Fernanda De Carvalho Lage

Fernanda de Carvalho Lage is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Brasília (Brazil) and a Visiting Scholar with the Crime & Society (CRiS) research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). With over a decade of university teaching and eight years of research on artificial intelligence and law, her work spans comparative law, legal theory, democracy, fundamental rights and digital governance, combining doctrinal and empirical approaches to courts, public institutions and surveillance.

At VUB, she held a competitive postdoctoral fellowship (2025–2026) from Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the federal research funding agency, and contributed to the Horizon Europe project GATHERINGS, coordinated by Lucas Melgaço. Her research examined the regulation of public-space surveillance under the GDPR, the Law Enforcement Directive and the AI Act. She is a co-author of Surveillance and Public Gatherings in the EU (Routledge, forthcoming 2027), contributing the chapter on privacy, data protection and transparency.

She holds a Master's degree in Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, with research on democracy, equality and human rights in Amartya Sen's political philosophy. Her PhD in Law (University of Brasília, 2020), awarded a university distinction in the Human Sciences, drew on interdisciplinary work on VICTOR, the first AI system of Brazil's Federal Supreme Court. She subsequently advised the Presidency of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (2020–2022) and participated in the National Council of Justice's working group on judicial AI.

She is the author or co-author of six books, has supervised six PhD research projects (three completed), and has taught in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile. She leads the Research Group on Law, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies (GETEC) at the University of Brasília. Her current research examines AI and algorithmic surveillance in relation to constitutional interpretation, fundamental rights and judicial remedies across European and Latin American legal cultures. 

Research line

Urban and Spatial Criminology