I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds : Applying Strict Liability to Artificial Intelligence as an Abnormally Dangerous Activity

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools have produced a myriad of injuries, up to and including death. This burgeoning technology has caused scholars to ask questions, such as, How do we create a legal framework for AI? Because AI creators have acknowledged that even they do not know the capacities of their technology for good or bad outcomes, this Article argues that an existing framework, strict liability, is an appropriate fit for harms arising from this new technology because a party need not prove negligence to prevail. Strict liability was uniquely developed to handle those activities that are “abnormally dangerous.” An abnormally dangerous activity is one that imposes an abnormal risk on anyone who is in the vicinity of its use. The quintessential historical example of this is strict liability applied to the production of atomic energy. Congress acknowledged that nuclear energy would be extremely beneficial to society but could not be supported by the safety net of insurance, due to the potentially catastrophic results from its production. Congress enacted the Price-Anderson Act to both establish insurance for nuclear plant operators and to set a liability cap. The Act served as a carrot to encourage nuclear operator entrepreneurs and as a protection for the public. The development of nuclear energy is comparable to the development of AI. Nuclear energy and AI share the essential feature that their creators acknowledge the potentially enormous, but not fully understood, capacities of their creations to do harm. This Article begins by discussing the development of strict liability for emerging technologies with the attribute of being “abnormally dangerous.” It then explores the issues associated with applying a strict liability framework to AI and posits that an umbrella insurance protection similar to the Price-Anderson Act would be a viable solution to one of the most salient questions in modern history: How do we create a legal framework for AI? This Article argues that regulation should create a compensatory structure for potentially catastrophic harms created by an unknown (or not fully understood) technology

Searching for Justice: Moving Towards a Trans Inclusive Model of Access to Justice in Canada

Access to justice literature has paid little attention to the role of gender identity and gender expression as barriers to justice that must be addressed. As a marginalized and disenfranchised population, trans and gender nonconforming people experience specific barriers to justice that cisgender people typically do not. This paper seeks to address the gap in access to justice literature by attending to specific barriers to justice that trans people face in Canada. These barriers include socioeconomic inequalities; exclusion from the legal system; sex/gender certification and bigenderism within the legal system; and transphobia and cissexism within the legal system. Calling for a more holistic understanding of access to justice that is rooted in intersectionality, this paper outlines a trans inclusive approach to access to justice and provides recommendations for increasing access to justice for trans people. La littérature sur l’accès à la justice a accordé peu d’attention au rôle de l’identité et de l’expression de genre en tant qu’obstacles à la justice qui doivent être abordés. En tant que population marginalisée et privée de ses droits, les personnes trans et les personnes non conformes au genre rencontrent des obstacles spécifiques à la justice que les personnes cisgenres ne rencontrent généralement pas. Cet article cherche à combler les lacunes de la littérature sur l’accès à la justice en s’intéressant aux obstacles spécifiques à la justice auxquels les personnes transgenres sont confrontées au Canada. Ces obstacles comprennent les inégalités socio-économiques, l’exclusion du système juridique, la certification du sexe/genre et le bigenrisme au sein du système juridique, ainsi que la transphobie et le cissexisme au sein du système juridique. Appelant à une approche intersectionnelle et holistique de l’accès à la justice, cet document présente une approche trans inclusive de l’accès à la justice et fournit des recommandations pour améliorer l’accès à la justice pour les personnes trans

USA v. Stefano Saienni

USDC for the District of Delawar

Brian Perri v. Warden Fort Dix FCI

USDC for the District of New Jerse

How Should We Measure Effectiveness of Medical-Legal Partnerships?

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) try to mitigate health inequity by uniting legal and health professionals to respond to legal determinants of patients’ health. While there is a long tradition of “patients-to-policy” work in MLPs, the current empirical evidence base has evaluated MLP effectiveness by assessing benefits to individual patients, clinicians, and hospital and legal systems. This article calls for future research to measure how community power, which includes shifting power to impacted communities to develop and lead equity-focused agendas, is built as both a process and an outcome of MLPs

Social Welfare Functions and Health Policy: A New Approach

The social welfare function (SWF) framework converts the possible outcomes of governmental policy choice into vectors (lists) of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, measuring the lifetime well-being of each individual in the population of interest. The SWF proper is a rule for ranking these vectors. The utilitarian SWF adds up well-being numbers. A prioritarian SWF adds up well-being numbers plugged into a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation function. Governmental policies are conceptualized as probability distributions over well-being vectors. A recent literature applies the SWF framework to health policy. This article first provides a brief overview of the SWF framework and then reviews some of the key concepts and findings that have emerged from this literature. One such concept is the “social value of risk reduction” (SVRR): the marginal social value (as calculated by the SWF) per unit of reduction in fatality risk for a given individual. The SVRR is the analogue, within the SWF framework, to the value-of-statistical-life (VSL) concept within benefit–cost analysis. This article explicates the SVRR concept and reports on recent theoretical findings and simulations that illustrate the properties of utilitarian and prioritarian SVRRs and their differences from VSL

Securities Law in the Supreme Court

Adam C. Pritchard and Robert B. Thompson will discuss their book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, recently-published by the Oxford University Press. The book goes behind the curtain to see how securities law gets made at the Supreme Court, relying on the justices\u27 internal correspondence, memoranda and interviews with law clerks to see how the ideologies and personalities of the individual justices have shaped the path of securities law. Pritchard and Thompson will also discuss the implications of that history for the future of securities law in the Supreme Court and the modern administrative state. Speaker Bios Adam C. Pritchard is the Frances and George Skestos Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, where he teaches corporate and securities law. His research focuses on securities class actions, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement and the history of securities law in the US Supreme Court. He is the author, with Stephen J. Choi, of Securities Regulation: Cases and Analysis, currently in its sixth edition. Robert B. Thompson teaches courses in the corporate and securities area, including mergers and limited liability. He joined the Georgetown faculty in 2010 after visiting in 2009-10. Previous positions include service as the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Vanderbilt University and the George Alexander Madill Professor of Law at Washington University. He has visited at New York University and Northwestern University and has taught intensive courses at the University of Sydney. He has authored or co-authored casebooks on corporations and on mergers, treatises on Close Corporations and Oppression of Minority Shareholders and LLC Members, and more than 50 articles. Thompson has testified before committees of Congress, a state legislature and the New York Stock Exchange. He has served since 1991 as editor of the Corporate Practice Commentator, served as an adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Agency and chaired two sections of the Association of American Law Schools

USA v. Matthew Nisbett

USDC for the District of New Jerse

Cardozo Welcomes Forum for Jewish Leadership for a Discussion about Immigration Law with Adjunct Professor Michael Wildes ’89

Cardozo welcomed students with the Forum for Jewish Leadership (FJL) on July 23 to hear from Adjunct Professor Michael Wildes ’89 about immigration law.https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/cardozo-news-2024/1028/thumbnail.jp