In this episode, we interview UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh, whose article The Freedom of Speech and Bad Purposes is published in issue 63.5 of the UCLA Law Review. We discuss the merits and weaknesses of First Amendment purpose tests--legal tests that strip protection if a person speaks with bad motives or intentions--and we consider whether First Amendment protections should ever be...
Selective Procreation in Public and Private Law
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...
The CRISPR Revolution: What Editing Human DNA Reveals About the Patent System’s DNA
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...
Virtual Violence
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...
Glass Half Empty
Abstract This science-fiction legal Essay is set in the year 2030. It anticipates the development and mass adoption of a device called the "Ruby" that records everything a person does. By imagining how law and society would adjust to such a device, the Essay uncovers two surprising insights about public policy: first, policy debates are slow to change when a new technology pushes out the...
Social Control of Technological Risks: The Dilemma of Knowledge and Control in Practice, and Ways to Surmount It
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...
Two Fables
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...
Policing Police Robots
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...