Mireille Hildebrandt

Biography

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. Since 2011 she holds the (parttime) chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University, Nijmegen and since October 2015 she is a Research Professor (appointed full-time by the VUB Research Council) at the research group for Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her focus will be on ‘Interfacing Law and Technology’. She has been affiliated with the Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam from 1994-2015 in the domain of Jurisprudence.

Research Interest

Her research interests concern the implications of smart technologies (notably machine learning) for (1) the substance of fundamental rights, notably the presumption of innocence, due process, fair trial, privacy, non-discrimination and the fundamental right to data protection; and for (2) the architecture of modern law, notably foundational concepts such as legal subjectivity, private, public and criminal liability, the idea of legal effect and the notion of law’s mode of existence. She publishes widely on the subject, was associate editor of Criminal Law and Philosophy and Editor in Chief of the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy. She coordinated legal teams within both LSTS and iCIS for various EU and Belgium research projects, is part of Advisory Board of the Netherlands Bar Association, founding member of the Digital Enlightenment Forum and part of the Onlife Initiative of the European Commission. Together with Serge Gutwirth she edited 'Profiling the European Citizen’ (Springer 2008) and with Antoinette Rouvroy 'Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing' (Routledge 2011). In 2015 she published her new book: ‘Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology’ (Edward Elgar 2015).