Artificial Intelligence and Legal Disruption

This course is a continuously improved-upon version of previous editions of the ‘AI and Legal Disruption’, and a significantly updated version of the ‘RoboLaw’, courses convened over the past several years. This course is heavily research-based, taking departure in cutting-edge work that is taking place here at the Law Faculty through the AI-LeD Research Group, and other leading institutions. It is also a research-integrated course: the unique approach to a wide and relatively open academic field means that there is much scope for students to engage in work that will push forward thinking in these areas. Previous final written assignments produced for this course have gone on to be published, and several former students are now undertaking their PhDs and beyond. There are amble opportunities for those of you who might be interested in pursuing research in the future to get a taster of what it might be like to write your Master’s Thesis or PhD Dissertation in this area.

This course is likely to be unique and unlike any other course that you have, or will take, during your time at university. This is because AI-LeD has a problem-finding orientation (in contradistinction to the more orthodox problem-solving approach). The difference is subtle, yet fundamental: in problem-finding, it is the question that is the central concern; for problem-solving, the main objective is in producing answers. In other words, the overarching objective of this course is to open up new research trajectories, and to probe the ‘unknown unknowns’ (what we do not know that we do not know). As a result, this course is run like a true research workshop, operating at the very edge of contemporary research and thinking. It invites students into the process of developing thinking approaches to these challenging contemporary issues as we collectively explore the potential problem and opportunity space for law, regulation, and governance that is opened up by AI and its applications. This is usually very difficult at the start, but it has always gotten easier as the term progresses. What you need to bear in mind for this course is that there are no answers, no solutions: at best we can hope for re-solutions that we will need to continually and iteratively revisit.

The seminars in this course will be divided into four broad sections, after the initial introductory sessions.

The aim of section  A is to ask the question: given how law has dealt with new technology in the past, does the rise of artificial intelligence and its applications actually create the need for a new, separate field of regulation? We will critically consider the competing views offered, on both the extent of the challenge posed by AI, and the nature of the necessary and appropriate regulatory responses. What can we learn from history, and why? Is there actually anything new under the sun, and why? This section thus anchors the course in the past trajectories of technology regulation, and in debates that have taken place to date about how best to regulate AI. Thus, this first section explores whether AI and its applications actually introduce new challenges to the law, and illustrates this by exploring the existing debates surrounding the use of autonomous weapons systems in armed conflict.

Having discussed the relevance of reconsidering regulation in the context of AI, sets the stage for section B, which aims to provide a toolbox of sorts for the course. It does so by exploring a range of different approaches to legal disruption, and the prospect for artificial intelligence to trigger it. Why are new technologies, including AI, the focus of regulatory attention? Why should we treat technology as a target for regulation? Are there other approaches which are more nuanced to the challenges and opportunities presented in an AI-infused world?

This section starts by pivoting away from treating technology as a regulatory target, towards regulating for technologically-driven changes in the sociotechnical landscape. Yet, this seems to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, because taken to its logical conclusion, it suggests that technology and technological artefacts play no role and have no impact in the regulatory sphere. To introduce nuance into these discussions we dip briefly into Science and Technology Studies (STS), with its focus at the intersection between new technologies and societal change.

Yet, why focus on the legal disruption model? We hone in on this question by reading the conceptual framing paper, and round it out by analysing a proposal for four levels of AI governance (both of these initiatives are homegrown, AI-LeD projects). This section then continues through a different approach, those revolving around ignorance, agnotology and uncertainty, proposing the course’s core orientation of problem-finding approaches, in the process. Why do we not know what will be the problems that we are confronted with as a technology is adopted and integrated into society? As this section is somewhat abstract and conceptual, the final two sessions seek to ground what we have covered within the debates on military AI, and autonomous weapons systems in particular, to work out the lessons that we might draw from these various approaches. We should conclude this section with new abilities to depart from the well-worn regulatory debates concerning how to regulate or govern AI, and launch forays into new ways of framing question or problems that can then be researched further.

Section C comprises of explorations and examinations into artificial intelligence and legal disruption. Again, the aim is to take a range of different approaches from Section B, and to work these through different areas of activity or application to unearth surprising problems or unintuitive conclusions. The unifying threads running through this Section are thus an active problem-finding orientation and attempts to identify alternative, valid, framings of the potential impact of AI applications on the sociotechnical landscape. There is clearly a vast potential area to be covered under Section C, so we draw clusters of related perspectives and problems as exemplars.

It may be worth noting that many of the best final written assessments in past editions of this course essentially identified and carved off areas of Section C and then subjected these areas to intense critical scrutiny with the different approaches that we introduced in Section B.

Section D is geared towards student-driven content and peer-to-peer teaching and learning, and the class is expected to be clustered into groups which will design and lead a particular session. This means that you will self-organise into groups according common interest or approach, and will as a group will be responsible for conducting a full seminar on this topic. This includes finding suitable readings, disseminating these to the rest of the class through Absalon, and actually conducting the class. It should be noted that, since it is designed along the peer-to-peer learning and teaching framework, that attention must be paid to mutual respect: continued engagement and participation is therefore mandatory and may affect your final grade.

This course seeks to jolt students out of lazy thinking habits and does this through de-familiarisation and participatory engagement. This overturns the temptation, when it comes to legal problems, to automatically reach for standard legal solutions and responses. Find the relevant area of the law, see what the rules stipulate, and apply those rules to the given facts to solve the problem. In Roger Brownsword’s terminology, this is the ‘coherentist’ legal mindset’.

As the approach of legal disruption maintains our focus on the edges of uncertainty, so this type of approach cannot work, almost by definition. While most legal education is aimed at resolving problems, closing gaps and reducing or eliminating uncertainty, the approach taken in this course is the direct opposite. Here, we seek to find the challenge, problem, or anomaly, and take that as a point of departure for a ‘deep dive’ that explores what the identified issue can teach us about the theory and practice of law as a whole. Thus, we exploit legal anomalies rendered perceptible by AI and robotics as a portal to exploring the structure and system of the law itself.