Roads Not Taken (AI, Law, and Otter Things #30)
Over the past few issues of this newsletter, I wrote quite a bit about my ongoing projects. Today I want to do something slightly different and speak about the ones that did not work out: my pet abandoned projects.
If you are anything like me, dear reader, you probably have a folder somewhere on your computer with materials for research you meant to develop at some point. Some of these materials amount to little more than an initial brainstorm and a few articles that were saved but never read. Others reflect more developed projects, which had some hope of viability at some point but eventually fell through.
In some cases, you might still hold a bit of hope of coming back to them someday—"as soon as I finish this article/semester/thesis/world domination plan, this is the next thing on my queue". Others are forgotten in some dark corner of your mind as your interest drifted toward other topics and methods. There might even be some projects that you deliberately avoid: that project which ended up being a waste of time, that collaboration that ended with a personal split, and so forth. But, at some point, you have to admit that you and the project are never, ever getting back together.
Nevertheless, there is that itch in the back of your mind that the project was onto something. Be it because the research question remains unexplored, the project had an interesting approach, or even because the topic was fun, giving up on a pet project is not always that easy. Since I have been too tired to develop a proper topic for today's newsletter, I figured out this is as good a time as any other to speak a bit about some of my favourites that will not be published. At worst, this helps me complete an already late issue; at best, something might be interesting to someone else. Who knows?
My favourite dead project, if I am being honest, is a book chapter on Dune and corporate law. In this chapter, my coauthor and I examine how the Dune books describe the CHOAM Company—a massive, galaxy-wide monopoly that provides the backdrop for the politics of the earlier books of the series. We argue that the books provide quite a few indicia regarding the Company's governance structure, which are useful for understanding how corporate structures are influenced by the broader socio-political arrangements in which they exist.
I loved working on this project for various reasons. It was a delightful working experience: as my collaborator is a good friend who is way more versed in private law than I am, I ended up learning quite a bit. The chapter also had some practical implications, as it suggested how sci-fi cases might be useful for introducing legal concepts in a "neater" way than real-world cases tend to provide. Plus, it attended to a very geeky point: we built the article mostly in response to how the current Brazilian translation of Dune took some liberties with corporate law terminology.
The text was originally proposed in response to an invitation to write a chapter for a book on "geek law". The book, however, did not come to pass, and the topic was a bit too niche to submit it to regular law journals in Brazil. For a while, we entertained the idea of translating the text to English, but this left us with some problems: not only it was still difficult to find a venue, but we would also miss the translation issues that originally motivated our discussion. So it seems unlikely the article will see the light of the day, at least in its current form.
Another dead-ish project, this one abandoned at an earlier stage, was to deal with how regulation by design approaches constrain social and legal responses to crises. In a sense, this is to be expected, since the value of regulation by design comes precisely from hard-coding (or, in smarter versions, soft-coding) constraints into software. However, the very efficacy of these constraints mean they cannot be removed or circumvented without removing the design constraints. Even if one decides to do so, the obduracy of large software systems means that any efforts to adapt the system to its new conditions might take quite a long time to come to fruition.
This, I think, is a somewhat underexamined question (though not necessarily uncharted territory). However, I realized I was not really interested in writing about crisis situations, and so I did not really take the project beyond its initial exploration stage. Yet, some of the issues I flag here might come up in future work on regulation by design.
A final project that fell through was a paper on personal data protection and LGBTQIA+ rights. My co-author was a practitioner experienced in the protection of fundamental rights, and so I ended up learning much both about the specific topic of the paper and about privacy matters in contexts of discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. We had completed a final-ish draft of the paper, but there were some external issues and we never really got around to updating the paper to try and publish after losing our original venue. Given my lack of standpoint and familiarity with the relevant academic literatures, I am unlikely to ever resume this project on my own. However, this is not a great loss to the world, especially as there are people developing far better contributions to this literature than I could hope to.
And you, dear reader—how do you feel about your abandoned works? I would like to read more stuff about other people's abandoned projects. And not just as a form of procrastination. Please let me know if you write up about your own dead projects!