Law Commons^™

Reconciling Risk And Equality, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

States have increasingly resorted to statistically-derived risk algorithms to determine when diversion from prison should occur, whether sentences should be enhanced, and the level of security and treatment a prisoner requires. The federal government has jumped on the bandwagon in a big way with the First Step Act, which mandated that a risk assessment instrument be developed to determine which prisoners can be released early on parole. Policymakers are turning to these algorithms because they are thought to be more accurate and less biased than judges and correctional officials, making them useful tools for reducing prison populations through identification of …

Towards A Data-Driven Financial System: The Impact Of Covid-19, Nydia Remolina

Centre for AI & Data Governance

The COVID-19 outbreak has a growing impact on the global economy and the financial sector, which plays a critical role in mitigating the unprecedented macroeconomic and financial shock caused by the pandemic. Given the unprecedented nature of the current crisis, financial regulators and supervisors, central banks, along with governments and legislatures face challenges to maintain financial stability, preserve the well-functioning core markets, and ensure the flow of credit to the real economy. Even though the COVID-19 has slowed down our daily lives and stopped the operation of many industries, it did not have the same effect in the data-driven finance …

Literature Review: How U.S. Government Documents Are Addressing The Increasing National Security Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This article emphasizes the increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in military and national security policy making. It seeks to inform interested individuals about the proliferation of publicly accessible U.S. government and military literature on this multifaceted topic. An additional objective of this endeavor is encouraging greater public awareness of and participation in emerging public policy debate on AI's moral and national security implications..

Securitizing Digital Debts, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The promise of financial technology (“fintech”) and artificial intelligence (“AI”) in broadening access to financial products and services continues to capture the imagination of policymakers, Wall Street, and the public. This has been particularly true in the realm of fintech credit where platform companies increasingly provide online loans to consumers, students, and small businesses by harnessing AI underwriting and alternative data. In 2019 alone fintech lenders represented nearly 50% of total non-credit card, unsecured consumer loan balances in the United States. One of the most prevalent ways fintech credit firms operate is by securitizing the online loans they help originate. …

Deploying Machine Learning For A Sustainable Future, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

To meet the environmental challenges of a warming planet and an increasingly complex, high tech economy, government must become smarter about how it makes policies and deploys its limited resources. It specifically needs to build a robust capacity to analyze large volumes of environmental and economic data by using machine-learning algorithms to improve regulatory oversight, monitoring, and decision-making. Three challenges can be expected to drive the need for algorithmic environmental governance: more problems, less funding, and growing public demands. This paper explains why algorithmic governance will prove pivotal in meeting these challenges, but it also presents four likely obstacles that …

Implementing User Rights For Research In The Field Of Artificial Intelligence: A Call For International Action, Sean Flynn, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Last year, before the onset of a global pandemic highlighted the critical and urgent need for technology-enabled scientific research, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched an inquiry into issues at the intersection of intellectual property (IP) and artificial intelligence (AI). We contributed comments to that inquiry, with a focus on the application of copyright to the use of text and data mining (TDM) technology. This article describes some of the most salient points of our submission and concludes by stressing the need for international leadership on this important topic. WIPO could help fill the current gap on international leadership, …

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …

Mining The Harvard Caselaw Access Project, Felix B. Chang, Erin Mccabe, James Lee

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay illustrates how machine learning can disrupt legal scholarship through the algorithmic extraction and analysis of big data. Specifically, we utilize data from Harvard Law School’s Caselaw Access Project to model how courts tackle two thorny question in antitrust: the measure of market power and the balance between antitrust and regulation.

Artificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) has attracted significant attention and has imposed challenges for society. Yet surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the impediments AI imposes on patent law’s disclosure function from the lenses of theory and policy. Patents are conditioned on inventors describing their inventions, but the inner workings and the use of AI in the inventive process are not properly understood or are largely unknown. The lack of transparency of the parameters of the AI inventive process or the use of AI makes it difficult to enable a future use of AI to achieve the same end state. While …

Machine Learning And The New Civil Procedure, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

There is an increasing emphasis in the legal academy, the media, and the popular consciousness on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will change the foundations of legal practice. In concert with these discussions, a critical question needs to be explored-As computer programming learns to adjust itself without explicit human involvement, does machine learning impact the procedural practice of law? Civil procedure, while sensitive to technology, has been slow to adapt to change. As such, this Article will explore the impact that machine learning will have on procedural jurisprudence in two significant areas-service of process and personal jurisdiction.

The Article …