Professor Alejandro Rodiles (ITAM, Mexico) will talk about the idea of ‘charter cities’ as a daring illustration of recent trends in urban development thinking, and the role of cities and local governance in international development.

This is part of the guest speaker sessions for Global Infrastructure and Tech Law Seminar.

Professor Lisa Ruth Rand is a historian of technology, science, and the environment who tends to gravitate toward extreme natures and broken things. Rand will discuss the environmental history of outer space, and in conversation with Professor Alejandro Rodiles (ITAM, Mexico) on planetary thinking.

This is part of the public speaker sessions for IILJ Colloquium: space and Planetary Law & Governance.

Open-source software (OSS) is source code developed by a global village of programmers for anyone to use anywhere, for any purpose. Ms. Jennifer Tridgell (Cambridge, UK) will talk about her doctoral research on global governance of free and open source software.

This is part of the guest speaker sessions for Global Infrastructure and Tech Law Seminar.

In the brief history of human space exploration, governmental entities have dominated the field for the majority of the time, with private actors primarily participating as individual contractors. The United States stands out as one of the longstanding spacefaring nations, notable for having the largest share of commercial participation and a constant effort to foster private-sector involvement in supplying essential space infrastructure.

Professor Hersch's book, Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle, explores its failure as a technological demonstrator and aims to answer a fundamental question: why did the Space Shuttle fail to make spaceflight cheap, safe, and routine? It also provides a broader perspective on the concept of failure within the context of American technological and cultural history.

This is part of the public speaker sessions for IILJ Colloquium: space and Planetary Law & Governance.

Digital corporations are, unsurprisingly, giants—and often vertically integrated ones at that. They’re known for creating new products and markets only to dominate them soon after. Critics argue that these companies reached such colossal size by bending traditional antitrust principles. In a notable shift toward a more interventionist antitrust approach, the Biden administration has taken on several of these tech behemoths, especially Google and Facebook. Professor Daniel Francis of NYU Law will join us to unpack the last four years of tech antitrust and shed light on what lies ahead.

Several of the world’s biggest digital corporations and most innovative digital technologies are Chinese. Given China’s political economy and system of governance, the regulatory approach towards digital corporations as well as the structure and practice of these digital corporations markedly differs from that of US companies. Professor Angela Zhang of the University of Southern California offers a deep dive into the Chinese regulatory model and Chinese digital economics more generally.

Regulating digital constellations often comes with much normative fanfare but little technical and infrastructural realism. What sounds nice on paper often proves extremely difficult to implement in existing technological and infrastructural set ups. Can data verifiably be ‘localized’? Can large language models ‘understand’ ethics? Many prominent policy proposals hardly withstand scrutiny from an infrastructural perspective. In turn, how does existing digital infrastructure impact regulatory path-dependencies? And, crucially, can we conceptualize (control over) infrastructure itself as a form of regulation of human behavior?

These and more questions are at the center of the guest lecture by Professor Thomas Streinz of the European University Institute.

This roundtable will explore how international law should adapt to govern the interconnected impacts of oceans and climate change with a focus on justice. With:

Janine Coye-Felson of the permanent mission of belize to the united nations
Angelina Fisher of New York University School of Law
Douglas Guilfoyle of the UNSW
César Rodríguez-Garavito of New York University School of Law

at International Law Weekend 2024.

The American Law Institute (ALI) has named Mark Geistfeld, Sheila Lubetsky Birnbaum Professor of Civil Litigation, to lead its newly launched project focused on the civil liability risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI). ALI produces scholarly work designed to clarify, modernize, and improve the law through its Restatements, Principles, and Model Codes.

ALI's initiative—Principles of the Law, Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence—arrives as AI’s impact on society and a broad array of industries continues to widen. “Given the anticipated increase in AI adoption by many industries over the next decade, now is an opportune time for The American Law Institute to undertake a more sustained analysis of common-law AI liability topics through a Principles project,” ALI Director Diane Wood said in a statement. The project aims to provide guidance to courts, legislators, regulators, and businesses that are now grappling with the legal implications of AI.

“Courts are already facing the first set of cases alleging harms, largely related to copyright and privacy, stemming from chatbots and other generative AI models,” Geistfeld said in a statement, “but there is not yet a sufficient body of caselaw that could be usefully restated. Meanwhile, influential state legislatures are actively considering bills addressing AI, and Congress and federal regulators pursuant to President Biden’s Executive Order 14110 are also addressing these matters. These efforts could benefit from a set of principles, grounded in the common law, for assigning responsibility and resolving associated questions such as the reasonably safe performance of AI systems.”

In tapping Geistfeld, ALI draws on his extensive expertise in tort law, including his scholarship addressing common-law rules governing the prevention of and compensation for physical harms. He has authored or co-authored five books along with over 50 articles and book chapters, often showing how difficult doctrinal issues can be resolved by systematic reliance on the underlying legal principles. Geistfeld has previously explored AI-related tort issues on the liability and insurance implications of autonomous vehicles in publications such as “A Roadmap for Autonomous Vehicles: State Tort Liability, Automobile Insurance, and Federal Safety Regulation” in the California Law Review.

Geistfeld holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University, with highest distinction, and a MA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. His primary teaching areas are torts, products liability, and insurance. He has also taught law and economics. Before joining the NYU Law faculty, Geistfeld worked as a litigation associate at Dewey Ballantine and Simpson Thacher and as a law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He continues to stay involved in litigation practice, serving as an expert witness or legal consultant in tort and insurance cases.

Geistfeld is a senior editor of the Journal of Tort Law and has served as an Adviser to ALI’s Restatement of the Law Third Torts: Concluding Provisions and its Restatement of the Law Third Torts: Medical Malpractice. He is often a referee for peer-reviewed scholarly journals, university presses, and governmental funding agencies.

According to ALI, the Principles of the Law initiative led by Geistfeld will center on tort problems of physical harms—such as injury or property damage—linked to AI, while other ALI projects focus on copyright, privacy, and defamation issues stemming from AI. “There are certain characteristics of AI systems that will likely raise hard questions when existing liability doctrines are applied to AI-caused harms,” Geistfeld explained in a statement. “Examples include the general-purpose nature of many AI systems, the often opaque, ‘black box,’ decision-making processes of AI technologies, the allocation of responsibility along the multi-layered supply chain for AI systems, the widespread use of open-source code for foundation models, the increasing autonomy of AI systems, and their anticipated deployment across a wide range of industries for a wide range of uses.”

Digital Corporations are, first and foremost, organizations. Pretty big ones too. They develop their own esprit des corps, bureaucratize in peculiar ways, and function along vectors not immediately intelligible to the outside observer. Digital corporations are the key transmitter for external feedback and policy input. Therefore, to regulate and improve the informational economy we must better understand the organizational reality of digital corporations. This guest lecture takes a closer look at how these organizational features intersect with efforts to advance privacy.

Professor Ari Ezra Waldman of the University of California, Irvine shares insights from years of fieldwork, especially on the influence of organizational patterns on the handling of privacy at digital corporations.

Professor Haksoo Ko of Seoul National University, currently serving as the Chairperson of Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission since October 2022 and a member of the UN High Level Panel on AI, will discuss current efforts to develop global initiatives on AI governance in the UN and other national & international fora, including South Korea.

Dr. Nathalie Smuha, from KU Leuven and adjunct professor at NYU Law & GGLT affiliate, along with Professor Thomas Streinz from NYU Law and the European University Institute, will join Professor Ko as discussants. Professor Benedict Kingsbury of NYU School of Law will moderate the discussion.

Time: September 19, 2024, 5-7pm

Location: NYU Law, VH 202

Note: Seats are limited due to room capacity. Kindly RSVP below to help us plan accordingly.

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) 2024 will take place on May 30 and May 31, 2024 in Washington, DC at Georgetown University Law Center. Angelina Fisher & Thomas Streinz will discuss a draft paper on “thinking infrastructurally” about data regulation.

The event is a preliminary workshop of Planetary Workshop series and an inter-/cross-disciplinary effort to initiate a conversation among scholars whose research grapples with planetary futures from various different perspectives.

In the first roundtable, Temporalities will serve as the overarching theme, and participants will explore human/nature relationship with time, evaluation of future and nature, and finally mortality.

The unifying theme for the second roundtable is Crisis, encompassing topics from extreme weather events, to global and transnational challenges posed by climate change, as well as technologies like geo-engineering that are intended for -- and may become -- crisis.

The third roundtable will focus on Resources and how their exploitation, appropriation, circulation and distribution shape and reshape power -- both past and future, and how humankind’s relationship with the planet is projected in their (in-)materiality and (in-)scarcity.

 The fourth roundtable is about Social where we will explore various actions and actors that are vested with or organized to have the power to move for and against the planet.

This event is a closed-door session, accessible by invitation only.

Contact: Yirong Sun, ys5086@nyu.edu

China’s success in cultivating Big Tech firms has enabled it to emerge as a formidable rival to the United States in the digital sphere. But in the past few years, the Chinese government has embarked on a massive regulatory crackdown, targeting its largest tech corporations such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Meituan. Many Western experts have viewed this tech crackdown as an assault on private businesses, causing doubt among investors about whether Chinese firms are still investable. Professor Angela Zhang will go beyond the headlines to unravel the dynamic complexity of China’s regulatory governance. Drawing insights from her newly published book, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, she will introduce the dynamic pyramid model of regulation, an analytical framework that demystifies Chinese regulatory governance. She will examine the impact of the tech crackdown on the administrative state, the competitive landscape, and global tech rivalry. And she will peer into the future by examining China’s strategy for regulating generative artificial intelligence. 

Legal and political discourse about digital technologies focus on whether and how the technology should be regulated—including discussions about machine learning, often grouped under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence or “AI”. This panel will shift the focus to ask how the proliferation of AI impacts the practice of international law(-making). Examples abound. International organizations are increasingly using AI for operational and advisory functions, commercial technology companies are becoming active players in global law-making, data modeling and AI are emerging as central to planetary governance, and AI is challenging established concepts and rubrics of international economic law. This roundtable will convene a conversation among scholars and practitioners about “next-generation international law” How does our digital turn affect international legal decision-making? How might our model of diplomacy be rethought in light of technological advances? What role do AI and other digital technologies play in negotiating our geopolitical and climate challenges?

Panelists: Victoria Adelmant, Adele Barzelay, Laura O’Brien, Thomas Streinz, Yirong Sun

The OFA Symposium will examine the social, political, and economic implications of open source. We will explore how open source is changing the way we work, communicate, and interact with each other, and how it is shaping the future of technology and society. The Symposium will feature a diverse and group of speakers and participants, including researchers, policymakers, developers, and activists.

Thomas Streinz, Executive Director of Guarini Global Law and Tech, will present and join the discussion.