Law and Global Technology

3 credits · Law School

The course investigates how law interacts with the planet-spanning digital infrastructures of contemporary societies. The class is structured as a conversation between technical and legal approaches to infrastructural analysis. Students will first learn about technology in the way it might be taught to engineers, then discuss the legal issues the technology poses, review attempts to regulate the technology across different jurisdictions, and assess underlying regulatory theories that motivate those efforts. The first half of the course will focus on the private standards, hardware, and software that comprise the internet. These technologies form the foundation upon which companies like Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook/Instagram), and ByteDance (TikTok) orchestrate complex targeted advertising ecosystems. They also play an increasingly important role in public discourse, access to resources, and geopolitics. The second half of the course will explore the controversial and evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Industrial-scale development of “artificial intelligence” through machine learning has progressed rapidly over the past decade due to massive datasets, availability of open-source models, and access to scalable computing power. More recently, large language models (LLMs) have enabled “generative AI.” We’ll examine contemporary debates—including regulatory attempts to “reign in” LLMs in the US and EU, the evolving role of AI infrastructures in legal and judicial practice, and the potentially disruptive effects of AI use on social equity, access to justice, and government administration. Enrollment limited. [3]