Law Commons^™

Is Algorithmic Affirmative Action Legal?, Jason R. Bent

AI-DR Collection

This Article is the first to comprehensively explore whether algorithmic affirmative action is lawful. It concludes that both statutory and constitutional antidiscrimination law leave room for race-aware affirmative action in the design of fair algorithms. Along the way, the Article recommends some clarifications of current doctrine and proposes the pursuit of formally race-neutral methods to achieve the admittedly race-conscious goals of algorithmic affirmative action.

The Article proceeds as follows. Part I introduces algorithmic affirmative action. It begins with a brief review of the bias problem in machine learning and then identifies multiple design options for algorithmic fairness. These designs are …