Prof. Mireille Hildebrandt will give a presentation on the 7th of March 2023 at the fourth edition of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) 2023 Conference in Maastricht. This technical conference is organised by the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University and will feature contributions from women working in data science, AI and related technical fields. The abstract of Prof. Hildebrandt’s presentation entitled ‘A Typology of Legal Technologies: the Challenge of Legal Protection by Design’ reads:

“Natural Language Processing has discovered the trove of legal text corpora that are now being transformed into ‘law as data’. A wide variety of legal technologies is being developed purportedly to make the administration of justice and the practice of law more efficient and more effective. In this talk I will discuss the gap between the claims made on behalf of these technologies and the substantiation of such claims, while fleshing out how upstream design decisions may impact downstream deployment and its impact on law and the rule of law. The talk will refer to the web tool that was developed by a team of lawyers and computer scientists as a method, a mindset and a resource to help lawyers and developers to better understand what is at stake. This should allow lawyers and developers to develop a ‘by design’ approach to legal protection, thus warding off attempts to replace the force of law with the force of technology.”

The slides of the presentation can be found here.