Portrait of Florence Guillaume, a creative researcher who's not afraid of legal novelty
Florence Guillaume is a full professor at the University of Neuchâtel. In 2020, she also founded the LexTech Institute, a university center dedicated to increasing collaboration between lawyers and computer scientists. Her enthusiastic, innovative approach promises to be a turning point for tomorrow's digital world.
Florence holds a doctorate in private international law from the University of Lausanne and a bar exam. She practiced law in Geneva and Zurich for six years. In parallel with her career as a lawyer, she published scientific contributions and articles in specialized journals, and worked at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. After a spell at the Federal Office of Justice in Berne, in the International Private Law Section, she was appointed full professor at the University of Neuchâtel in 2006. Florence was Dean of the Faculty of Law for three years. She has been a member of the University Council for several years. In 2020, she founded the LexTech Institute, a university center dedicated to research and training in digital technologies.
Meet a creative and inquisitive researcher who is not afraid of legal novelties.
What have been the highlights of your career?
My experience at the Hague Conference on Private International Law was a determining factor in my career. I worked on the drafting of the Convention on Intermediated Securities within this international organization, whose aim is to create uniform rules of private international law. This Convention applies to international financial markets, a very specific field which required the adoption of a new type of legal rule. I have always been interested in creating new legal rules for legal institutions that are little known or unknown in the Swiss legal system. This passion began with trusts when I was an assistant at university, a subject I studied alongside my doctoral thesis, which was devoted to international companies. Today, I'm particularly interested in the legal issues arising from the use of new technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. In all these new areas, the aim is to examine a legal institution that does not exist in our legal system, and to imagine new rules that could be applied to provide a degree of legal certainty, particularly from an international perspective. This type of scientific research has been the guiding principle of my academic career.
What are the main challenges and difficulties you face?
When it comes to new institutions with implications for the law, the main challenge is to understand what we're talking about, to be able to form a picture of the basic mechanism. Then, we need to conceptualize legal rules that make sense. For example, when a smart contract is used to formalize a legal relationship, it is necessary to understand the basics of blockchain technology if we are to create legal rules that can be applied in practice given the IT requirements. What's more, the use of blockchain occurs in the context of international relations, so the first question that arises is toidentify the legal order in which to anchor the legal relationship . Is it Swiss law or some other law that should apply? There is no uniform international legal regime in this field. The law is lagging behind technological development, resulting in considerable legal uncertainty. There are plans at international level to establish common legal rules, but for the time being, these have not yet been adopted by the States. Each state is free to adapt or not its legal system by adopting new rules of law.
In Switzerland, we're well ahead of the game in terms of legislation. The Swiss legislature has, for example, passed a new law on adapting Swiss law to developments in distributed electronic ledger technology, which came into force at the beginning of 2021. This made it possible to adapt certain laws on an ad hoc basis to ensure that new rules applicable to the use of blockchain were incorporated into Swiss law. Nonetheless, it is difficult to know when Swiss law applies, as the decentralization of blockchain nodes, with computers potentially located in every state in the world, makes it extremely difficult to determine the most central point of attachment. Only when it is possible to anchor the legal relationship in Swiss territory is Swiss law likely to apply. Questions of private international law arising in connection with the use of this technology have as yet been largely unexplored. The main challenge in creating new legal rules for legal institutions that are unfamiliar or unknown to the Swiss legal system is to design rules that will work in practice and provide the required level of legal certainty.
Do you work with people specializing in new technologies? On which subjects?
I work with computer scientists to keep abreast of new technological developments and better understand the challenges of the digital revolution. The aim is to design technology-neutral legal rules that can be applied not only to technology as we know it today, but also to technology as it will be tomorrow.
The year 2021, in connection with blockchain, is the year of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). As far as legal rules are concerned, we're in total limbo. The rules likely to apply to NFTs are not designed for this type of asset. For example, it's hard to know whether transferring ownership of the token also implies transferring ownership of the work attached to it. People spend large sums of money to acquire NFTs, and it's admittedly difficult to know exactly what they're buying. In addition, there is the question of which state's law is applicable. The answer to this question of private international law has important legal consequences. There may be an effective transfer of ownership under the law of one state, but not under the law of another. Today, there is a great deal of legal uncertainty in the field of digital technologies. As part of my scientific research, I'm trying to come up with legal rules that could be adopted by the Swiss legislator to provide greater legal certainty.
What other new products are keeping you busy in your research?
Another subject I'm currently passionate about is conflict resolution. I'm interested in the development of new dispute resolution mechanisms that are available online. These are alternatives to state justice, i.e. private online courts that are set up to resolve conflicts resulting from the use of blockchain, and whose operation is fully integrated into the philosophy behind the use of this technology to develop a crypto-economy. These private tribunals are made up of judges who are specialists in the blockchain community (lawyers, IT developers, subject matter experts, etc.). A decision is rendered on the basis of their joint assessment of the dispute, following several successive votes, according to a procedure involving economic and consensus mechanisms unknown to state justice. It's still a niche field, but these new blockchain-based dispute resolution methods are gradually being put in place, and could provide an interesting alternative to state justice.
I'm also interested in the protection of the private sphere, and in particular the protection of personality rights in the digital world. The right to have and exercise control over one's own data is a fundamental right protecting everyone, whatever their nationality or place of residence. In my opinion, it is important to adopt clear rules that also protect the digital integrity of every person active on the Internet, in the same way as the physical and psychological integrity of every individual is protected by law. Digital rights also raise other questions:
Can an artificial intelligence have rights and obligations? Can an artificial intelligence be held legally responsible for its actions?
These are all questions to which European legislators are in the process of providing comprehensive answers, seeking to reconcile the protection of individuals' fundamental rights with the development of trustworthy artificial intelligence. The Swiss legislator's approach in this area is more ad hoc, since it has merely revised the Data Protection Act.
What is your preferred approach to these new technologies?
In my opinion, it's essential to collaborate with people specializing in new technologies when considering the adoption of new legal rules applicable in this field. For example, I took part in an international working group made up of experts from the legal and technology worlds, whose aim was to define a legal framework for DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). The synergies created between the various members of the working group, who came from different backgrounds, made it possible to draw up a draft model law on DAOs proposing a flexible legal framework adapted to the characteristics of this new form of entity operating mainly on the blockchain. I am convinced that such a project would not have been possible without this multidisciplinary approach.
In 2020, you founded the LexTech Institute. How did this project come about?
The LexTech Institute was born of the desire to intensify collaboration between legal and computer scientists at the University of Neuchâtel. I founded this university center with Prof. Pascal Felber to encourage exchanges between researchers in these two disciplines at our University. Our basic idea was to develop a common language between lawyers and computer scientists, so as to be able to more effectively design a coherent legal framework that takes technological constraints into account. Very quickly, the LexTech Institute attracted the attention of researchers from other disciplines who were also devoting their scientific work to the digital world. We then decided to integrate these other disciplines into the LexTech Institute's research and training themes, and so we created a community of scientists analyzing the development of society 4.0 in a global way in all the research fields specific to digital technology. Currently, we have 8 Labs bringing together over 100 researchers from the University of Neuchâtel.
We are in the process of setting up scientific collaborations with other academic institutions, other universities in Switzerland and abroad, and of course with industry. Research at the LexTech Institute is not only academic, but also practice-oriented. We have a blog on our website, which publishes one or two posts a week. These are short articles on topical issues related to the digital revolution, with a scientific content that is totally understandable to everyone. We are also very active on social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter and soon Instagram) and we will be launching a YouTube channel by the end of the year with videos presenting in a simple and accessible way scientific themes linked to new technologies in the fields of law, IT, economics, humanities and social sciences.
What do you think of Neuchâtel's innovation ecosystem?
I think it's a very active ecosystem that's conducive to innovation. Personally, I'm quite close to entrepreneurs in the blockchain field, and I'm very impressed by the dynamism of Neuchâtel companies using and developing this technology. I believe that Neuchâtel has taken the digital turn and has an important card to play at Swiss and international level in the field of distributed ledger technology. Neuchâtel's blockchain ecosystem is made up of high-performance companies and highly qualified individuals who are developing innovative projects like NEDAO. To my knowledge, this is the first project to use a DAO in a didactic way to make the new tools resulting from blockchain technology accessible to the public. Other recent projects include NYM and the ORIGYN foundation, both of which seem to me to have a bright future ahead of them. I see this innovation ecosystem as a logical extension of the watchmaking industry, with which there is an obvious continuity. This tradition of expertly harnessing new technologies is now attracting key blockchain players to our canton, enabling Switzerland to occupy an important position in this field on the international stage.
Source : Microcity
