Explainable AI for the EU Right to Explanation: A Systematic Review of the Law-XAI Translation Gap

The "Law-XAI Translation Gap" is severe: Only 19 out of 57 reviewed papers substantively integrated both legal and technical perspectives, indicating that current XAI research largely fails to address what EU law actually requires for the Right to Explanation under GDPR Article 15(1)(h) and AI Act Article 86.

Legal misunderstandings are widespread: Most papers in the corpus misidentify the GDPR legal basis for explanation rights, suggesting that technical researchers developing XAI solutions may not fully understand the regulatory framework they're meant to satisfy, with potential consequences for whether explanations actually help individuals contest decisions.

Form versus content matters legally but is often confused: The paper identifies a critical distinction—explanation form (how it's presented) should be governed by who receives it, while explanation content should be governed by the legal purpose—yet this distinction is frequently conflated in current XAI literature, leading to technically sophisticated but legally inadequate solutions.

Current XAI may not meet legal requirements: The review suggests that existing Explainable AI techniques may not be sufficient to satisfy the EU Right to Explanation in practice, with direct implications for individuals' ability to challenge automated decisions affecting loans, hiring, healthcare, and other consequential domains.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is urgently needed: The authors propose a four-phase operationalization blueprint and identify six open research questions, indicating that progress requires lawyers and technologists to work together rather than in parallel.