Stanford CIS Panel: Artificial Intelligence: A Legal Perspective

A panel on Artificial Intelligence: A Legal Perspective, was held 27 October 2011, at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA. Click here for video of the panel.

The panel discussed many issues respecting artificial intelligence and law, including the legal agency and liability of AIs.

The panelists were Associate Dean Mary-Anne Williams of the University of Technology, Sydney Faculty of Engineering and IT; Professor Dr. Ian Kerr of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law; Professor John O. McGinnis of the Northwestern University School of Law; and Professor Lawrence Solum of the Georgetown University Law Center. The moderator was Ryan Calo of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The panel was sponsored by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The panel was a follow-up event to Stanford Law School’s 2009 panel entitled Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics (click here for video).

Review of: The Future of Identity in the Information Society

Rowena Rodrigues, Esq., LL.M., of the University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published a fine review of The Future of Identity in the Information Society: Challenges and Opportunities (Kai Rannenberg et al. eds., 2009), in 2009(2) JILT: The Journal of Information, Law & Technology. This book appears to be the final report of the EU’s FIDIS project, on which a number of legal informatics scholars have worked. The book addresses a number of legal informatics issues respecting identity, data protection, and privacy law in the online environment, as well as the application of law to software agents.

Sartor on Cognitive Automata and the Law

[NOTE: Updated on 21 October 2009 to link to the SSRN preprint.]

Professor Giovanni Sartor, of Università di Bologna, Centro Interdipartimentale de Ricerca in Storia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica (CIRSFID), has published Cognitive Automata and the Law: Electronic Contracting and the Intentionality of Software Agents, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence & Law. A preprint is available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“I shall argue that software agents can be attributed cognitive states, since their behaviour can be best understood by adopting the intentional stance. These cognitive states are legally relevant when agents are delegated by their users to engage, without users’ review, in choices based on their the agents’ own knowledge. Consequently, both with regard to torts and to contracts, legal rules designed for humans can also be applied to software agents, even though the latter do not have rights and duties of their own. The implications of this approach in different areas of the law are then discussed, in particular with regard to contracts, torts, and personality.”