Digitalization and Legal Responsibility

Digitalization enables machines to make, or contribute to, ever more complex decisions with ever higher stakes. This imposes the question of legal responsibility for digitalized decision-making on us all. Our project inquires whether digitalization is a threat to long-established models of legal thinking, reasoning and adjudicating, and, if so, why that is and what can be done about it. Our focus will be on empirical material in the domain of law and security, to be considered in the light of international legal rules with particular reference to the responsibility of operators and commanders, programmers, producers and states.
It is beyond doubt that there is considerable demand for our research, not at least by Swedish industry with its high stakes in digitalization. Nordic universities lack projects remotely comparable to what we propose. As we combine empirical with foundational research, our results are portable to other areas where digitalization meets law.
This research team pools unique assets for the realization of this project. As members of Sweden’s largest international law research environment, we have specialized in interdisciplinary research. Each of us is an expert in international law who brings digitalization-specific capabilities to this project, as degrees in computer science and engineering, or reputable publications on the interplay between technology and law.