complex systems — the brain, and AI.

I am drawn to complex systems. The brain and AI are both vast and noisy, and only legible once you find the structure. Keep scrolling — watch the noise resolve into a brain, then re-form into a language model: tokens, attention, the next word.

03Productivity