Professor Barton Beebe is John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law at NYU Law, co-director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, and a co-director of the Competition, Innovation, and Information Law LLM Program. Professor Beebe will talk about his new writing on technological change and the recurring thinking of death of law. The discussion will focus on Part II of the project on outer space, cyberspace, and technospace.

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

Dr Haris Durrani, JD, PhD (Princeton) is judicial clerk in the Federal Circuit 2024-25; an incoming Harvard History and Economics post-doc on satellite history. Dr Durrani will present ideas from his recently-completely History doctoral thesis on earth satellite programs in the 1960s. Haris Durrani has also contributed to literature on SciFi concerning space and other worlds. We read his short 2021 article, 'Frank Herbert, the Republican Salafist', about the political thought of the author of Dune (1965).

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

Professor Weinzierl, is Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program at Harvard Business School, where he is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit.  His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation. This year he published a book, Space to Grow:  Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier (with Brendan Rosseau), about the commercialization of space. 

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

Professor Akhil Rao is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College who has recently been the Acting Chief Economist in NASA's Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy. Professor Rao is going to speak about "how government actors could vs do shape behaviors in space."  He will be discussing several space policy questions to illuminate the gap between how governmental actors are influencing behavior in space and how they could do so in his opinion, such as policy questions around space constellations and debris. 

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

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.

Expert Esther Brimmer from the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force will present Task Force Report No. 82: Securing Space – A Plan for U.S. Action. She will explore the United States' role in emerging space governance, with a particular focus on Low-Earth Orbit, where thousands of commercial satellites—many operated by American companies—are in operation.

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

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.