In this special episode, Professor Eugene Volokh shares his thoughts on writing and editing—skills that are part and parcel of the lawyer’s craft. Tune in to hear Professor Volokh’s tips on how to make your written work more effective and persuasive.
PULSE Symposium 2016
Foreword - Imagining the Legal Landscape: Technology and the Law in 2030 Jennifer L. Mnookin & Richard M. Re 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...
Episode 2.1: The Freedom of Speech and Bad Purposes with Professor Eugene Volokh
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...
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...