
Mireille HildebrandtVrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB · Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS)
Mireille Hildebrandt
LLM, PhD
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160
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Introduction
Mireille Hildebrandt is a tenured Research Professor on 'Interfacing Law and Technology' at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), appointed by the VUB Research Council. She works with the research group on Law Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology. She also holds the part-time Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Science Faculty, at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Her research interests concern the implications of automated decisions, machine learning and mindless artificial agency for law and the rule of law in constitutional democracies.
She has published 4 scientific monographs, 21 edited volumes or special issues, and over 100 chapters and article
Additional affiliations
October 2015 - December 2024
January 2002 - present
June 1994 - present
Publications
Publications (160)
In this tutorial, we provide insights on what law does, how it operates and why it matters. We will more specifically dive into what law has to do with computer science or AI. In the second part we will zoom in on a set of texts that are highly relevant for computer science and AI. A first aspect we discuss the content of legal norms that apply to...
This book investigates the different boundaries that shape digital lawmaking in Europe. It explores different layers of decision-making—national, supranational, transnational—that weave together personal data and data-driven techniques which then have differential impacts upon legal relationships and governance. In this data-driven field, the bound...
In this position paper I discuss the use of health-related training data for medical research, in light of the European Health Data Space. If such data is deployed as a proxy for 'the truth on the ground', we need to address the issue of proxies. Ground truth in machine learning is the pragmatic stand-in or proxy for whatever is considered to be th...
Recommendations are meant to increase sales or ad revenue, as these are the first priority of those who pay for them. As recommender systems match their recommendations with inferred preferences, we should not be surprised if the algorithm optimizes for lucrative preferences and thus co-produces the preferences they mine. This relates to the well-k...
This paper is a draft entry for an encyclopedia. It aims to provide an overview rather than an in-depth discussion. To begin with, we need to come to terms with the question of what is meant with AI, avoiding both over- and underinclusive definitions. In section II, I first explore the definitional conundrum within the research domain of AI, follow...
Recommendations are meant to increase sales or ad revenue, as these are the first priority of those who pay for them. As recommender systems match their recommendations with inferred preferences, we should not be surprised if the algorithm optimises for lucrative preferences and thus co-produces the preferences they mine. This relates to the well-k...
Experts from disciplines that range from computer science to philosophy consider the challenges of building AI systems that humans can trust.
Artificial intelligence–based algorithms now marshal an astonishing range of our daily activities, from driving a car (“turn left in 400 yards”) to making a purchase (“products recommended for you”). How can...
Why law matters for computer scientists and other folk.
In this paper I further develop a philosophy of technology for law and the rule of law, more specifically for the role of territorial jurisdiction in the protection against crime and against arbitrary use of the ius puniendi. In the face of the code- and data-driven nature of cyberspace I will discuss modern positive law as based on a text-driven j...
Speaking of ‘smart’ technologies we may avoid the mysticism of terms like ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). To situate ‘smartness’ I nevertheless explore the origins of smart technologies in the research domains of AI and cybernetics. Based in postphenomenological philosophy of technology and embodied cognition rather than media studies and science a...
This chapter confronts the foundational challenges posed to legal theory and legal philosophy by the surge of computational law. Two types of computational law are at stake. On the one hand we have artificial intelligence in the legal realm that will be addressed as data-driven law, and on the other hand we have the coding of self-executing contrac...
This chapter enquires into the upcoming domain of data-driven ‘law’, that is, into the use of big data analytics and predictive technologies as a means to inform the law. I will argue that this may transform the ‘mode of existence’ of law, due to the novel ‘affordances’ of data-driven systems. In the first part I will investigate the promises of le...
This chapter focuses on how machine learning (ML) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) change the environment of the law, the substance of legal goods, and on the extent to which these changes affect legal protection. ML applications, for example, can decide a person's credit worthiness or employability. Moreover, DLTs can, for instance, self...
This chapter considers instances where ICT applications cause physical, material, economic, or emotional harm, with a focus on third party liability or tort law. The chapter should be read as an important example of how private law liability may step in to deter the development, sale, or usage of faulty ICT. It discusses the relevant legal conditio...
This chapter covers privacy and data protection. This entails a series of legal requirements for development and design, for the default settings, and for the employment of computer architectures. In addition, the chapter defines the right to privacy as a subjective right, attributed by objective law, which may be national (constitutional) law, int...
This introductory chapter briefly situates the rise of modern positive law as an affordance of a specific information and communication technology (ICT)—namely the printing press, which is better described as an information and communication infrastructure (ICI). One of the challenges that modern positive law faces is the transformation of the ICI...
This chapter is an introduction to the domain of intellectual property (IP) rights, notably copyright. For computer scientists, the most relevant part of copyright law concerns copyright on computer programs, or software. Copyright on software is the enabling precondition for the General Public Licence (GPL) and the open source initiative. Before d...
This concluding chapter investigates the distinction between law, code, and ethics, as well as their interrelationship and their interaction. It is intended for those interested in the nexus of law and ethics, in the light of code- and data-driven information and communication infrastructures (ICIs). One of the main differences between law and ethi...
This chapter explores the legal framework regarding cybercrime, with a focus on Europe. In the case of cybercrime, competent authorities face a moving target, as technological developments, both on the side of perpetrators and on the side of policing and forensics, often outwit prevalent and tested strategies against traditional crime. This chapter...
This book introduces law to computer scientists. Computer scientists develop, protect, and maintain computing systems in the broad sense of that term, whether hardware, software, or data. They may be focused on e.g. digital security, or on embedded systems, or on software science. The aim of this book is to convey the internal logic of legal practi...
This chapter considers the three major domains in law and the study of law: private, public, and criminal law. These domains have their own principles, vocabularies, and structures, each geared to the type of relationships they aim to regulate and constitute. This chapter first explains how these domains differ based on a set of conceptual distinct...
This chapter considers legal personhood for artificial agents. It engages with the legal issues of autonomous systems, asking the question whether (and if so, under what conditions) such systems should be given the status of a legal subject, capable of acting in law and/or being held liable in law. The main reason for considering this option is the...
This chapter faces the question of law's ‘mode of existence’, by asking what law does—and how. To accomplish this, the chapter explains the concept of the ‘sources of law’ and the nature of legal reasoning, notably the attribution of legal effect when specified legal conditions apply. The crucial distinction between primary (regulative) and seconda...
This chapter turns to international and supranational law. It focuses on international law in the context of the Council of Europe (CoE) and on supranational law in the context of the European Union (EU). The chapter first discusses the concept of jurisdiction and its formative status in national, international, and supranational law, after which i...
Multimedia research has long moved beyond laboratory experiments and is being rapidly deployed in real-life applications including advertisements, search, security, automated driving, and healthcare. Hence, the developed algorithms now have a direct impact on the individuals using the abovementioned services and the society as a whole. While there...
This volume targets the issue of how data-driven agency affects everyday life and everyday law, highlighting potential transformations of human agency and the emergence of new types of human-machine hybrid intelligence. Human agency will be considered as depending – in part – on the affordances of our technological environment, meaning that insofar...
This chapter contains a crossing of swords and thoughts between the editors, who come from different disciplinary backgrounds and different philosophical traditions, but nevertheless occupy much common ground. The conversation is too short to enable the cutting edge of Occam’s razor (pun intended), but refers to other work with more extensive argum...
The Artificial Intelligence of European Union Law - Volume 21 Issue 1 - Mireille Hildebrandt
This keynote will introduce some of the key concepts of European data protection law, and clarify how and why this is not equivalent with privacy law. Next, I will explain why and how EU data protection law could enhance the methodological integrity of machine learning applications, also in the domain of multimedia.
The question is, first, how the...
Multimedia research has now moved beyond laboratory experiments and is rapidly being deployed in real-life applications including advertisements, social interaction, search, security, automated driving, and healthcare. Hence, the developed algorithms now have a direct impact on the individuals using the abovementioned services and the society as a...
Recommendations are meant to increase sales or ad revenue, since this is the first priority of those who pay for them. As recommender systems match their recommendations with inferred preferences, we should not be surprised if the algorithm optimises for lucrative preferences and thus co-produces the preferences they mine. In this talk I will expla...
This Article takes the perspective of law and philosophy, integrating insights from computer science. First, I will argue that in the era of big data analytics we need an understanding of privacy that is capable of protecting what is uncountable, incalculable or incomputable about individual persons. To instigate this new dimension of the right to...
In this brief contribution, I distinguish between code-driven and data-driven regulation as novel instantiations of legal regulation. Before moving deeper into data-driven regulation, I explain the difference between law and regulation, and the relevance of such a difference for the rule of law. I discuss artificial legal intelligence (ALI) as a me...
The idea of artificial legal intelligence stems from a previous wave of artificial intelligence, then called jurimetrics. It was based on an algorithmic understanding of law, celebrating logic as the sole ingredient for proper legal argumentation. However, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has noted, the life of the law is experience rather than merely logi...
This discussion note does three things: (1) it explains the notion of ‘legal protection by design’ in relation to data-driven infrastructures that form the backbone of our new ‘onlife world’, (2) it explains how the notion of ‘by design’ relates to the relational nature of what an environment affords its inhabitants, referring to the work of James...
This Reply to Critics takes the vantage point of “affordances” to respond to the reviews of five noted scholars of law, philosophy and political science to Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Philosophy. The reply interacts with the points made, by revisiting the dependencies between law and its technological em...
This article introduces the special issue from SoLAR’s 2016 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. The field of learning analytics (LA) draws heavily on theory and practice from a range of diverse academic disciplines. In so doing, LA research embodies a rich integration of methodologies and practices, assumptions and theory to bring new insi...
In this paper we present research results from the multi-disciplinary EU research project USEMP (USEMP is a project funded from EU research framework, additional information about project scope and deliverables are available at project’s public website at: http://www.usemp-project.eu/). In particular, we look at the legal aspects of personal data l...
This contribution introduces the mathematical theory of information that ‘informs’ computer systems, the internet and all that has been built upon it. The aim of the author is to invite lawyers to reconsider the grammar and alphabet of modern positive law and of the Rule of Law, in the face of the alternative grammar and alphabet of a data-driven s...
This chapter describes the implications of the computational turn for the formation of publics in constitutional democracies and argues that legal protection by design should prevent the erosion of fundamental rights in the Onlife world. In the first part the notion of the computational turn is described in reference to the increasing usage of arti...
What does it mean to be human in a computational era? The Manifesto rightly suggests that though such a question cannot generate final answers, it must be addressed to come to terms with the Onlife experience. © 2015, Springer International Publishing. All rights reserved.
This timely book tells the story of the smart technologies that reconstruct our world, by provoking their most salient functionality: the prediction and preemption of our day-to-day activities, preferences, health and credit risks, criminal intent and spending capacity. Mireille Hildebrandt claims that we are in transit between an information socie...
This article forages the fruits of Radbruch’s Legal Philosophy of 1932, taking into account his writings after the horrors of National Socialism in Germany. This contribution builds on the findings of my chapter concerning Radbruch’s inquiry into the origins of the criminal law, in Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law. In that chapter I presen...
This entry discusses the legal framework of data protection in relation to the sociotechnical infrastructure of ambient computing. Starting from earlier conceptions such as ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, the entry detects the key techniques and technologies of adaptive environments, highlighting the need to distinguish three types o...
This volume brings together a number of timely contributions at the nexus of new media, politics and law. The central intuition that ties these essays together is that information and communication technology, cultural identity, and legal and political institutions are spheres that co-evolve and interpenetrate in myriad ways. Discussing these shift...
This chapter examines the relationship between law and technology, with particular reference to the transformations of the criminal law in the face of a data-driven society. It considers how modern law has been mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the printing press, and how the substance of legal protection may be...
This book presents chapters which critically engage with formative texts in criminal legal thought since Hobbes. It aims to contribute to the emergence of a transnational canon of criminal law by documenting its intellectual and disciplinary history and, at the same time, to present a snapshot of contemporary work on criminal law within that histor...
This chapter investigates the issue of the proliferation of location data in the light of the ethical concept of contextual integrity and the legal concept of purpose binding. This involves an investigation of both concepts as side constraints on the free flow of information, entailing a balancing act between the civil liberties of individual citiz...
In this contribution, I will argue that the image of a balance is often used to defend the idea of a trade-off. To understand the drawbacks of this line of thought, I will explore the relationship between online security technologies and fundamental rights, notably privacy, nondiscrimination, freedom of speech and due process. After discriminating...
En aquest treball es debat la nocio de macrodades en relacio amb la monetitzacio de les dades personals. Es revisa el que afirmen alguns dels seus defensors i adversaris, segons els quals les macrodades impliquen que «n = totes», en el sentit que ja no es necessari utilitzar mostres ates que disposem de totes les dades, i s'arriba a la conclusio qu...
This article argues that to achieve a technology neutral law, technology specific law is sometimes required. To explain this we discriminate between three objectives, often implied in the literature on technological neutrality of law. The first we call the compensation objective, which refers to the need to have technology specific law in place whe...
What is at stake if justice authorities decide to hack a computer system that is physically located on a server outside the territory of the state they represent – for instance, because a malicious attack was operated from foreign territory, causing serious harm to a variety of computing systems? The article explores potential answers to this quest...
This chapter introduces the volume with a discussion of computer law and human law. Instead of referring to the common meaning of computer law as a field of private or public law that aims to regulate human actions that involve computing systems, this chapter introduces the idea of a law that effectively rules the interactions of non-human actors....
When Ken Jennings, 74-times winner of the Jeopardy TV quiz, lost against a room-size IBM computer, he wrote on his video screen: ‘I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords’ (citing a popular ‘Simpsons’ phrase). The New York Times writes that ‘for IBM’ this was ‘proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent mac...
This chapter forms the introduction to part I of this volume. It explores the notions of natural language and computer code in relation to law. After explaining the role of natural language in the constitution of legal norms and the provision of legal certainty, the nature of computer code is explored, raising the issue of how computer code contrib...
This deliverable contributes to the SIAM project by complementing the reports based on empirical research in work package 3 (impact analysis on criminal actions). The results of this report will contribute to the SIAM database and the Assessment Support Tool.
The main objective of this deliverable is to present and discuss the complexities involved...
The focus of this book is on the epistemological and hermeneutic implications of data science and artificial intelligence for democracy and the Rule of Law. How do the normative effects of automated decision systems or the interventions of robotic fellow ‘beings’ compare to the legal effect of written and unwritten law? To investigate these questio...
This chapter focuses on a variety of ethical implications of ICT implants. We will explain how different ethical implications arise from different types of implants, depending on the context in which they are used. After a first assessment of what is at stake, we will briefly discuss the Opinion 20 of the European Group on Ethics of Science and New...
Potential consumers are increasingly profiled to detect their habits and preferences in order to provide for targeted services. Both industry and the European Commission are investing huge sums of money into what they call Ambient Intelligence and the creation of an 'Internet of Things'. Such intelligent networked environments will depend on real t...
There have been many inevitable transformations in society due to digitization - the introduction of digital technology, including communication technology, through the Internet and its use via the Web. This book is the first Yearbook of the Digital Enlightenment Forum. Whilst it cannot cover all the many aspects which the forum encompasses, the bo...
Positive law, inscribed in legal texts, entails an authority not inherent in literary texts, generating legal consequences that can have real effects on a person’s life and liberty. The interpretation of legal texts, necessarily a normative undertaking, resists the mechanical application of rules, though still requiring a measure of predictability,...