Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt Recent documents in Mireille Hildebrandt en-us Sun, 02 Aug 2009 12:07:15 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/25 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/25 Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:10:01 PDT New entities in the information society that operate at increasing distance from the physical persons 'behind' them, such as pseudonyms, avatars, software agents, and robots, challenge the law. One way of addressing this challenge is to attribute legal rights and/or duties in some contexts to non-humans, thus creating entities that are addressable in law themselves rather than the persons 'behind' them. In this article, we review existing literature on rights for non-humans, with a particular focus on emerging entities in the information society. We discuss three strategies for the law to deal with the challenge of these new entities: interpreting and extending existing law, introducing limited legal personhood with strict liability, and granting full legal personhood. Full legal personhood implies that entities can be held liable for culpable and wrongful action and can claim (post)human rights like freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial. To assess these strategies, we distinguish between different types of persons (natural, legal, and moral) and different types of agency (automatic, autonomic, and autonomous). We conclude that interpretation and extension of the law seems to work well enough with today's emerging entities, but that sooner or later, attributing limited legal personhood with strict liability is probably a good solution to bridge the accountability gap for autonomic entities; for software agents, this may be sooner rather than later. The technology underlying new entities will, however, have to develop considerably further from facilitating autonomic behaviour to affording autonomous action, before it becomes legally relevant to attribute 'posthuman' rights to new entities. Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/24 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/24 Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:17:15 PDT Some of the most critical challenges for 'the future of identity in information society' must be located in the domain of automated profiling practices. Profiling technologies enable the construction and application of group profiles used for targeted advertising, anti-money laundering, actuarial justice, etc. Profiling is also the conditio sine qua non for the realisation of the vision of Ambient Intelligence. Though automated profiling seems to provide the only viable answer for the increasing information overload and though it seems to be a promising tool for the selection of relevant and useful information, its invisible nature and pervasive character may affect core principles of democracy and the rule of law, especially privacy and non-discrimination. In response to these challenges we suggest novel types of protection next to the existing data protection regimes. Instead of focusing on the protection of personal data, these novel tools focus on the protection against invisible or unjustified profiling. Finally, we develop the idea of Ambient Law, advocating a framework of technologically embedded legal rules that guarantee a transparency of profiles that should allow European citizens to decide which of their data they want to hide, when and in which context. Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/23 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/23 Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:56:32 PDT Asking the question whether the fundamental concepts of the Data Protection regulation are still adequate presumes that data protection should be our prime concern. In this paper I will argue that autonomic profiling, based on advanced forms of pattern recognition, produces a type of knowledge that requires both more and less than the protection of personal data. Taking into account the role played by new - non-human - actors such as intelligent agents and distributed multi-agent systems, the legal framework needs a more fundamental reconstruction. Privacy should not be reduced to the hiding of personal data and autonomy should not be reduced to the right to withhold consent in a situation whereas people have no idea of the consequences of the processing of their data. Besides, the invisible visibility of lifestyles, health-risks, earning capacity and other personalised profiles creates the possibility for sophisticated social sorting, requiring concern for illegitimate discrimination. Above all, however, the invisivle visibility warrants legal and technological transparency tools that are lacking in both the legal framework and the design of technological infrastructure of smart environments. Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/22 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/22 Wed, 13 May 2009 07:07:06 PDT This contribution stems from a workshop on foundational issues in the philosophy of criminal law. This may raise expectations for a discussion of the core business of what is called substantive criminal law: the structure of crime, the concept of intention, complicity and participation, attempt and preparation; acts and omissions; or causation.However, most punitive sanctions-- especially fines--concern regulatory offenses that are structured to a much lesser extent by such moral notions as culpability and wrongfulness, while the applicable burden of proof does not even come close to the presumption of innocence in the case of criminal offenses. This raises the question of how the difference between regulatory and criminal offenses is to be understood and of the extent to which regulatory offenses (should) fall within the scope of the criminal law. The answers to these questions will be derived from an exploration of the historicity of crimes and regulatory offenses, and their relationship to the (modern) state. I will start off with tracing the emergence of contraventionsand criminain the course of the early and late Middle Ages and the subsequent advent of a domain of "police" at the threshold of modernity next to the already existing domain of "justice." After this the strict separation of the domains of "police" (covering Polizeidelikten) and "justice" (covering Verbrechen and Vergehen) in nineteenth-century Germany will be discussed as well as the relationship of both domains to different conceptions of the Rechtsstaat and the État de droit. The main argument will be that understanding the difference between criminal and regulatory offenses in essentialist terms, such as the medieval malum in se and malum prohibitum,does not make sense. Building on a nonessentialist difference I will suggest that differential procedural constraints should be based on pragmatic arguments, which, however, do not equate with utilitarian arguments. In line with philosophical pragmatism the separation of means and end that characterizes utilitarianism is rejected and replaced by a pragmatic approach grounded in the normative position of a constitutional democracy in the sense of an État de droit or a substantive conception of the Rechtsstaat. This implies that the aim of punishing regulatory offenses is to sustain an effective domain of "police" under the rule of law, meaning that the punishment of regulatory offenses will have to be regulated by the same principles that inform the "fair trial." This will allow the state to impose punitive sanctions to prevent and retaliate violations of specific legal norms, while enabling citizens to contest the incriminated violation as well as the lawfulness of the violated legal rule. Mireille Hildebrandt Philosophy of Criminal Law http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/21 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/21 Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:30:19 PDT Profling is not about data but about knowledge. It provides a crucial technology for a society that is flooded with noise and information. Profiling is another term for sophisticated pattern recognition, and the enabling technolgy for Ambient Intelligence. It confronts us with a new type of inductive knowledge, inferred by means of automated algorithms. To the extent that decisions that impact our lives are based on this knowledge, we need to develop the means to make it accessible for individual citizens and provide them with the legal and technological tools to anticipate and contest these knowledge claims or to challenge their implications. Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/20 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/20 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:14:28 PDT Internationaal terrorisme en ander vormen van grensoverschrijdend geweld roepen oude en nieuwe vragen op ten aanzien van de relatie tussen wraak, straf, vete en oorlog. Waar houdt het strafrecht op en wat wacht ons daarna: een rechtsvrije ruimte, oorlog(srecht) en/of alternatieve geschillenbeslechting? In hoeverre kunnen de instrumentele en rechtsbeschermende aspecten van het strafrecht vorm krijgen in crisissituaties die de macht van de nationale staat lijken uit te hollen? In hoeverre beschermt het strafrecht onze vrijheid en (hoe) kan die vrijheid vorm krijgen buiten het gezag van de staat? In 'Vrijheid en straf' wordt studie gemaakt van het werk van de Groningse rechtshistoricus Immink, die zich bezighield met het ontstaat van straf en strafrecht vóór en in de vroege middeleeuwen. Wat Immink interesseert is vooral de overgang van de Oudgermaanse niet-statelijke samenleving naar het Frankische rijk. In die overgang situeert hij het ontstaan van de straf en een omwenteling in de vrijheid die uiteindelijk mede ten grondslag ligt aan ons vrijheidsbegrip. Hoewel zijn onderzoek geen rechtstreeks antwoord geeft op bovenstaande vragen, biedt het een gedegen zicht op de historische achtergronden van de relatie tussen strafrecht en soevereiniteit. Mireille Hildebrandt Philosophy of Criminal Law http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/19 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/19 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:00:17 PDT Deze dissertatie gaat in op de consensuele - althans buitengerechtelijke - afdoening van strafzaken als instrument voor het terugdringen van het tekort in de rechtshandhaving. De vraag is of, en zo ja in hoeverre consensuele punitieve rechtshandhaving een bijdrage kan leveren aan het terugdringen van dit tekort. Deze vraag vormt de aanleiding tot een grondslagenonderzoek naar straf en strafbegrip en naar de relatie met het procesbeginsel. Straf en strafbegrip worden benaderd vanuit rechtshistorisch en rechtsantropologisch perspectief en vergeleken met de punitieve rechtshandhaving in de Oudgermaanse niet-statelijke samenleving. De rode draad vormt een aan Glastra van Loon ontleend rechtsnormbegrip dat - in samenhang met de relationele rechtsopvatting van Foque en 't Hart - zicht biedt op de bijzondere rol die het recht, de straf en het strafproces (kunnen) spelen bij de constitutie van de maatschappelijke orde, in het bijzonder in het kader van de democratische rechtsstaat. Mireille Hildebrandt Philosophy of Criminal Law http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/18 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/18 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:21:04 PDT This contribution aims to explain how European Criminal Law can be understood as constitutive of European identity. Instead of starting from European identity as a given, it provides a philosophical analysis of the construction of self-identity in relation to criminal law and legal tradition. The argument will be that the self-identity of those that share jurisdiction depends on and nourishes the legal tradition they adhere to and develop, while criminal jurisdiction is of crucial importance in this process of mutual constitution. This analysis will be complemented with a discussion of the integration of the first and the third pillar as aimed for by the Constitutional Treaty (TE), which would bring criminal law under majority rule and European democratic control. Attention will be paid to two ground breaking judgements of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that seem to boil down to the fact that the Court actually manages to achieve some of the objectives of the CT even if this is not in force. This gives rise to a discussion of how the CT (and related judgements of the ECJ) may transform European criminal law in the Union to EU criminal law of the Union, thus producing an identity of the Union next to the identities prevalent in the Union. The contribution concludes with some normative questions about the kind of European identity we should aim to establish, given the fact that such identity will arise with further integration of criminal law into the first pillar. Mireille Hildebrandt Philosophy of Criminal Law http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/17 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/17 Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:09:07 PDT Dit is de Nederlandstalige introductie van mijn hoofdstuk 'Technology and the end of law' in 'Facing the limits of the law' (onder redactie van Erik Claes, Wouter Devroe en Bert Keirsbilck), tijdens de boekpresentatie op 1 april 2009 Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/16 http://works.bepress.com/mireille_hildebrandt/16 Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:08:47 PDT In this chapter we will argue that if we do not embody legal norms in new techno-logical devices and infrastructures, we may reach the end of law. At the same time we will argue that if we do embody legal norms in technological devices we may still reach the end of the rule of law. In short, first, we argue that legal normativity in an information society needs translation into new technological devices to sus-tain the instrumental and protective normativity that is central to constitutional democracy, and second, we also argue that an unreflective translation of legal standards into technological artefacts is dangerous if technology is wrongly seen as only instrumental to human intention. To argue our point, we will use the example of an emerging technological infrastructure that will probably have far-reaching implications: the so-called 'In-ternet of Things', or 'Ambient Intelligent Environment'. These implications con-cern the way we perceive things, the way we are present in this world, and the way we can live together with things and human beings (section 2). Instead of building only on schools of thought within law and legal theory, we will analyse the poten-tial consequences with the help of the philosophy of technology. Beyond naïve op-timism and ideological pessimism, the philosophy of technology has developed insightful ways to investigate the actual implications of specific technological de-vices and to speculate about what this means for our shared world (section 3). We will draw on, amongst others, the phenomenological inquiries of Don Ihde and the anthropological observations of Bruno Latour, and on the critical reconstruction of their work by Peter-Paul Verbeek. Verbeek provides a critical link to legal norma-tivity, because he assesses the morality of things. This in itself is enough to raise the eyebrows of many a reader, since modernity has taught us that things can only be instruments, while human beings - as Kant stipulated - should never be treated as pure instruments but always be respected as autonomous creatures. We hope that the reader will bear with us when we discuss the 'Internet of Things' in some detail, and explain how a philosophy of technology can enhance our understanding of the implications of this emerging technological infrastruc-ture. After this exploration beyond the limits of the law we will return to the legal field to investigate what legal normativity amounts to and how it compares to technological normativity (section 4). We will explain how both law and technol-ogy can be constitutive or regulative of human (and non-human) interaction, seek-ing to discern relevant similarities and differences. Serious investigation into the normativity of modern law, however, clarifies that contemporary law in Western societies is already technologically embodied, and we will describe the material embodiment of legal norms in written language and the consequences of the use of written language and written law for legal normativity (section 5). Finally, we will discuss the end of law from the two perspectives mentioned above (section 6). Firstly, we will argue that if we do not embody law into new technologies, the emergence of 'Ambient Intelligence' and the 'Internet of Things' will mean the end of law as an effective and legitimate instrument for constitu-tional democracy. Secondly, we will argue that this cannot mean that legal norms can be embodied in whatever way in any kind of technological device or infra-structure. We will relate a relational conception of law to a pluralist conception of technology and submit that both lawyers and technologists should stop taking for granted deterministic, causal conceptions of technology and voluntaristic concep-tions of law. Only in that case can we continue the process of reconstituting our shared world with a technologically embodied law that adequately installs and protects constitutional democracy. Mireille Hildebrandt Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies