Professor Barton Beebe (John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law, New York University School of Law, New York)
Technology and the Beautiful Deaths of Law: A Recurring History
with discussion and reception after the talk
The emergence of artificial intelligence has once again prompted jurists to declare the imminent “death of law,” some in panic, some in elation, as they have done so many times before in the history of law and technology.
This lecture will offer a critical history of modern legal thought’s strange tendency to declare its own “death” in the face of certain forms of technological change. To do so, it will identify in the recent history of legal thought successive waves of legal extinction anxiety and legal extinction euphoria that have accompanied the emergence of the technologies of administrative bureaucracy in the early twentieth century, space exploration in the 1960s, the Internet at the turn of the century, and now AI.
These waves of legal extinctionism are best understood as reactions not to particular technologies but to the broader ideology that these technologies represent, the ideology of technological rationality. Jurists have perceived each of these technologies as threatening not simply to outpace but to replace law and furthermore to replace it in whole with technological rationality.
Jurists now perceive AI as the ultimate expression of this threat. The legal extinction panic that AI has triggered is taking the form, as it has so many times in the past, of a “romantic reaction,” one that seeks to position law in a peculiar evolutionary niche: the aesthetic. The legal extinction euphoria that AI has also triggered is taking the form, as it also has so many times before, of the dream of the total rationalization and optimization—and now the total mechanization—of law.
In engaging the thought of Roscoe Pound, Evgeny Pashukanis, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and recent “technoregulation” commentators among others, the lecture will consider the dangers of these recurring forms of legal extinctionism.
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