Dissertation title: You are not your data: Developing a human right to non-algorithmic decision-making.
Doctoral Supervisor: Professor Benedict Kingsbury
Biography: Katrina Geddes is a JSD student at NYU. She holds an LLM in International Intellectual Property Law from Cambridge University, a Master's in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. An Australian lawyer, she has clerked at the Supreme Court of New South Wales (Court of Appeal) and worked at King & Wood Mallesons, Sydney, prior to moving overseas to work at the United Nations Development Programme, Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School. Katrina's research interests include international intellectual property law, international human rights law, and international development.
Research: Katrina is drawing on human rights theory and norms of the administrative state to develop a human right to non-algorithmic decision-making, based on the indignity of being reduced to our data points, and having our fundamental rights and interests be determined on the basis of our data proxies, effectively erasing those aspects of ourselves and our lived experiences that do not yield to quantification or categorization. She will explore how individual justice can be secured in the context of fully automated and algorithm-assisted decision-making with respect to the determination of our fundamental rights and interests, including an interrogation of the conditions required for human decision-makers, particularly administrative agency officials, to resist automation bias. She will also explore the implications for democratic accountability of the delegation of administrative agency functions to algorithmic decision systems.