Hello, dear reader! This issue took longer than I expected to prepare. It was actually supposed to be an essay-ish newsletter, and I even started some drafts. However, it turns out I’m running out on fumes at the end of the academic year. As a result, none of the drafts is really at a standard I’d feel comfortable in publishing, even in an informal space as AI, Law, and Otter Things. I plan to come back to them after my break (which starts tomorrow), but in the meantime I’ll share some recommendations of stuff that might interest you.
On law
As a largely self-taught student of EU law, I’m always trying to revisit the fundamentals of the field, both to improve my grasp of core concepts and to placate impostor syndrome. This year, I’ve read Elise Muir’s An Introduction to the EU Legal Order, which I found very instructive. It benefits from a different presentation order, which begins with the foundations and history of the EU, but then focuses, in order, on the actors of European integration, the instruments and institutions of the EU legal order, and the distinctive elements that make it a unique legal creature. I think this is a good starting point for those wanting to move past the ABC of EU law.
Also on the subject of introductions, Mireille Hildebrandt’s Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk remains, after a few years of its publication, a good guide to interdisciplinary dialogue. It introduces core legal concepts in various legal disciplines that are likely to be relevant for CS-adjacent work, such as data protection law and intellectual property law, while presenting the conceptual foundations of law as a social practice. While I might not buy into her moralistic conception of law or affordance-centric approaches to technology, the book works both as an introductory read and as an exemplar of how to establish interdisciplinary dialogues while respecting the complexity of other disciplines (and one’s own).
If you are working on research academia in certain places (particularly English-speaking institutions) or fields (EU law), doctrinal legal scholarship can seem a bit passé. Long-time readers might know that I’m far from sympathetic to the view that doctrinal scholarship isn’t true scholarship,1 but it still leave us with problem that so much doctrinal scholarship is bad scholarship. Pierre Schlag and Amy J Griffin provide a solution to this issue in their How to Do Things With Legal Doctrine, which offers a structured account of the value of doctrinal reason and its constitutive movements. By looking at what it means to think doctrinally, we can think about whether doctrinal reasoning is useful for a particular research question—and, if that is the case, how to do it well.
Moving a bit outside my usual grounds, Fabrizio Esposito’s The Consumer Welfare Hypothesis in Law and Economics sustains that discussions of allocative efficiency, at least in EU law, should be guided by the evaluation of consumer welfare rather than total welfare. To make this point, the author shows that his position is not prima facie incompatible with economic theory and historical development and that it gives a better account of EU consumer and competition law than the alternative. The book is a very accessible read and makes excellent use of theories of legal argumentation, and a such it can be interesting even for those (like me) who are not particularly interested in the Law and Economics programme (or its Political Economy variant).
Technological matters
If you are not already saturated with readings about AI language models, or are looking to a place in which you can catch up with the state of the debates, the OECD has just the thing for you. In a short-ish report (52 pages), the authors provide an overview of the state of technical, socio-economical, and policy debates up to April 2023. Quite a bit has happened since then, but the report is still handy as a starting point for further reading.
In my (admittedly biased) opinion, law and technology scholarship does not pay enough attention to legacy systems. We tend to see technology as always new and shiny, or at least easily replaceable. But, as large technological systems become embedded into social infrastructures, some AI systems and other computer systems are likely to remain in operation for a long time. Marianne Bellotti’s Kill It with Fire presents a technically-oriented discussion of the issues that emerge when one is trying to keep old systems operational. Technical readers are likely to pick up various tricks, while non-technical audiences might at least grasp the complexity of the issues that are often handwaved with expressions such as “[these provisions] must be observed throughout the entire life cycle of the system.”
To finish this section, I will recommend two historical books. Donald Mackenzie’s Inventing Accuracy is a classic book on the social studies of technology, examining the contingency of technological development through an analysis of the history of nuclear missile guidance until the end of the 1980s. Increased accuracy is not an inevitable or natural consequence of technical change, but rather the product of a complex process of conflict and cooperation between various social actors, such as technologists, laboratories and corporations, and political and military leaders. The book provides a good antidote to technical and political determinisms, coupled with accessible explanations of relevant technical concepts, which are crucial for understanding how seemingly small "technicalities" become focal points in political disputes over visions of the future of certain technologies.
Finally, Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age goes a bit back in history, as it discusses the uses of gunpowder in Chinese warfare before the 19th Century. The received wisdom in this domain is that, while gunpowder was invented in China, most breakthroughs in its military usage happened in the West, giving European countries an advantage they rode to global domination. Andrade argues that such an image resides in various falsehoods, and that the divergence between China and the West in military power only appeared much later. In doing so, the book provides a rich portrait of how technological development is embedded in social and political developments.
Science fiction
First, some audiovisual recommendations. If you are into Star Wars, or overtly political science fiction, you’ve probably watched Andor by now. If not, do that immediately, and you will find a very interesting story which manages to be explicitly political without becoming a Chick track, while still being incredibly respectful of the Star Wars universe. If you are (also/instead) into Star Trek, the second season of Strange New Worlds is also something you don’t want to miss: they managed to follow up on the strongest debut season of a Trek show and boldly take the series into some places it has never been before.
Recently, I’ve spent quite a lot of time with Warhammer 40,000 in its various forms. It is an interesting universe, especially if you don’t take the grimdark too seriously. My starting point to WH40k was the Dawn of War series of videogames, but I cannot recommend it as even the most recent game is quite old by now. But I recently started playing Mechanicus, which is a game that lends itself for playing in short bursts. In addition, the official “Black Library” also publishes a ton of books within the WH40k universe, and Peter Thuborg has helpfully written a guide of good novels for getting started. Finally, you might want to try your hand at the tabletop game itself, which can be fun, even if it takes some money and time to build your miniature army and play with it.
Beyond these franchises, I have three other recommendations. This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, rose to prominence some time ago, thanks to an enthusiastic and curiously-named Twitter user, and it is a lovely epistolary novel about love and war. Reinforcing a recommendation from a previous issue, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire is a powerful novel about language, imperialism, and being a foreigner in a culture you have long observed from the outside. Finally, Laurent Binet’s Civilisations narrates an alternate history in which not only various empires of the Americas avoid devastation at the hand of European colonizers and plagues, but make their way to an Europe divided by natural disasters and political fragmentation.
A final recommendation
As I enter the final year of my doctoral research, William Germano’s On Revision is surely going to be a useful reference. The author provides various useful heuristics on how to re-read your work, decide what to preserve (and what to change), and bring your argument to the fore by structuring it well and tailoring it to the intended audience. And it is a mercifully short book, so you can read it in good time and come back to it as you re-write and re-write whatever you are working on.
And now, the otters
See you on the other side of my vacation. And, in the meantime, please spread the word about the newsletter:
Quite the contrary: if I were forced to choose, I’d probably side with those that claim that doctrinal scholarship is legal scholarship par excellence. But we live in a better world than one where we could not avoid this binary choice.