Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Legal Competencies and Algorithmic Liability into the Engineering Curriculum

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Algorithmic Liability; Engineering Education; EU AI Act; Legal Autopsy; Value-Based Engineering; Artificial Intelligence Regulation; Micro-credentials

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of autonomous artificial intelligence systems has precipitated a profound liability crisis that traditional engineering education is ill-equipped to address. Historically insulated by the “provided as-is” doctrine, software engineers now face an evolving geopolitical regulatory matrix in which algorithmic opacity, emergent bias, and unprompted decision-making can yield tangible legal and physical harms. This comprehensive report details the collapse of legacy liability shields and the emergence of strict, divergent regulatory empires across the European Union, the United States, and China. By synthesising recent jurisprudence - specifically, the algorithmic hallucinations in the Air Canada litigation and the fatal system safety failures in the Uber autonomous vehicle collision - this analysis identifies the precise intersections at which technical design choices become actionable legal negligence. To navigate this engineering-legal singularity, this report proposes a systemic restructuring of higher education curricula. It advocates cultivating “T-shaped” engineers by integrating Value-Based Engineering standards, implementing “Legal Autopsies” as a core pedagogical framework, establishing interdisciplinary legal-engineering clinics, and deploying blockchain-secured micro-credentials. Ultimately, this report demonstrates that legal literacy can no longer be relegated to the periphery of engineering education; it must be embedded as a fundamental boundary condition of algorithmic design.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zsolt Czékmann
AU  - Gergely Cseh-Zelina
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/04
TI  - Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Legal Competencies and Algorithmic Liability into the Engineering Curriculum
BT  - Proceedings of the Innovation in Engineering Education 2026 Conference (IEE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 68
EP  - 84
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_7
ID  - Czékmann2026
ER  -