Danièle Bourcier


Danièle Bourcier is a French lawyer and essayist, who has contributed to the emergence of a new discipline in France: Law, Computing and linguistics.
She is director of research emeritus at CNRS, leads the "Law and Governance technologies" Department at the Centre for Administrative Science Research at the University Paris II, and is associate researcher at the March Bloch Centre in Berlin and at the IDT laboratory of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Scientific and academic biography

Her doctoral thesis in public law, after she obtains a scholarship for Stanford University describes the first application of artificial intelligence in the legal decision. She uses other models to explore the cognitive aspects of legal phenomena, modeling of legal knowledge, and socio-legal impacts of digitization of law.
Her work in legal language took place at the Conseil d’Etat in the Legal Informatics Centre, founded by Lucien Mehl who was also one of the first juricybernetician. From 1982 to 1994, she headed the laboratory of the CNRS No. 430 Computers Legal Linguistics at the State Council.
She was a visiting professor at Netherlands, in Sweden in Austria, and Wissenschaftzentrum Zu Berlin, WZB.
In these different Advanced Studies Institutes, she develops Theory on e-government and computational ethics.
Her research is currently focusing on the Open Science, Open Data, protection of personal data and the evolution of copyright in the digital age. She gave a lot of lectures on “Legal Robots and Artificial intelligence”.
She launched in 2004 the French Creative Commons licences : she is currently the scientific lead of the French Chapter Creativecommons.fr in charge of the scientific aspects of the CC licences.
She gives lectures on Cybercrime and on e-government. She also taught at the University Paris X at ENSTA, Sciences Po, and the National School of Administration.
Interested in mechanisms and unexpected effects of discoveries in science and particularly in Law and political Science, she published at Hermann, Paris:
From Serendipity in Science, Technology, the Art and law''. She was co-organizing, in July 2009, an interdisciplinary symposium in the Center of Congres “Chateau de Cerisy la Salle” in Normandy, leading to the publishing of the collective work La Sérendipité, un hasard heureux, at Hermann publisher.
The work she has done with Pek van Andel on serendipity led to the spread of the notion and the phenomenon of serendipity in the Francophonie world: the word sérendipité was elected the word of the 2011 Year by a scientific newspaper and entered the French usual word book in 2012.
She was appointed in various international and national expertise : UNESCO, European Commission and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility ; Focus Group RTD-L.3; OECD ; the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences and Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Recently she was invited as expert in artificial decision & Robot at UN Geneva.
She also works on the theory of complex systems applied to law, and the neuroconnexionnist networks. She conducts linguistic research on the legal language and argumentation, and finally the writing the law. This research led her to develop methods in legislative drafting in which she studied the development of new forms of coordination to agree on norms. Her study on digital communities in Europe have allowed her to explore the governance of commons. The research on Commons rooted in his implication in Creative Commons project.

Curriculum