Mireille Hildebrandt started her academic life with a taste of cultural anthropology, later switching to law. She took her law degree from Leyden University in the Netherlands and defended her PhD thesis in the philosophy of criminal law at Erasmus University Rotterdam, integrating legal anthropology and legal history to develop a hermeneutic phenomenology of punishment.
Hildebrandt is a tenured Research Professor on 'Interfacing Law and Technology' at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She work with the research group on Law Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology. Se also holds the parttime Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Science Faculty, the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen Her research interests concern the implications of mindless artificial agency for the core tenets of constitutional democracies. Together with Serge Gutwirth she edited 'Profiling the European Citizen' (Springer 2008), with Antoinette Rouvroy 'Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing' (Routledge 2011), with Katja de Vries 'Privacy, Due Process after the Computational Turn' (Routledge 2013) and with Jeanne Gaakeer 'Human Law and Computer Law'. In 2015 she published her new book: 'Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology' (Edward Elgar 2015).