Back to work (AI, Law, and Otter Things #35)
Today's issue features a bit of self-promotion of my future paper presentations, a link to Zotero tips, a few calls for papers, and job applications. As well as the usual otters and reading recommendations, of course.
Welcome to a new issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! Now I am officially back to work, though not at full steam yet. Before the official start of the first term of the academic year, I have time to catch up with a few ongoing projects. Since a few projects of mine are moving towards completion, I am also taking the opportunity to speak with people and explore a few potential collaborations. Plus, the work on the thesis never really stops, does it?
In the next month or so, I will have the opportunity to participate in a few events. On 16 September, my DigiCon colleagues and I will present a panel on Digital Constitutionalism at the third ICON-S Italia conference. I will speak (with Yeliz Figen Döker) about the role of science fiction in law and technology. Our panel will be one of the few English-language panels there, so I will get to practice a bit of my Italian, which I rarely use in a work context.
In early October 2022, I will participate in the REALaw Forum for young scholars at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). This year's forum deals with "European Administrative Law and the Challenges of Uncertainty". My paper speaks about the promise that AI can help administrators in managing uncertainty and the various ways in which such promises break down.
A few weeks later, I will attend the workshop "What is ‘the Global’?Reassembling Global Authority across Space and Time", which will take place at the EUI. There, I will present a paper on how the increased reliance on regulation by design (primarily but not just in EU law) impacts the geographical and temporal constraints to AI regulation.
All in all, I am pretty excited about what the next few months will bring.
Reference management 101
My least favourite part of academic writing has always been the formatting stage. It is not that I don't care about document aesthetics; quite the contrary, as Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers opened my eyes even before I went to law school. But I am not a details-oriented person, which means that it takes me a lot of time to ensure compliance with all relevant rules.
This unwillingness to deal with formatting led me to install Zotero, an open-source tool for managing references. Within Zotero, you can keep a library of papers, book chapters, and other materials. This library, in turn, can be used to generate citations in various formats (such as the variants of the Chicago Style, OSCOLA, the Brazilian ABNT style...there is even a somewhat passable version of Bluebook).
But Zotero can help you with a lot more. So I would like to share with you a Twitter thread with some tips on how to use it.
Open calls
Readers of this newsletter might be interested in the "Broadening Research Collaborations in ML" workshop that will take place at NeurIPS 2022. The workshop welcomes perspectives and research papers on collaboration initiatives in a machine learning context, as well as cultural and institutional incentives for collaboration. Submissions are open until 22 September.
The Brazilian Data Protection Authority (ANPD) invites contributions about high-risk processing of personal data. This call for contributions is aimed at providing small-scale data controllers and processors with the information they need to evaluate the risks involved in their data processing. Contributions are accepted until 28 September.
The next edition of the CEPE conference on computer ethics will take place in Chicago, USA from 16 to 18 May 2023. The conference topic is "Human-AI Interaction and the Future: Values, Responsibilities, and Freedoms", and they are accepting extended abstracts until 15 November.
Job positions
TILT (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society) has a vacancy for a PhD Researcher in Law. The researcher would work on data protection and cybersecurity for the Internet of Things. Applications are open until 10 October.
The FARI initiative in Brussels is currently looking for a postdoctoral researcher for a 3-year project on legal protection by design. The position is targeted at a PhD in law with experience in European human and fundamental rights and a willingness to cooperate with AI developers and computer scientists. Applications are open until 12 September.
Prof. Helena Farrand-Carrapico at the Northumberland University is looking for a postdoctoral researcher for the ESRC-funded project 'Digital Sovereignty by Design- Exploring the Impact of European Union's Digital Sovereignty Approach on the UK's Technology Landscape'. Applications for this 12-month position are open until 20 September.
Reading recommendations
Noortje de Boer and Nadine Raaphorst, ‘Automation and Discretion: Explaining the Effect of Automation on How Street-Level Bureaucrats Enforce’ Public Management Review forthcoming
The received wisdom in public administration literature is that automation curtails discretion. To test that hypothesis, the authors designed a survey study to measure perceptions of discretion and how they impact the enforcement styles of inspectors having to deal with a new automated system. Their results suggest that bureaucrats perceive a curtailment in their discretion and that they change their enforcement styles after automation. However, the changes cannot be explained by automation. Furthermore, they are not uniform: bureaucrats' facilitating work was mostly left unchanged, but they perceived themselves as more legalist and less accommodating than before automation. This suggests we need to take a more fine-grained look at discretion rather than treating it as a homogeneous phenomenon.
Fleur Johns, ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (2019) 82 The Modern Law Review 833.
Much analysis about law & development departs from Scott's critique of high modernism in "Seeing Like a State". Scholars show the issues with top-down approaches and frequently propose bottom-up approaches as an alternative. Yet, governability approaches have themselves become less keen on heavy planning, becoming increasingly reliant on prototypes of public policies. These prototypes have a claim to follow a bottom-up approach, as they rely on local information to build general models, but remain an exercise of power that requires critique. Nevertheless, current analytical tools seem to be insufficient to capture what is distinctive about bottom-up instances of state activity such as those described in the article, and so research on law and development must pay attention to how state practices have incorporated these paradigms of lean action and prototyping from the private sector.
Brainard Guy Peters and Maximilian Lennart Nagel, Zombie Ideas: Why Failed Policy Ideas Persist (1st edn, Cambridge University Press 2020)
Zombie ideas are policy ideas that continue to be relevant after being decisively refuted. Some examples include transparency as a mode of governance, tax cuts as a mechanism for growth, and top-down industrial policy. These ideas tend to persist due to various factors, such as path dependency or symbolism, which can be grouped into three clusters: elite interests (experts, politicians, or both), organizational factors granting resilience, and societal and individual buy-in. After mapping these factors, the authors provide perspectives on how zombie ideas affect policy discourse and why ideas become zombies in the first place.
Patricia Popelier, Giulia Gentile and Esther van Zimmeren, ‘Bridging the Gap between Facts and Norms: Mutual Trust, the European Arrest Warrant and the Rule of Law in an Interdisciplinary Context’ European Law Journal forthcoming
Drawing from the social-scientific literature on trust, the authors argue that the CJEU provides an excessively narrow view of the exceptions to the principle of mutual trust in European Arrest Warrants. This narrowness comes as the CJEU locates trust at the individual level of judges, rather than acknowledging its inter-organization and inter-legal-system components. Accordingly, the presumption of compliance with EU law should be weakened. Furthermore, doing so would not be contrary to the principle of mutual trust, as control over institutions does not necessarily weaken trust—and may in fact reinforce it, as control in individual cases may prompt institutions and systems to better perform their systemic duties.
Anthony D Rosborough, ‘Zen and the Art of Repair Manuals: Enabling a Participatory Right to Repair through an Autonomous Concept of EU Copyright Law’ (2022) 13 Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law 113.
The right to repair in the US is usually associated with consumer protection, but it has gained traction in EU law as a largely environmental concern. In this paper, the author argues that "repair" should be understood as an autonomous concept of EU law. Such an understanding would expand the possibilities for the right to repair under the InfoSoc Directive (but, as Rosborough points out, not for the Software Directive) beyond the current narrow constructions in Member State transposition laws.
Finally, the otters
See you next time!