The lecture series Humanity in the Automated State continued on 9 April 2026 at Leiden Law School with Professor of Public Law, Ida Koivisto from the University of Helsinki. She specialises in the digitalisation of public administration, general administrative law, and the legitimation strategies of public power
Koivisto is the author of The Transparency Paradox (OUO 2022). In her lecture, "Humans as a Legal Technology," Professor Koivisto examined a striking development in European technology regulation and ethical discourse: the emergence of what she calls "new humans." Rather than natural persons, bureaucrats, or civil servants, these 'humans' are abstract entities assigned legal functions and powers by regulatory frameworks. Legal requirements such as 'human intervention,' 'human oversight,' and 'human judgment' in instruments like the EU AI Act construct a figure that is, she argued, a conceptual transplant from the discourses of technology, one whose incorporation into law is uneasy and whose relationship to actual human beings is far from clear.
The central argument of the lecture was that this emergence of 'new humans' should prompt a fundamental rethinking of how we understand legal technology. Professor Koivisto proposed adopting a wider conception of legal technology that dissolves the conventional human/machine distinction in public administration, treating digital tools, human legal labour, and even mindsets as legal technologies alike. Rather than assuming that inserting a human into an automated process resolves concerns about accountability or legitimacy, this reframing makes visible the naïve human exceptionalism embedded in prevailing legal thinking and questions its sustainability in an era of pervasive algorithmic governance.
The lecture series, organized by Dr. Melanie Fink (Europa Institute) and Dr. Daria Morozova (Department of Business Studies), is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the VENI grant "Gateways for Humanity: The Duty to Reason in the Automated State" and Leiden Law School's research focus area "Technology, law, and justice." The series brings together scholars from law, management, public administration, and computer science throughout the 2025/2026 academic year to examine how algorithmic governance reshapes human relationships with public authority.
The final session of the series features Natali Helberger (University of Amsterdam, May 26).
