Overview
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way we make decisions, conduct business, and express ourselves. Our legal institutions are responding, and policymakers around the world are tweaking, overhauling, or remaking just about every area of law. This course will investigate existing and emerging legal frameworks that address AI’s growing role in society. Students will survey laws at the local, state, and federal levels from the United States as well as engage in comparative analyses of approaches in other jurisdictions, such as the European Union.
This survey course will cover the interactions between law and AI across many substantive legal topics, including tort law, criminal procedure, employment discrimination, privacy law, First Amendment, and due process, among others. We will come to understand the similar changes that AI brings to different areas of law, why such similarities exist, and what makes them difficult. We will also be able to understand when a specific legal context should instead shape the way we understand AI. All the while, we will be asking a few core questions: What about AI is really new? Why is it a topic of regulation? Should it be?
A core premise of this course is that students must deeply understand the technological advances that are spurring the rapid development of AI. Although no prior technical knowledge is required, students should expect to devote some class hours delving into the technical aspects of AI to understand the legal developments in a deeper manner.
Course Objectives
At the end of this course you will be able to:
- Understand the technological advances that have led to the rapid advance of AI technology and develop a foundation of technical knowledge to better understand future advances;
- Apply the emerging legal frameworks for regulating AI surveyed in the course and anticipate and understand future developments in this area of law;
- Articulate moral, ethical, and policy-focused positions underpinning AI regulation;
- Place the current developments and approaches in AI regulation into longer historical arcs of regulating technology and other complex systems; and
- Diagnose the way AI and related technologies can exacerbate or alleviate pre-existing disparities such as in the differential treatment of individuals and groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, and disability.
Class Meetings, Review Session, Final Exam
Class: Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:45 – 3:10 PM, Room 1447
Review Session: Tuesday, April 29, 1:30 – 2:45 PM, Room 1447
Final Exam: Wednesday, May 7. Three-hour in-class exam.
Materials
I am currently writing an Artificial Intelligence Law casebook with Margot Kaminski and Paul Ohm. We will be working from a draft copy of the book chapters. As this is a work-in-progress, the reading will be distributed to you piecemeal in the OneDrive folder throughout the semester as PDFs. I will strive to provide each class’s reading at least one week in advance. (Note: These are copyrighted and draft materials; do not share with anyone outside class.)
Attendance
Regular attendance is required for all classes at UCLA Law. Pursuant to our academic standards, students who do not regularly attend class may, at my discretion, be prohibited from sitting for the final exam, resulting in a grade of “F” or being dropped from the class. Students for whom this may be an issue will receive a written warning before this final action, and may need to attend all remaining classes after the written warning is given. If you must miss a class because of a medical need, or serious familial, religious, or professional obligation, please email me at least 2 hours before class to request an excused absence. Class will be recorded and the recordings will be available for review, but watching the recording is not a substitute for attending class sessions.
Grading
Your grade will be based on your performance on the final exam and to a limited degree, your class participation.
Class Participation
I expect you to come prepared to participate in class discussion. Good preparedness requires both reading and thinking about the material before showing up in class. Because this is an upper-level course, we will not necessarily discuss every bit of the reading assignments at length. I do want you to read the material for a full understanding of the topic. I encourage questions about anything you find puzzling.
Please note that you will be assessed on the quality, not the quantity, of your participation (though there is certainly correlation). Quality does not mean giving the “correct” answer; thoughtful discussions are more important than facile answers. We will be exploring many new topics for which the answers may change year to year or even week to week, so the answer today might not be the answer tomorrow; it is much more important to learn how to reason through the issues. The key is to be prepared and engaged. Any poor assessment regarding your participation will be the result of protracted absence from class, unexcused lack of participation, disrespectful comments, or sustained evidence of lack of preparation and engagement.
Because you are assessed on quality, not quantity, I also ask that you also be cognizant of your speaking time. Some students will be especially keen to volunteer, which I appreciate — but sometimes I will stop calling on frequent speakers to get a diversity of voices. I will also call on students at random sometimes, because I do not want a small number of students to do the large majority of the talking. If you find that you are speaking often, please consider making space for others in the room who speak less frequently to have their turn. If you find that you are more hesitant to speak, trust that you will have valuable contributions that we would all benefit from hearing, and please consider engaging directly in the discussion.
Office Hours
Office hours will be Monday 3:30–4:30PM, in my office, Room 3370. Please drop in then—no appointments necessary. If you cannot make that time or want to have a private conversation, please email me to schedule another time.
Privacy
Per University policy, UCLA Student Conduct Code 102.28 says that expectations of privacy apply, and it specifically prohibits recording without the consent of all recorded parties and prohibits taking photographs where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. In remote teaching, advising, chatting, and other engagement in course activities remotely there is a reasonable expectation that photographing, screen capture, or other copying methods or recordings will not occur without express permission from all participants. A violation subjects a student to the disciplinary process. Do not record your courses, do not take screen shots of your classes, professors, or classmates, and do not release, post, email, text, or otherwise share or sell course materials to others.
Accommodations
UCLA Law strives to provide accommodations in a way that supports students with disabilities while maintaining their anonymity and the fundamental nature of our law program. As such, students needing academic accommodations should not contact their professors directly, but contact Carmina Ocampo, Director of Student Life or the UCLA Center for Accessible Education (CAE) When possible, students should start this process within the first two weeks of the semester, as reasonable notice is needed to coordinate accommodations.
Resources for Health and Wellness
Students needing assistance with medical or mental health issues, substance abuse, anxiety or depression or other health-related matters should contact the Office for Student Affairs, UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) at 310-825-0768 (Courtney Walters is the counselor regularly assigned to the law school) or the Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center at 310-825-4073.
Remote Classes
We may have a few remote classes, to accommodate guest speakers or for other reasons. The link to the zoom classroom is in BruinLearn, and scheduled classes will be linked at the Zoom tab on the left side of the course page.
If we have class online, I ask that each of you please turn on your video whenever possible so we can be as fully engaged as possible while in a remote setting. If you must turn your video off for personal reasons or for bandwidth reasons, please let me know in advance where possible, and please limit it to be the exception rather than the rule. Please note that I am requesting camera usage to aid classroom discussion and presence, not as a way to introduce surveillance into the class; if you have a momentary need to turn off your camera for whatever reason, please do so at your own discretion.
Structure of the Course
At a high level, this is what I want to try to get through this semester. Please understand that because this is a brand new course, using draft materials, this is all but guaranteed to change. Specific reading assignments will be posted below as they are constructed and assigned.
- Overview
- Part I: Automated Decisionmaking
- COMPAS Case Study
- Technological Due Process
- Bias and Discrimination
- Regulating Automated Decisionmaking: Explanation, Documentation, Transparency
- Part II: AI and Physical Harm
- AI, Robots, and Tort Law (Autonomous Vehicles and Medical Devices, mostly)
- Autonomous Weapons (maybe)
- Part III: Generative AI
- Copyright
- Speech
- Synthetic Content (Deepfakes)
- AI and Legal Practice (maybe)
- Part IV: AI and Data Governance
- The Life Cycle of Data
- Fourth Amendment
- Data Protection Regulation
- Security
- Facial Recognition Laws
- Part V: Regulating AI
- Principles, Standards, and Soft Law
- EU AI Act and Emerging US Law
- Regulatory Paths not (yet) Taken
Assigned Topics and Reading
Reading assignments are below. The topics will be filled out as the assignments are constructed and posted. Depending on pace, it may change as well.
Note: We have a makeup class scheduled for Friday, April 11th from 3:45 PM – 5:10 PM in Room 1357.
| # | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Th 1/16 (Administrative Monday) | Overview, Themes, and Terminology |
| – | M 1/20 | NO CLASS: MLK DAY |
| 2 | W 1/22 | The COMPAS Case Study |
| 3 | M 1/27 | Benefits, Government Administration, and Due Process |
| W 1/29 | NO CLASS: PROFESSOR OUT SICK | |
| 4 | M 2/3 | Benefits, con’t |
| 5 | W 2/5 | AI and Discrimination Law I |
| 6 | M 2/10 | AI and Discrimination Law II |
| 7 | W 2/12 | Regulating AI Decisionmaking I: Explanation and Contestation |
| – | M 2/17 | NO CLASS: PRESIDENTS’ DAY |
| 8 | W 2/19 | Regulating AI Decisionmaking II: Documentation, Audits, Transparency |
| 9 | M 2/24 | AI and Physical Harm I: Products Liability |
| 10 | W 2/26 | AI and Physical Harm II: Negligence and Strict Liability |
| 11 | M 3/3 | Catchup day |
| 12 | W 3/5 | Neural Networks and Generative AI |
| 13 | M 3/10 | Copyright I: Authorship |
| 14 | W 3/12 | Copyright II: Infringment |
| 15 | M 3/17 | AI and the Legal Profession (Guest Speaker: Jennie VonCannon). Read: ABA Formal Opinion 512. |
| 16 | W 3/19 | First Amendment I: Coverage |
| – | M 3/24 | NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK |
| – | W 3/26 | NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK |
| 17 | M 3/31 | First Amendment II: Speech Harms |
| 18 | W 4/2 | catch-up day |
| 19 | M 4/7 | Regulating Generative AI |
| 20 | W 4/9 | Regulating Generative AI con’t |
| 21 | F 4/11 (Makeup) | Privacy, Data Protection, and AI I: 4th Amendment |
| 22 | M 4/14 | Privacy, Data Protection, and AI II: Processing Personal Data |
| 23 | W 4/16 | Privacy, Data Protection, and AI III: Facial Recognition |
| 24 | M 4/21 | |
| 25 | W 4/23 | |
| 26 | F 4/25 (Administrative Monday) |
Andrew Selbst 