I have posted a draft of an article by Ian Ayres and me, The Law of AI is the Law of Risky Agents Without Intentions, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:Many areas of the law, including freedom of speech, copyright, and criminal law, make liability turn on whether the actor who causes harm (or creates a risk of harm) has a certain mens rea or intention....

People disagree what to make of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s recent remark that in today’s climate of political polarization, “one side or the other is going to win.”  It has been interpreted as an “anodyne” description of that polarization, or as a “horrific” claim that compromise is impossible and that he is one of the partisans. ...

Last week, the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors shut down its website briefly because of concerns about the process by which the review published an article critical of Israel. The decision quickly called forth charges of censorship. Then the board reactivated the website, leading to allegations that it had “buckled.” Both the editors...

Calls from the public for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down so that President Joe Biden can name a younger replacement are unlikely to be effective.  Advice from strangers often carries little weight or might even backfire if the recipient doesn’t want to seem to knuckle under political pressure. Private suggestions from trusted colleagues...

  Sunday’s NY Times had a story about “the network that took down Roe v. Wade.” From an academic’s point of view, the journalistic breathlessness (“told for the first time,” accounts of “secret meetings”) is dismaying. The story the authors tell is basically a story about how strategic...

If Stormy Daniels’s sworn testimony is to be believed, the intercourse that she and Donald Trump engaged in was (1) a first-time sexual encounter, and (2) unprotected.  Katharine Baker and I have argued in a piece published in 2005 (less than a year before Daniels and Trump met at Lake Tahoe) that unprotected, first encounter sex is “reckless”...