Law, Tech & Society (Spring 2025)

Overview

In this seminar, we will learn to think about how the world we live in shapes and is shaped by technology, and we will consider what the role of law is and should be with respect to regulating technology’s creation, use, and effects. We will learn to analyze the relationships between technology, law, and society through theoretical and critical lenses. We will examine how law and policy interacts with the development and proliferation of new technologies, or new applications of existing technologies. We will examine the challenges that legislators, judges, and regulators face when acting in contexts affected by technology, including uncertainty about the future, lack of technical expertise, and the speed at which technology develops. We will learn to synthesize insights from a variety of sources and fields in our discussions and in a final research paper.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Articulate what it means to think about technology through a sociotechnical lens, and why it matters.
  • Scrutinize the ways in which technologies can be beneficial or harmful to society.
  • Describe the differences between how different legal actors—judges, legislators, regulators, and in-house counsel—might interact with technological development.
  • Examine the role and limitations of law in regulating the social effects of technology.

Class Meetings and Office Hours

We will meet Tuesdays, from 11AM – 1PM, in Room 2483. Office hours will be by appointment, in my office, Room 3370.

Materials

There is no assigned textbook for this seminar. We will read books, journal articles, news articles, cases, and other materials. Some of the assignments below are hyperlinked, but readings that are not will be posted in the course OneDrive folder, linked to the right and on BruinLearn.

Three of the five books we will read (or read large portions of) are available online through the UC Library system, though if you can swing it, I recommend purchasing physical copies so you can mark them up, take notes, and bring them to class. The books are:

For assistance with the final paper, I recommend Professor Volokh’s book Academic Legal Writing. It doesn’t really matter which edition, though later is probably at least a little better. This book is especially useful if you hope to expand and publish it after the seminar (more on that below), or if you plan to write a Note in your law school career.

Attendance

Regular attendance is required for all classes at UCLA Law, and is especially important in seminars. Pursuant to our academic standards, students who do not regularly attend class may, at my discretion, be prohibited from turning in a final paper, 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. It should go without saying by now, but if you feel ill or experience symptoms of COVID-19, please email me for the excused absence and do not come to class.

Note: You must be present on the first day of class, or you will be dropped from the class and/or waitlist. If you are on the waitlist and show up the first day of class, ready to participate, I will give you preference as slots open after the first meeting.

Grading

Your grade will be based on class participation (40%), reading reflections (10%) and a final research paper as described below (50%).

Class Participation

This course is driven by group discussion, and class participation is 40% of your grade. I will be a discussion participant and sometimes facilitator, but I do not intend to drive it. I cannot stress this enough: If you do not want to be an active participant in class discussion, do not take this course. Participation is required, and you will not receive a grade you are happy with if you do not contribute meaningfully to the discussion. We are here to learn from and teach each other, and if you do not participate meaningfully, you are depriving not only yourself, but your classmates as well.

You will be assessed on the quality, not the quantity, of your participation. We each bring our own valuable perspectives and expertise to the discussion, and the lenses through which each of us sees the readings are as interesting and important as the readings themselves. Quality participation, therefore, does not mean that you understand the material fully and completely with the perfect interpretation. There are not right or wrong answers. Rather, quality participation means thorough preparation and thoughtful engagement that enriches class discussion and thus helps us all learn.

Weekly Reading Reflections

Each week, no later than 9AM on the day of class, you must submit a brief reading reflection on the BruinLearn discussion board. These reflections can be a few paragraphs, or the equivalent of a page or two at most. You should not summarize the readings. The aim is merely to inform your classmates and me what the readings made you think about, in order to facilitate and enrich class discussion. I will read all of your reflections before class, and I expect each of you to do the same. (You should feel free to comment on each others’ posts as well. Discussion is always welcome.)

The sum of these will make up 10% of your final grade, and you will receive full credit if you demonstrate that you have done the readings and thought about them. You may skip one week, with advance notice, no questions asked. Any more than that, and it will affect your grade negatively, except in emergency circumstances.

Final Paper

The remaining half of your grade will be determined by an original research paper. In it, you should do new factual and legal research to explore a topic related to law, technology, and society that we do not cover in class, or a new aspect of a topic we do cover.

You may choose whether to have the paper satisfy the SAW requirement. If your paper satisfies the requirement, it should be somewhere in the 25–40 page range. This is only a guideline. The rule is that the research must be “substantial,” and though this is perhaps not helpful as a directive, my view is that you should write exactly as many words as needed to make your arguments well. I am giving you an approximate page count to explain that I anticipate that something in that range will accomplish the task. If you go under that range, I anticipate that it will not meet the SAW requirement, and if you greatly exceed that range, your claim must be large enough to justify the extra length used to defend it. If your paper does not satisfy the SAW requirement, it can be shorter, somewhere in the 15-20 page range.

The paper will be evaluated on clarity and organization, the integration of sources and analytical arguments to back up your claims, and a demonstrated facility with the concepts we cover in class. This last part is important to me. This class is about the interweaving of law, technology, and society, and this is your chance to demonstrate to me that you have absorbed the analytical frames and concepts that are central to the class. The goal is not to parrot those concepts back at me—you need to write about whatever topic excites you—but for me to be able to see how the concepts in the course have influenced your thinking. (Hint: If you write about technology as if it were entirely separable from the people who build, use, and otherwise interact with it, you’re going to have a bad time. You will see what I mean in the first couple weeks.) Please note that per our Academic Standards, the use of AI assistance in your paper is strictly prohibited and will be considered a violation of the Student Conduct Code.

Depending on whether you are aiming to satisfy the SAW, you must complete either two or three assignments on the way to the final paper. Each of these must be submitted before the start of class on the specified due date. Failure to adequately complete these assignments on time will result in automatic single-step letter-grade deductions from your final paper grade. Please submit the assignments in the designated place in BruinLearn. They should be a Word documents titled specifically: “Paper_Proposal.docx”, “Outline_and_Bibligraphy.docx”, “First_Draft.docx” or “Final_Draft.docx”, as appropriate. Do not include your name, BruinLearn takes care of that. Please number your pages as well. Doing this correctively ensures that I will be able to give you credit for having turned it in.

Paper Proposal (Due Week 5, 2/20; mandatory for all students):

You must submit a paper proposal. This should be 1–2 pages, identifying the topic you wish to explore; some open questions; a rough sketch of the paper’s expected thesis; and an indication of whether you plan to use the paper to fulfill the SAW requirement. For this assignment, you will need to do some initial research to understand what is out there already. I also expect this thesis to change as you research more, so do not worry about it being perfect; I just want to make sure you’re on the right track and asking the right sorts of questions.

In the following week, I will return the proposals with comments. But feel free to check in with me as you think about topics before your proposal is due.

Some of you who are satisfying the SAW requirement may be interested in turning the seminar paper into a publishable paper. If so, please discuss that with me as early as possible, at latest by the paper proposal. I’m happy to help guide you, and it will not affect my evaluation for grading purposes, but it will change the advice I give you, especially with respect to topic choice.

Annotated Paper Outline and Bibliography (Due Week 9, 3/20; mandatory for all students):

Next, you must submit an annotated paper outline and initial bibliography. By this time, you should have done substantial research and understand your argument decently well. I expect you to outline the paper at a level of detail such that I can understand your thesis and each step of the argument by reading the outline. Please annotate your outline as needed to make this happen. For the bibliography, you should provide a list of at least ten sources separate from the outline, and for each, a few sentences explaining what it is and how it fits in the argument of your paper.

I will return the outline with comments the following week, and will make time to meet with each of you that wants to meet and discuss the paper. It is imperative that you lay out the outline and annotation in a tight, organized manner, and that you state your thesis explicitly so that I know what you’re trying to argue. If you do not give me your thesis, or the information is not organized enough way, my feedback will be less helpful.

First Draft (Due Week 12, 4/17; mandatory for SAW papers, optional for others):

If you are aiming to satisfy the SAW, your first draft is due four weeks after your outline. This first draft should be as close to your finished product as you can make it, to spare you from having to make big changes during finals period. I will not be grading them yet, but I will offer feedback. I hope to turn them around within about 10 days, to give you a full four weeks to work on the final draft. If you are not satisfying the SAW requirement, then you may turn in a first draft, and I will provide feedback, but it is not a requirement.

Final Draft (Due at the end of finals period, 5/15):

Self-explanatory. This is final the product that will be graded.

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.

The Classroom Environment

I want to ask for three things from you in creating the classroom environment that is conducive to learning: presence, generosity, and security. First, I ask for presence. We are engaged together in a semester-long intellectual exploration, and I hope you will be present for it, as much as you are able. This goes beyond simple physical attendance or even preparation. I encourage and invite you to bring into the class as much of your attention, your curiosity, your interest and imagination, as you can.

Some of the topics we face in here may be difficult, not just intellectually, but emotionally or politically as well. In daily life, we may often face strong pressure to embrace, or to reject, particular opinions in matters of law and policy. On some issues, this can be part of how we express our values and define ourselves. The seminar room is an intentionally different kind of space: It is a safe place to play with new ideas, to try on arguments, to entertain controversial, uncertain, or unpopular views. Advocating a position with which one actually disagrees can at times be fruitful. In any event, I expect you to honor one another’s intellectual growth by making an active effort to hold your mind open to new perspectives.

Therefore, the second thing I ask is that you be generous toward the ideas you encounter here — whether from me, from the readings, or from our shared discussion — in a specific way: seek out the strongest version of each idea, before responding to it. Ask yourself, “what’s the smartest thing this person (or this text) could possibly be trying to say?” Then, respond to that, including with spirited objections if they arise for you.

Third, I ask that you work with me to create conditions in which we can feel secure in taking intellectual risks. Specifically, please do not quote your classmates outside of class without first obtaining their permission. Views expressed in the seminar are part of the learning process, and may not reflect the speaker’s fully developed view. Conversation is a vehicle that helps us discover and develop our perspectives.

Course Schedule

The first few weeks of the course will be dedicated to thinking about what technology is and what it means. We will interrogate the idea of technology as an object, and explore the social systems and power structures that affect and are affected by technology. We will spend this portion of the course developing a vocabulary that is associated with these questions in the scholarship.

For most of the remaining time, we will apply our newly acquired theoretical frameworks to different case studies. How do technology, legal issues, and social or cultural issues interact? How much of the effect of a technology is new, and how much is attributable to existing societal structures? What kinds of problems does the technology raise, and how can law best respond or anticipate the problems? These are the kinds of questions I hope to discuss each week, as well as whatever you all raise in your weekly reflection papers.

The final two classes will be reserved for short paper presentations. Each of you will present your final paper topic. Reading for the week will consist of paper abstracts—a short (1–2 pp) summary of a paper’s topic and argument—submitted by each presenter. I will also ask you share an updated version of your annotated outlines, to help us understand the topic. You should come to class prepared to make a short (~10) minute presentation on the topic, leaving some time for your classmates to ask questions (each person has about 14 minutes in total if we start and end perfectly on time).

Reading Assignments

Your weekly reading assignments are below. Required readings are in bold and recommended in normal type, with some annotation as to why they might be interesting to read in your surely ample spare time.

Note: This course has some heavy reading requirements. In some weeks, we will read entire books. I’ve tried to keep the harder readings in shorter weeks, and have spaced out the books so you can get a head start the week before. You will just need to check the reading schedule in advance. Also, books do not require the same kind of attentive reading as case law does; you can read for the general ideas and skim other parts as needed.

Note 2: We will not meet April 3. The makeup class will be Monday, April 21, 10:45AM–12:45PM. Please mark this down in your calendars.

Week 1: Technology, Politics, and Society

Does technology drive social change? How does society shape technology? What does it mean to talk about the politics of a technology? What do we even mean by “technology” anyway?

We begin the semester with several classic texts in Science, Technology and Society (STS). by probing the definition of technology and examining how and when it makes sense to speak about technology as having political or normative attributes. We will also have some time to get to know each other and go over the plan for the course.

  • This syllabus. Yes, the whole thing. Seriously. I worked hard on it.
  • Donald MacKenzie & Judy Wajcman, Introductory Essay, in The Social Shaping of Technology (1985).
  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan, How the Refrigerator Got its Hum (1985)
  • Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980)
  • Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other (1987)
    • This is a classic articulation of the “social construction of technology” theory, and an interesting look at the history of the bicycle as an illustration of it.
  • Ryan Calo, The Scale and the Reactor (forthcoming book chapter)
    • This chapters offers an overview of STS as a discipline and explains how law and technology can learn from it and add to it. Focused more on scholarship than policy, but the lessons translate and align well with the goals of this seminar.
Week 2: How Do We Regulate Technology?

How should we think about regulating technology? Can law keep up with the pace of technological development? Does technology drive legal change? Does the idea of “regulating technology” even make sense?

This week we will think about ideas such as the pacing problem, the Collingridge dilemma, technological exceptionalism, and technological neutrality to ask how to best approach regulation in a world of developing technology.

  • Gary E. Marchant, The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and the Law (2011)
  • Meg Leta Jones, Does Technology Drive Law? The Dilemma of Technological Exceptionalism in Cyberlaw (2018)
  • Lyria Bennett Moses, How to Think about Law, Regulation and Technology: Problems with“Technology” as a Regulatory Target (2013)
  • Rebecca Crootof & BJ Ard, Structuring TechLaw (2021) (Parts I & II)
    • This article proposes a theory of technology regulation as a set of responses to standard types of legal uncertainty that occur in the wake of sociotechnical change.
Week 3: Technology as Regulation

Last week we discussed the regulation of technology; this week it’s regulation by technology. How does technology regulate? How are regulation by law and regulation by technology similar? How are they different? How can translating legal requirements into code distort their meaning? When is that an acceptable risk?

  • Lawrence Lessig, What Things Regulate?, Chapter 7 in Code 2.0 (2002)
  • Danielle Citron, Technological Due Process, (2008) (Parts I & II)
  • Karen E.C. Levy, Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law (2017)
  • Madeleine Akrich, The De-Scription of Technical Objects (1992)
    • This is another classic STS piece, in which Akrich describes the kinds of “scripts” that technology designers imbue their creations with, based on the limited contexts in which they consider that they may be used. Akrich describes situations in which those scripts do not accurate reflect real world scenarios, and how that changes teh function of the technologies in question.
Week 4: Technology and Race

How does technology encode race? Those of you in the Critical Race Studies Program might have noticed certain similarities in critical approaches to technology and critical approaches to law. For example, both CRT and STS aim to unearth claims to neutrality that hide value judgments and drive inequities. Well, it turns out that there is some substantive overlap as well. This week will discuss how technology can reinforce racial hierarchies and ask how what the law’s role is in mediating race and technology.

Week 5: Technology and Policing

Paper Proposal Due

This week, we will examine police use of technology, through a book that is the culmination of years of research with the LAPD. Even better, Professor Brayne will be joining us in class, so be sure to come prepared!

  • Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (2020)
  • Kevin S. Bankston & Ashkan Soltani, Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones (2014)
    • Essay arguing that the economics of information disclosure and retrieval has relevance for the Fourth Amendment’s control over police.
  • Paul Ohm, The Many Revolutions of Carpenter (2019) (Read pp. 358–69, 394–409)
    • Article that discusses the tech exceptionalism present in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), the biggest Fourth Amendment case of the last several decades, as well as how it modifies the previous rules regarding police and technology.
Week 6: Flexibility, Ownership, and Innovation

The ways in which technology gets put to use, and by whom, are often unexpected. Manufacturers have historically wanted to lock down unintended uses, for security or profit, but can that desire be reconciled with property rights and innovation? Should consumers have a right to tinker, a right to repair? What should regulators do? Whose interests are considered when regulators make such decisions, and whose should be?

  • FTC, Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions (read the executive summary)
  • Leah Chan Grinvald & Ofer Tur-Sinai, Defending the Right to Repair (2024)
  • Tim Wu, The Foreign Attachment, Chapter 7 in The Master Switch (2011)
  • Jonathan Zittrain, Law and Technology: The End of the Generative Internet (2009)
  • Ronald Kline & Trevor Pinch, Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States (1996)
    • Classic STS article describing the early reception of the automobile, how people used them in interesting ways that are different than we use them today, like using the motor for chores on the farm, how the use of car became gendered, and the social forces that restabilized the concept of the automobile over time.
Week 7: Artificial Intelligence: The Future or Just Hype?

Artificial intelligence is seemingly all anyone talks about these days. But how much of it is just talk? What can AI actually do and what problems does it pose in reality? What do we even mean when we say “AI”? This week we’ll read a book from two computer scientists who seek to set the record stright on some of these issues. As you read, try to think about how regulators might think about the multifaceted problems that different types of AI pose? How much do we need new laws or can we adapt existing laws? How much technical knowledge is required to understand what’s real?

  • Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (2024)
  • Inioluwa Deborah Raji, I. Elizabeth Kumar, Aaron Horowitz & Andrew Selbst, The Fallacy of AI Functionality (2020)
    • Paper documenting and taxonomizing the different ways that AI already in the marketplace fails, while arguing that existing laws can address these failures.
  • Michael Veale & Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Demystifying the Draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act (2021)
    • Paper detailing and critiquing the (then-proposed, now enacted) EU AI Act. Some of it as changed since the draft, but this paper does a great job of contextualizing and explaining the overall approach and its weaknesses.
Week 8: Technology and Reproductive Rights

Reproductive rights are collapsing in this country. This week we’ll examine the role of technology in reproductive rights by looking at abortion medication and the rise of “femtech,” a class of consumer technology deisgn to meet “female” needs. We will think through the societal changes that attend each, how they can empower pregnant people, and how they are and will be regulated in a post-Roe world.

  • David S. Cohen, Greer Donley & Rachel Rebouché, Abortion Pills (2024) (skip Part IV)
  • Leah R. Fowler & Michael R. Ulrich, Femtechnodystopia (2023) (Parts I.B & II)
  • Elizabeth E. Joh, Dobbs Online: Digital Rights as Abortion Rights (2024)
  • Cynthia Conti-Cook, Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary (2020)
    • Article detailing at greater length all the digital traces that pregnant people will leave behind as they seek out self-help for abortions rather than visit medical facilities.
  • Michela Meister and Karen Levy, Digital Security and Reproductive Rights: Lessons for Feminist Cyberlaw (2024)
    • Chapter arguing that feminist perspectives on privacy and surveillance offer a clearer abortion-related digital security threats.
Week 9: Technology and Intimate Privacy

Outline and Annotated Bibliography Due

We all know that in the age of internet commerce and social media, our personal privacy has been eroded in many ways. This week we will discuss privacy over our intimate lives—our ability to explore our identities, our sex lives, our sexual orientations. What does the invasion of that kind of privacy do to us? What are the implications for women and/or queer folk in the digital world? Should law recognize a separate concept of “intimate privacy” and what would that look like?

  • Danielle Keats Citron, The Fight for Privacy (2022)
  • Complaint, In re Snapchat, FTC Docket No. C-4501
    • FTC complaint against Snapchat for deceptively implying to consumers that photos were unable to be captured and shared, when in reality Snapchat was aware of easy workarounds and did not address them
  • Diana Freed et al, “A Stalker’s Paradise”: How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology (2018)
    • A research paper on how technology is used by perpetrators of intimate partner violence, drawing on interviews with survivors and professionals that provide services to survivors
Week 10: Social Media and Content Moderation

With social media comes content moderation. For years, people have argued about how to regulate content online properly. A free speech maximalist position leads to platforms overrun by pornography and hate speech, and content that is illegal in the US or elsewhere. But remove too much content and you stifle speech, and eventually engagement. Once a policy exists, how easy is it to tell what content violates it? Who decides and how? Can enforcement ever scale? Is this kind of private power concerning? This week, we’ll discuss many of these questions, as well the First Amendment implications of content moderation.

  • Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707, 144 S. Ct. 2383, 219 L. Ed. 2d 1075 (2024)
  • Robyn Caplan, Content or Context Moderation: Artisanal, Community-Reliant, and Industrial Approaches (2018)
  • James Grimmelmann, The Platform Is the Message (2018)
  • Evelyn Doeuk, Content Moderation as Systems Thinking (2022)
    • This article argues that because of its scale and speed, content moderation is better seen as a “project of mass speech administration” than as individual adjudications about posts, meaning that lawmakers and reformers should see it as an issue of institutional design rather than through the lens of analogy to individual speech rights.
  • Isaac Chotiner, The Underworld of Online Content Moderation (2019)
    • Interview with Prof. Sarah Roberts about her book “Behind the Screen,” which describes the pyschological horrors and other terrible working conditions of those who review content for takedown decisions.
Week 11: Technology and Labor

First Draft Due for SAW papers

How does technology transform the workplace? What does it mean to say that technology creates efficiency improvements? Does technology replace workers or change the relationship between people and their work? How are the effects of technology in and on the workplace divided by class or industry? Should workers worry about AI, and if so, why?

  • Julia Ticona, Left to Our Own Devices (2023)
  • Kate Kilkenny, The Animation Guild Reaches Tentative Deal With Studios (2024)
  • Alexandra Mateescu & Madeleine Clare Elish, AI in Context: The Labor of Integrating New Technologies (2018)
    • Report on the effects of integrating automating technology on labor in grocery stores and farm work.
  • Ally Schweitzer, When Your Boss Is an Algorithm (2023)
    • Short news piece discussing some of the challenges Uber drivers face due to the algorthmically managed labor environment.
Week 12: Presentations 1
  • Final Paper Abstracts
Week 13: Presentations 2
  • Final Paper Abstracts