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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies

Assessing Automated Administration, Cary Coglianese, Alicia Lai Apr 2022

Assessing Automated Administration, Cary Coglianese, Alicia Lai

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To fulfill their responsibilities, governments rely on administrators and employees who, simply because they are human, are prone to individual and group decision-making errors. These errors have at times produced both major tragedies and minor inefficiencies. One potential strategy for overcoming cognitive limitations and group fallibilities is to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) tools that allow for the automation of governmental tasks, thereby reducing reliance on human decision-making. Yet as much as AI tools show promise for improving public administration, automation itself can fail or can generate controversy. Public administrators face the question of when exactly they should use automation. …


Moving Toward Personalized Law, Cary Coglianese Mar 2022

Moving Toward Personalized Law, Cary Coglianese

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Rules operate as a tool of governance by making generalizations, thereby cutting down on government officials’ need to make individual determinations. But because they are generalizations, rules can result in inefficient or perverse outcomes due to their over- and under-inclusiveness. With the aid of advances in machine-learning algorithms, however, it is becoming increasingly possible to imagine governments shifting away from a predominant reliance on general rules and instead moving toward increased reliance on precise individual determinations—or on “personalized law,” to use the term Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat use in the title of their 2021 book. Among the various technological, …


Algorithm Vs. Algorithm, Cary Coglianese, Alicia Lai Jan 2022

Algorithm Vs. Algorithm, Cary Coglianese, Alicia Lai

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Critics raise alarm bells about governmental use of digital algorithms, charging that they are too complex, inscrutable, and prone to bias. A realistic assessment of digital algorithms, though, must acknowledge that government is already driven by algorithms of arguably greater complexity and potential for abuse: the algorithms implicit in human decision-making. The human brain operates algorithmically through complex neural networks. And when humans make collective decisions, they operate via algorithms too—those reflected in legislative, judicial, and administrative processes. Yet these human algorithms undeniably fail and are far from transparent. On an individual level, human decision-making suffers from memory limitations, fatigue, …


Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese Dec 2021

Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese

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New technologies bring with them many promises, but also a series of new problems. Even though these problems are new, they are not unlike the types of problems that regulators have long addressed in other contexts. The lessons from regulation in the past can thus guide regulatory efforts today. Regulators must focus on understanding the problems they seek to address and the causal pathways that lead to these problems. Then they must undertake efforts to shape the behavior of those in industry so that private sector managers focus on their technologies’ problems and take actions to interrupt the causal pathways. …


Tightening The Ooda Loop: Police Militarization, Race, And Algorithmic Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle Jan 2016

Tightening The Ooda Loop: Police Militarization, Race, And Algorithmic Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

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This Article examines the role military automated surveillance and intelligence systems and techniques have supported a self-reinforcing racial bias when used by civilian police departments to enhance predictive policing programs. I will focus on two facets of this problem. First, my research will take an inside-out perspective, studying the role played by advanced military technologies and methods within civilian police departments, and how they have enabled a new focus on deterrence and crime prevention by creating a system of structural surveillance where decision support relies increasingly upon algorithms and automated data analysis tools, and which automates de facto penalization and …


Cyber Espionage Or Cyber War?: International Law, Domestic Law, And Self-Protective Measures, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2015

Cyber Espionage Or Cyber War?: International Law, Domestic Law, And Self-Protective Measures, Christopher S. Yoo

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Scholars have spent considerable effort determining how the law of war (particularly jus ad bellum and jus in bello) applies to cyber conflicts, epitomized by the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Many prominent cyber operations fall outside the law of war, including the surveillance programs that Edward Snowden has alleged were conducted by the National Security Agency, the distributed denial of service attacks launched against Estonia and Georgia in 2007 and 2008, the 2008 Stuxnet virus designed to hinder the Iranian nuclear program, and the unrestricted cyber warfare described in the 1999 book by …


Layers Of Law: The Case Of E-Cigarettes, Eric A. Feldman Jan 2014

Layers Of Law: The Case Of E-Cigarettes, Eric A. Feldman

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This paper, written for a symposium on "Layers of Law and Social Order," connects the current debate over the regulation of electronic cigarettes with socio-legal scholarship on law, norms, and social control. Although almost every aspect of modern life that is subject to regulation can be seen through the framework ‘layers of law,’ e-cigarettes are distinguished by the rapid emergence of an unusually dense legal and regulatory web. In part, the dense fabric of e-cigarette law and regulation, both within and beyond the US, results from the lack of robust scientific and epidemiological data on the behavioral and health consequences …


Poisoning The Next Apple? The America Invents Act And Individual Inventors, David S. Abrams, R. Polk Wagner Mar 2013

Poisoning The Next Apple? The America Invents Act And Individual Inventors, David S. Abrams, R. Polk Wagner

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The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed …