A presentation by Raphaële Xenidis, Assistant Professor in European Law at Sciences Po Law School. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium under the cluster "Fundamental Rights and (Anti-)Discrimination" co-hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights, Jaques Delors Centre and Centre for Digital Governance.
Algorithmic bias pervades numerous areas of life and worsens inequalities. Yet EU equality law only offers limited legal remedies. One the one hand, its central doctrinal categories – direct and indirect discrimination – are analytically ill-suited to capturing algorithmic types of discrimination. On the other, the prevailing system of ex post individual redress does not effectively address the reality of AI predictions, which turn past discrimination into a self-fulfilling prophecy. To remedy these fundamental inadequacies, this article proposes an alternative legal test, seeking resilience in the margins of the current regulatory regime. It argues that conceptualising discriminatory algorithms as ‘instructions to discriminate’ fosters legal certainty and equality by shifting responsibility for algorithmic discrimination away from society and to the users who draw profit from AI systems. This alternative test centres positive action by creating a ‘duty to reasonably debias’, which in turn stimulates the creation of prevention ecosystems.
Raphaële Xenidis is Assistant Professor in European Law at Sciences Po Law School. Her current research focuses on European discrimination and equality law. In the framework of her Ph.D. dissertation, she has worked on issues of intersectionality and intersectional discrimination. Her Marie Curie postdoctoral project explored problems of algorithmic discrimination, bias in automated decision-making systems and data-driven inequality.
She is trained as a political scientist and a lawyer. She holds a PhD in law from the European University Institute. She received Master’s degrees from Sciences Po Lille in France, the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Germany and SAIS Europe, Johns Hopkins University in Italy, as well as a LL.M. in Comparative, European and International laws from the European University Institute. Raphaële has also been a Fulbright-Schuman visiting researcher at Columbia Law School in New York.
Before joining Sciences Po, Raphaële was a permanent lecturer in EU law at the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh, a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht Law School and a member of the coordination team of the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination Law. Raphaële is also a Global Research Fellow at iCourts at the University of Copenhagen.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
