To achieve a proper understanding of the issues at stake in data- and code-driven ‘law’, COHUBICOL brings together the expertise of lawyers, philosophers, and computer scientists. During the course of the project, an annual philosophers’ seminar is organised to probe different aspects of computational ‘law’.

Compliance and Automation in Data Protection Law (2023)

In May 2023 COHUBICOL will hold its fourth and final Philosophers’ Seminar at the Conference on Computers, Privacy & Data Protection (CPDP), in association with ALTEP-DP, a project also based at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The seminar aims for an in-depth study of the concept and practice of compliance, notably in the context of data protection, focused on the automation of compliance. This entails a sustained reflection on compliance software, software compliance and how they affect legal protection.

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In November 2021 COHUBICOL holds its third Philosophers’ Seminar, bringing together lawyers, computer scientists and philosophers to engage in an in-depth study of rule formalisation and self-execution (e.g. using blockchain or ‘rules as code’ (RaC) approaches), in terms of whether and on what basis computer code may have the intended legal effect of binding a constituency as if it were legislation.

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Interpretability issues in machine learning (2020)

On 3-4 December 2020 COHUBICOL holds its second Philosophers’ Seminar, bringing together lawyers, computer scientists and philosophers to engage in an in-depth study of interpretability in machine learning and how it is relevant to legal protection and the rule of law in the context of computational law. The event is meant to practice slow science, based on draft papers that have been shared in advance, read by all participants. No presentations, only in-depth discussion of each paper.

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Text-driven Normativity and the Rule of Law (2019)

On November 2019 COHUBICOL held its first Philosophers’ Seminar, bringing together lawyers, computer scientists and philosophers to discuss and share ideas on text-driven normativity (TDN). The point of departure of this project is that the current mode of existence of law is text-driven: law lives in and through text, its past and futures are ostensibly bound in the written word (even oral arguments in court are ultimately reified in the text of precedent).

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