LSE Recommendation Letter Example: API developer to interoperability regulation (Score 92)

Department of Law [University Name] [Date] To the Admissions Committee MSc Law and Regulation London School of Economics and Political Science Dear Members of the Committee, I am writing to support the application of the applicant to the MSc Law and Regulation programme at LSE. I supervised their undergraduate dissertation over approximately eight months, and that sustained working relationship gives me a reasonably clear picture of how they think, how they respond to difficulty, and where they still have room to grow. The applicant came to me with a background in computer science and a proposal that sat at an unusual intersection: they wanted to examine whether existing interoperability obligations in platform regulation could be mapped onto the technical realities of API governance. My first instinct was that the framing was too engineering-heavy to sustain a regulatory argument. What changed my view was a supervision meeting about six weeks in, when the applicant arrived having drafted a short analytical memo — unprompted — comparing the EU Data Act's interoperability provisions with the practical constraints they had encountered in API integration work. The memo was uneven in places; the legal sourcing was thin and the regulatory vocabulary was not yet precise. But the underlying analytical move — using technical knowledge to interrogate a regulatory assumption rather than simply illustrate it — was exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary reasoning that dissertation work at this level demands. I told them the memo needed significant revision, and they took that seriously. The revision process is where I observed something more durable than initial ability. Over the following two months, the applicant restructured their analytical framework after I pushed back on an early chapter that conflated interoperability as a technical standard with interoperability as a regulatory obligation. That is not a trivial distinction, and many students at this stage resist the correction or paper over it. The applicant instead produced a revised chapter that drew a cleaner conceptual line, cited the relevant regulatory literature more carefully, and — importantly — acknowledged in the text where the evidence did not yet support a stronger claim. That kind of epistemic honesty in academic writing is something I actively look for and do not always find. I should be candid about the limits of what I observed. The applicant's engagement with legal method was still developing throughout the supervision period. Their instinct is to reach for technical analogy when a closer reading of regulatory text would serve better, and there were moments in the final dissertation where that tendency produced arguments that were suggestive rather than fully grounded. This is not unusual for a computer science student moving into regulatory analysis, and the trajectory over eight months was clearly upward, but it is a gap that postgraduate legal study will need to address directly. I raise it not as a disqualifying concern but because the MSc Law and Regulation programme is precisely the environment where that gap can be closed under proper supervision. On the question of fit: the applicant's interest in technology governance is not superficial. The applied project work they undertook alongside the dissertation — examining AI governance frameworks in the context of API-mediated data flows — showed genuine curiosity about how regulatory design choices produce or foreclose technical outcomes. That is a substantive intellectual interest, and it maps credibly onto the kind of interdisciplinary regulatory analysis that LSE's programme is designed to develop. I would describe the applicant as a capable, intellectually honest researcher who is making a serious and considered transition from technical practice into regulatory scholarship. They are not the most polished legal writer I have supervised, but they are among the more genuinely curious, and they have demonstrated that they can revise under critique rather than defend initial positions. For a programme that asks students to engage rigorously with the regulatory dimensions of emerging technology, I think that combination of background and disposition is worth taking seriously. I am happy to discuss this application further if it would be helpful. Yours sincerely, Associate Professor of Law and Regulation [Department, University]