Expert Roundtable on ‘The Future of EU Public Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’
On 19-20 October 2023, Europa Institute’s Simona Demkova and Melanie Fink, together with Giulia Gentile (Essex Law School), co-hosted an Expert Roundtable on the topic of ‘The Future of EU Public Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,’ in the context of the Digital Constitutionalism (The DigiCon III) conference that took place at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
The conference is a yearly event organised by the researchers-led project - DigiCon, a legal blog on digital constitutionalism. The Expert Roundtable on ‘The Future of EU Public Law in the Age of Artificla Intelligence’ was funded by the Leiden University Starting Grant for a collaborative research project on ‘The EU’s Human-Centered Digital Transformation,’ received by Simona Demkova and Daniel Mândrescu in March 2023.
The Expert Roundtable draws on the scientific symposium organised by Simona Demkova in her capacity as the Head of Section on Digital State for the DigiCon blog, co-edited with Melanie Fink and Giulia Gentile (Essex Law School). The symposium’s topic of ‘Safeguarding The Right to Good Administration in the Age of AI’ gathered expert contributions from senior as well as early career scholars in EU law.
The contributors met in Florence to explore future ways of ensuring accountability in AI-driven public administrations. The conference opened with a keynote talk by Herwig Hofmann, Professor at the University of Luxembourg and a leading scholar in EU public law and digitalisation.
Taking the EU's right to good administration guaranteed under Article 41 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights as a starting point, the experts reflected on the existing and future relevance of EU public law in regulating the use of AI by public administrations.
The Roundtable opened with two sets of horizontal perspectives. The first set of contributions by Albert Sanchez-Graells, Filipe Brito Bastos and Marco Almada delved into the limits of the rights and obligations guaranteed under the umbrella principle of good administration when faced with the use of AI by public authorities. The second set discussed the interplay between the principle of good administration and the rules of EU secondary law, particularly the EU GDPR and the upcoming AI Act with contributions by Mitisha Gaur, Jacopo Dirutigliano and Marco Fontana. Lastly, the discussion looked at the specific challenges of AI-assisted decision-making across different fields, such as tax administration (with a contribution by Katerina Pantazatou and Arthur BIANCO ) or border management (by Alexandra Karaiskou), as well as across different jurisdictions (looking at the French and UK examples, by Alexander Stepanov and Alexandra Sinclair respectively).
The second half of the conference was devoted to the Future of Digital Constitutionalism in the age of Generative AI, opening with a keynote by Professor Lilian Edwards. The two-day event allowed for critical exchanges among the experts from the two strands of legal scholarship in the search for interrelated legal solutions to technological challenges.