Hildebrandt will publish a chapter entitled ‘Boundary Work between Computational “Law” and “Law-as-We-Know-It” in D Curtin & M Catanzariti (eds.), Data at the Boundaries of European Law (forthcoming May 2023, Oxford University Press).

This chapter is built on a course module given at the Academy of European Law, with regard to the emergence of data-driven law. It traces the operations and assumptions of machine learning systems that predict judgments and/or detect relevant case law based on legal search engines. The chapter then compares the nature of data-driven law to the text-driven nature of modern positive law-as-we-know-it, highlighting the way that the technologies of text (script and printing press) affords multi-interpretability and contestation, thus also affording the rule of law.

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