Chapter 3 is up!

Chapter 3 discusses the three tech-fostered social impacts (artifacts, activities, actors), provides suggestions for identifying legally influential ones (heavily informed by my DARPA work), and notes the regulatory impact of difference-in-degree/kind debates.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

one of the most important conversations tech companies should have about every new feature and product is "how can this be abused" and in OpenAI's case they apparently decided to make that the selling point for their new app

this is a million lawsuits and ruined lives waiting to happen

I’ve had experience with a lot more generals and admirals than the average left-leaning critic of the military-industrial complex and 21st century wars. There’s an occasional jerk or narcissist, but generally they are thoughtful, committed, allergic to bullshit. Hope my sample is representative.

Waymo dodges a ticket b/c tickets lack a field for robot drivers. Imagine if it got points for a moving violation, and every cars' points went to one AI's license, those could add up pretty quickly.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Been looking forward to reading this for a while!

"The Internet Archive isn't scraped by AI—they prohibit the bots from training on their massive trove of data. So from the perspective of AI, the Internet Archive simply does not exist."

I like this -- they fed AITA posts where the humans voted "asshole" to LLMs and found that the bots would almost always tell you that you're not an asshole. ^^; No wonder they're so popular!

www.businessinsider.com/reddit-aita-...

🚨 New Publication 🚨

ISP Fellows Rebecca Crootof & @bjard.bsky.social have launched their Technology Law coursebook!

First chapters now live:
📑 TOC: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

📘 Ch.1: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

📘 Ch.2: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

New chapters drop twice monthly.

Nightstand Pile Files: Re-reading @jackbalkin.bsky.social's "Old School / New-School Speech Regulation," on governments' various techniques for controlling and surveilling speech.

I read it nearly every year. And every year it feels more and more relevant.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Chapter 2 is up!

The prior chapter introduced our methodology for resolving techlaw uncertainties; Chapter 2 delineates what techlaw uncertainties actually are. In brief, they many manifest as application uncertainties, normative uncertainties, and institutional uncertainties.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It has been 10 days now since the Trump administration conducted a lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean.

In that time, the administration has not even attempted to present a legal justification for this premeditated killing of people outside of armed conflict.

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Preordered, and can't wait to read!

I'm particularly struck by Calo's celebration of what Julie Cohen terms law's "relentless pragmatism," which he argues is distinctive to law and may inform other disciplines. (This captures why I pursued a law degree instead of other postgrad options.)

As Calo summarizes, "Law is a useful science."

Nightstand Pile Files: Re-reading @rcalo.bsky.social's excellent "The Scale and the Reactor," on what techlaw and STS scholars can learn from each other.

Aside from informative and prescriptive, it is jam packed with delightful phrasings and analogies.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

So we agree! :)

We should talk!

My school doesn’t offer a degree in Outlook, even though odds are very good that a majority of my students will be required to use it in their professional lives, and many of them will use it poorly/incorrectly.

We’ll release new chapters biweekly with updates to our front matter and table of contents at docs.google.com/document/d/1....

Chapter 1 introduces our "techlaw uncertainties" approach at
docs.google.com/document/d/1....

We welcome your feedback!

Second, I’m thrilled to share the first excerpts of the Technology Law coursebook I’m co-authoring with @crootof.bsky.social. We’ve built these materials across courses at three institutions, beginning with the seminar we taught with @jackbalkin.bsky.social at Yale Law School in 2016.

The United States has committed every moral atrocity that has ever been committed. I can’t prevent that. What I can do is say that it should not do so, and if it does so, we should call it what it is, condemn it, hold ppl accountable for it, and deprive them of power.

Then the chapter which was probably the most difficult one to write, wherein we introduce the concept of "Technology Law"

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....