CategoryDiscourse

Legal scholarship tends to focus on the past, the present, or the relatively visible, near-term future.  And that’s understandable: the challenges that loom many years away often aren’t susceptible to confident claims or carefully worked out solutions.  In law as in life, our biggest worries—or hopes—may never come to pass at all. But what about challenges in the foreseeable but still uncertain...

Abstract This Article sets forth a new way to think about the ethics and law of choosing genetic traits in future children.  And it applies this framework of offspring to controversies over efforts to select offspring traits including sex, race, intelligence, and deafness using methods ranging from donor selection to embryo screening and gene editing.  I adapt the lens of ambivalence that...

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in digital information and connected devices, but constant revelations about hacks make painfully clear that security has not kept pace.  Societies today network first, and ask questions later. This Essay argues that while digitization and networking will continue to accelerate, cybersecurity concerns will also prompt some strategic...

Abstract Recent bills have allocated federal funding to states and localities as an incentive to adopt handheld genome sequencing devices, smooth the ongoing transition from older forensic typing methods to “next generation sequencing” (NGS), and facilitate law enforcement access to medical and recreational DNA databases.  At the request of legislators considering these bills, the Congressional...

Introduction1 Imagine a world that is aggressively engineered for us to achieve highly desirable objectives.  In this hypothetical future, technology will serve as the means for governing—or one might say, micromanaging—our world to prioritize three distinctive yet interrelated normative ends: optimized transactional efficiency, resource productivity, and human happiness. Now, even though we do...

Abstract Not since the invention that launched the entire biotech industry has a life science invention offered as much promise as the CRISPR technique for editing genes.  Gene editing techniques existed before CRISPR, but they were slow, inaccurate, and expensive.  The CRISPR invention is like moving from the manual typewriter—click, clack, slide across—to modern word processing. As we stand at...

Abstract Immersive virtual reality may change the way we interact with each other.  In the future, we may be technologically capable of experiencing every aspect of an interaction except its physiological consequences.  So what does this mean for interpersonal violence?  If virtual reality creates a strong sense of “presence,” such that virtual experiences seem comparable to their physical...

Abstract Effective management of societal risks from technological innovation requires two types of conditions: sufficient knowledge about the nature and severity of risks to identify preferred responses; and sufficient control capacity (legal, political, and managerial) to adopt and implement preferred responses.  While it has been recognized since the 1970s that technological innovation creates...

Abstract This Article contains two imaginary stories about the future.  The first attempts to imagine what might happen if intellectual property law no longer prohibited copying and we were to live in a world entirely driven by data, algorithms, and metrics that monitor reading and discussion; in particular, it dwells on how this might affect scientific and scholarly publications.  The second...

Abstract Just as they will change healthcare, manufacturing, and the military, robots have the potential to produce big changes in policing.  We can expect that at least some robots used by the police in the future will be artificially intelligent machines capable of using legitimate coercive force against human beings.  Police robots may decrease dangers to police officers by removing them from...

Abstract How will big data impact environmental law in the near future?  This Essay imagines one possible future for environmental law in 2030 that focuses on the implications of big data for the protection of public health from risks associated with pollution and industrial chemicals.  It assumes the perspective of an historian looking back from the end of the twenty-first century at the...