Law and computation I

Summary

This course provides students with insights into how law shapes our increasingly digital and artificially intelligent environments and how the law itself gets shaped within that process and is designed for students who want to critically examine the interplay of law and computation.

Content

Both law and computation have been permeating our private and professional lives: The law has done so for thousands of years already by determining the social and economic structures in which we interact, while in comparison, digitalization only much more recently has been transforming our societal fabric. Understanding how the law can enable or constrain innovation within the broad domain of computation or digitalization is central for developers and engineers to determine how to shape future, responsible computing as well as regulatory environments. Within this course, we will analyze the regulatory toolkit at the disposition of policymakers and map legislations that emerged in Switzerland, Europe, and selected jurisdictions across the globe. We will analyze how the field of digital law has shifted over the years, more recently with a focus on data driven computing and machine learning, and aiming to achieve trustworthy artificial intelligence. We will critically reflect on the shortcomings of current legislation and envisage new approaches to address new risks that an ever-artificially intelligent world entails. This opens up the discussion to newer approaches and domains of law, that are focused on how computation and design can improve legal processes and access to law and justice. These new approaches are situated within the field of regulatory innovation, legal design, and computational law and combine the expertise of computer scientists, human-computer interaction designers, and legal scholars and are often driven by the quest to leverage interdisciplinary know-how to create more accessible legal processes.