INDREK GRAUBERG

When Law Forgets the Human: Legal Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This presentation examines how artificial intelligence challenges the idea of the human being at the center of law. The issue is not only whether AI can improve efficiency, consistency, or access to legal information, but whether its growing role in legal decision-making quietly transforms law itself. Law has traditionally understood persons as responsible agents capable of judgment, interpretation, contestation, and moral accountability. AI, by contrast, tends to approach them as data to be processed, predicted, and managed.

The presentation argues that the real danger is not the dramatic replacement of judges by machines, but the gradual shift from law as a normative practice to governance as technological management. If legal judgment is reduced to pattern recognition and optimized output, law risks losing its connection to responsibility, freedom, and public justification. The central claim is that AI may assist law, but it must not redefine the meaning of legal agency.

Indrek Grauberg is an Estonian legal scholar, academic leader, and university lecturer whose work centers on law, sovereignty, constitutional thought, and the role of the state in a globalizing world. His academic profile combines legal theory, public law, and higher education leadership, with a sustained interest in how modern and postmodern understandings of the state influence contemporary legal and political systems.

He holds a PhD from King’s College London, where his research examined sovereignty in international law and politics. His scholarship explores themes such as the meaning of sovereignty in changing political conditions, the legitimacy of law and truth in postmodern contexts, and the relationship between law, rights, and political order. More recent publications also show interdisciplinary interest, including work on emerging technologies in higher education and broader debates on populism, democracy, and social change.