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What It Means to Be Human in the Automated State: New Blog Post Symposium

Author: Melanie Fink, Daria Morozova et al
Date: 23 June 2026
Links: What It Means to Be Human in the Automated State: New Blog Post Symposium

What does it mean to be human in a system that no longer simply serves us, but often acts upon us? That question is at the centre of “Humanity in the Automated State,” a Blog Post Symposium published this week as a DigiBook by The Digital Constitutionalist (DigiCon). The Symposium accompanies the lecture series of the same name, organized by Dr. Melanie Fink (Europa Institute) and Dr. Daria Morozova (Department of Business Studies), which ran at Leiden Law School throughout the 2025/2026 academic year.

The lecture series brought together seven scholars from law, management, public administration, and computer science to examine how the automation of state authority affects fundamental aspects of the human experience. The fourteen contributions gathered in the Symposium take up and extend these questions, organized around four themes traced by the lecture series.

The first theme concerns the meaning and limits of human oversight, the central governance response to the risks of automated decision-making, and a concept that raises as many questions as it answers: what does meaningful oversight require, and can it deliver what it promises? This theme is taken up by Jake Goldenfein and Connal Parsley, Isabella Banks, and Johann Laux.

The second theme turns to the concrete legal and institutional tools through which accountability over automated systems can be established and maintained, and whether they are fit for purpose given the opacity, speed, and complexity of the systems they are meant to scrutinize. Contributions on this theme come from Robbert Bruggeman, Michael Sierra, Alex Chanhou Lou, and Matias Mascitti.

The third theme examines what algorithmic governance means for those who seek legal protection against it, in courts, in dispute resolution mechanisms, and in the criminal justice system, adding new layers of complexity to a terrain where access to justice has always been uneven. This theme is explored by Elke Olthuis and Anna van Duin, Agnese Palazzi, Janko Munjic, and María Manuela Márquez Velásquez and José Restom.

The fourth theme steps back from institutional mechanics to ask what algorithmic governance does to the human subject: to dignity, autonomy, and the conditions of a fully human life. This theme is taken up by Ali Mert Gürkan, Antoni Napieralski, and Öznur Uğuz.

In their concluding contribution, Dr. Morozova and Dr. Fink trace across the Symposium where the human keeps getting displaced in the automated state, for administrators and citizens alike, and ask whether the legal and institutional tools built for human-to-human encounters can be adapted to the automated state, or whether new ones need to be built altogether.

The lecture series and accompanying Blog Post Symposium are funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the VENI grant “Gateways for Humanity: The Duty to Reason in the Automated State” and supported by Leiden Law School’s research focus area “Technology, law, and justice.” Speakers in the lecture series included Christine Moser (VU Amsterdam), Aya Rizk (Linköping University), Sofia Ranchordás (Tilburg University/Luiss Guido Carli), Madalina Busuioc (VU Amsterdam), Mengchen Dong (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), Ida Koivisto (University of Helsinki), and Natali Helberger (University of Amsterdam).