Table Of ContentLaw for Computer Scientists and Other Folk
Law for
Computer Scientists
and Other Folk
Mireille Hildebrandt
1
3
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for Don Ihde
Acknowledgements
In 2003, Bart Jacobs held his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Digital Security
under the heading ‘Computers under the Rule of Law’. Since then, the insti-
tute of Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University
in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) has taken a leading role in integrating legal
education in the computer science curriculum. I have had the privilege of
teaching law to master students of computer science since 2011, when I was
appointed as Professor of ‘Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule
of Law’.
This has been a very productive experience, and I have found computer sci-
ence students remarkably open to the foundational grammar and vocabulary
of law, and to the architecture of the rule of law. I am deeply grateful for the
excellence I encountered, the interesting questions that were raised, and the
high quality of the assignments and papers my students submitted. I wrote
the draft chapters in the Fall of 2018, during the 2018–1 9 course (adding some
updates during the copy edits at the end of 2019). Two of the students, Aniek
den Teuling and Ruben Eijkelenberg, provided salient and extensive feedback.
This book is the consolidation of eight years of teaching law to master students
of computer science and I am sure that my new colleague Frederik Zuiderveen
Borgesius will find similar intellectual pleasure in teaching. Since I have been
awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for my re-
search project on ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational
Law’ (COHUBICOL),1 I am withdrawing from teaching to focus on the re-
search. I am happy to have somehow found the time to turn the course into a
book that combines the formats of textbook and scholarly inquiry, very much
in line with the core tenets of the COHUBICOL project that has enabled me to
publish this work in open access with Oxford University Press (OUP).
COHUBICOL also brought me the pleasure of working with our coordinator
Irina Baraliuc, who has performed miracles in the process of getting a draft
manuscript online with MIT’s pubpub software for the open review.2
1 Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme (grant agreement No 788734). See http://w ww.cohubicol.com.
2 https:// lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org.
viii Acknowledgements
I want to applaud Alex Flach of OUP, who proposed to put this draft online in
collaboration with MIT for open review, enabling me to reach out to a more
extensive community than the excellent anonymous reviewers that endorsed
the book for publication (hoping they will be happy with the final chapter,
which deals with some of their comments).
The open review has brought out incisive and detailed comments (online, via
email, and over coffee), allowing me to read the text from non-E U perspec-
tives (reminding me of different terminologies, e.g. that of ‘legal power’ in US
discourse, instead of ‘legal competence’ in continental European discourse),
showing gaps (pointing out that I did not discuss the concept of rights, or
that I did not explicitly include the Constitution as a source of law), mistakes
(one of my students saliently highlighting an ‘and’ that should be an ‘or’, thus
pinpointing a cumulative legal condition that is actually an alternative legal
condition), and common misunderstandings amongst non-l awyers who read
only one specific chapter (e.g. confusing cybercrime with cybersecurity or pri-
vate law liability for copyright infringements with cybercrime). Many heart-
warming responses also came in via twitter, where the online version has been
applauded as a much needed and long- awaited resource, filling a gap that will
hopefully contribute to a better understanding between law and computer sci-
ence. Especially the final chapter on closure, comparing law and ethics, while
discussing their relationship and interaction, seems to stir the imagination.
Many thanks are due to my home base in the research group on Law, Science,
Technology and Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (my main af-
filiation), with its unique focus on the study of both positive law and legal
theory. My long time colleagues Serge Gutwirth and Paul de Hert have steered
this research group in myriad ways that foster intellectual independence
while acknowledging that research is a practice that is always done in collab-
oration with others, whether in person or through reading (which generates
what Montaigne called a ‘monologue interieur’, though a ‘dialogue’ or even a
‘plurilogue interieur’ seem more on-t he- spot).
The intellectual shoulders that have carried me this far could fill a universe,
if not Borges’ library: lawyers, philosophers of law, philosophers of tech-
nology, and computer scientists. To really understand the law, and its foun-
dational relationship with the technologies of written and printed text, one
should, however, ‘simply’ read case law. Merely immersing oneself in the in-
tricate reasoning of, for example, the Court of Justice of the European Union
or the European Court of Human Rights will generate admiration for those
who must think across national jurisdictions, while resolving highly complex
Acknowledgements ix
interactions between fundamental rights and freedoms, public interest, pri-
vate interests, legal certainty, justice, and the instrumentality of the law. I hope
this work will contribute to a better appreciation of the role of law in the realm
of data- and code- driven environments, based on a proper understanding of
the goals, the operations and the limits of the law.
This work is dedicated, however, to Don Ihde, founding father of philosophy
of technology in the United States, whose understanding of how technologies
reinvent us as we invent them is of critical importance to better grasp the as-
sumptions and implications of our new code- and data- driven lifeworld— even
if that may not be his primary focus. Don has deeply inspired my appreciation
of the systems that computer scientists develop, and the need to inquire how
they affect both law and the rule of law.
Mireille Hildebrandt
September 2019
Brussels
