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1. Can Robots Get Some Human Rights? A Cross-Disciplinary Discussion

   https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5461703  

   Persaud, Priya; Varde, Aparna S.; Wang, Weitian (September 2021, Journal of Robotics)

   Li, Changsheng (Ed.)

   An autonomous household robot passed a self-awareness test in 2015, proving that the cognitive capabilities of robots are heading towards those of humans. While this is a milestone in AI, it raises questions about legal implications. If robots are progressively developing cognition, it is important to discuss whether they are entitled to justice pursuant to conventional notions of human rights. This paper offers a comprehensive discussion of this complex question through cross-disciplinary scholarly sources from computer science, ethics, and law. The computer science perspective dissects hardware and software of robots to unveil whether human behavior can be efficiently replicated. The ethics perspective utilizes insights from robot ethics scholars to help decide whether robots can act morally enough to be endowed with human rights. The legal perspective provides an in-depth discussion of human rights with an emphasis on eligibility. The article concludes with recommendations including open research issues. 

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2. Manuscript Authors’ Perspectives on the Peer Review Process of the Journal of Engineering Education

   Cutler, Stephanie L.; Beddoes, Kacey; Croninger, Rachel M.V. (January 2019, Research in Engineering Education Symposium)

   null (Ed.)

   Research communities often emphasize theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and topics that appeal to particular subgroups of scholars within the community. Therefore, one of the challenges associated with the peer review process is ensuring that innovative ideas are not rejected simply because they live outside the conventional paradigms of the community. Determining why manuscripts are rejected from premier outlets, which influence the norms of a field, can further our understanding of existing disciplinary boundaries and how to increase the diversity of perspectives and the participation of scholars with views outside the conventional paradigm in the community. However, much of the literature on disciplinary boundaries focuses on the reliability of reviewers themselves and published manuscripts. As such, this paper focuses on the experiences and perspectives of scholars who have submitted to but not published an article in the Journal of Engineering Education through in-depth, qualitative interviews. 

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3. A Programming Language for Future Interests

   Shrutarshi Basu; Nate Foster; James Grimmelmann; Shan Parikh; Ryan Richardson (October 2022, Yale journal of law technology)

   Emile Shehada (Ed.)

   Learning the system of estates in land and future interests can seem like learning a new language. Scholars and students must master unfamiliar phrases, razor-sharp rules, and arbitrarily complicated structures. Property law is this way not because future interests are a foreign language, but because they are a programming language. This Article presents Orlando, a programming language for expressing conveyances of future interests, and Littleton, a freely available online interpreter (at https://conveyanc.es) that can diagram the interests created by conveyances and model the consequences of future events. Doing so has three payoffs. First, formalizing future interests helps students and teachers of the subject by allowing them to visualize and experiment with conveyances. Second, the process of formalization is itself deeply illuminating about property doctrine and theory. And third, the computer-science subfield of programming language theory has untapped potential for legal scholarship: a programming-language approach takes advantage of the linguistic parallels between legal texts and computer programs. 

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4. Net versus relative impacts in public policy automation: a conjoint analysis of attitudes of Black Americans

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01975-3  

   Kennedy, Ryan; Austin, Amanda; Adams, Michael; Robinson, Carroll; Salib, Peter (July 2024, AI & SOCIETY)

   Abstract The use of algorithms and automated systems, especially those leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), has been exploding in the public sector, but their use has been controversial. Ethicists, public advocates, and legal scholars have debated whether biases in AI systems should bar their use or if the potential net benefits, especially toward traditionally disadvantaged groups, justify even greater expansion. While this debate has become voluminous, no scholars of which we are aware have conducted experiments with the groups affected by these policies about how they view the trade-offs. We conduct a set of two conjoint experiments with a high-quality sample of 973 Americans who identify as Black or African American in which we randomize the levels of inter-group disparity in outcomes and the net effect on such adverse outcomes in two highly controversial contexts: pre-trial detention and traffic camera ticketing. The results suggest that respondents are willing to tolerate some level of disparity in outcomes in exchange for certain net improvements for their community. These results turn this debate from an abstract ethical argument into an evaluation of political feasibility and policy design based on empirics. 

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5. 94 different countries? Time, place, and variations in federal criminal justice

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38KW57J58  

   Lynch, Mona (January 2018, Berkeley journal of criminal law)

   null (Ed.)

   Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins’s 1991 book, The Scale of Imprisonment, was a pioneering intellectual effort to explain what was then just coming into view to social scientists and legal scholars: the massive growth and transformation of American criminal justice, particularly as manifested in what soon came to be called mass incarceration. Zimring and Hawkins endeavored to disentangle multiple forces in play, ranging from formal law, to local and regional legal norms, to a series of broader social and political transformations. In doing so, Zimring and Hawkins set out to disentangle the complex, multi-jurisdictional political and legal structures that govern imprisonment policy in the U.S. In this Article, I apply their insights about locale-based variations in criminal justice operations over time to the case of federal sentencing. Specifically, I empirically examine variations in how the “criminal history” provision of the federal sentencing guidelines is applied as a function of both time and place to demonstrate the limits of formal law in accounting for punishment outcomes. In doing so, I hope to shed additional light on how vast differences in legal practices and outcomes are produced, especially in response to top-down legal change. 

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