Law for Computer Scientists

Welcome to the open review site for Mireille Hildebrandt’s Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2020. The book is the result of 8 years of teaching law to master students of computer science, whose agile and inquiring minds made each course an intellectual feast.

Please note the book is not an attempt to turn computer scientists into lawyers, there is no claim to completeness. It is a presentation of how law and the Rule of Law protect what is crucial to constitutional democracy and how that is pertinent to computer scientists (and other folk).

We are looking forward to constructive Qs and commentaries.

The book should be read as a whole as law is in many ways an architecture that can only be properly understood if one grasps the whole as well as the parts (including the frictions between them). Those not interested in theory can skip chapter 1, and maybe even chapter 2. They will be referred back to the pertinence of these chapters while reading into the parts they deem relevant (though the software does not support cross-references at this moment). Chapter 11 is a bonus chapter that targets the intricacies of ethics and code, and how they interact with the law.

The site will be open for review comments for two months.

The cover image is El Lissitzky (1890-1941), 2. The Announcer, part of Victory Over the Sun 1923 released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported). It returns in chapter 11.

The book Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk is now available for purchase at Oxford University Press and in open access here.

Dedication

Acknowledgements

11. Closure: on ethics, code and law

This chapter explores the interaction between law, ethics and code. I argue that if ethics aligns itself with the force of technology, this may overrule the force of law, and, paradoxically, reduce the space for ethics.

5. Privacy and Data Protection

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter first confronts the landscape of human rights law at the global, national and EU level, followed by a discussion of the concept of privacy. It then inquires into the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection, highlighting their differences and overlap.

Part I

What Law Does

2. Law, Democracy, and the Rule of Law

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter addresses the dependencies between law and the Rule of Law, and between democracy and its legal underpinnings. It explains what counts as 'law' in terms of interpretation and argumentation, as well as legal certainty, justice and purposiveness.

3. Domains of Law: Private, Public, and Criminal Law

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter first explains the main domains of law, based on a set of conceptual distinctions. This provides the foundations for a hands-on introduction of the core structure, vocabulary and underlying principles of each domain.

4. International and Supranational Law

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter explains how international law operates between independent states and how national, federal and supranational law operate within a hierarchical jurisdiction. This is pivotal for understanding both the validity and the interpretation of individual legal norms.

Part II

Domains of Cyberlaw

5. Privacy and Data Protection

by Mireille Hildebrandt

6. Cybercrime

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter first raises the question of what makes cybercrime ‘cyber’, followed by an introduction to international and supranational legal frameworks that are meant to cope with cybercrime. Finally, it will provide a more detailed analysis of the Cybercrime Convention.

7. Copyright in Cyberspace

by Mireille Hildebrandt

Copyright on software is the enabling precondition for the General Public License (GPL) and the open source initiative. This chapter investigates the position of IP law in the context of constitutional democracy, while clarifying that IP law is private law.

8. Private Law Liability for Faulty ICT

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter targets third party liability (tort law), as an important example of how private law liability may step in to deter developers, manufacturers, retailers and users of ICT from developing, selling or using faulty ICT.

Part III

Frontiers of Law in an Onlife World

9. Legal Personhood for AI?

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter will engage with the legal issues of autonomous systems, asking the question whether (and if so, under what conditions) such systems should be given legal personhood.

10. ‘Legal by Design’ or ‘Legal Protection by Design’?

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This chapter focuses on how machine learning and blockchain change the substance of legal goods such as legal certainty, equality before the law, fairness and human dignity. It then investigates how legal protection can be designed into emerging ICT infrastructure.

Bonus

11. Closure: on ethics, code and law

by Mireille Hildebrandt

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 788734 on ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law’ COHUBICOL).