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Femina Rico: Feminist Legal Issues

Prof. Constance Backhouse

 

This course is designed to explore a cross-section of legal issues with a focus on gender, class, and race discrimination.  The assigned reading will be composed of books and articles from Canadian, American, and Puerto Rican authors, including Constance Backhouse Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada; Sonia Sotomayor My Beloved World; Jane Doe The Story of Jane Doe; Brian Valee Life with Billy; and Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography.  The classroom discussions will be structured around the readings.  The method of evaluation is student journals.  

 

 

Arte-Rico: Art, Technology and Law

Prof. Chloé S. Georas

 

This course explores the relationship between art, technology and law from an interdisciplinary perspective.  By examining debates that have emerged in cultural, performance, poststructuralist and feminist studies, among others, the course addresses how legal discourses and technological architectures constitute, limit and reinvent artistic production.  The course will look at legal debates on artistic expression and practice and how new technologies impact the dilemmas and stakes of the pre-existing debates.  The main purpose of the course is to stress the cultural, political and ethical complexity of the interpretation of art by the courts as well as by other institutions and social actors and to push the limits of the discussion in the context of new technologies.  Accordingly, one of the main overarching questions of the course will be whether traditional legal categories as applied to the fields of art should be adapted in the digital turn of societies.  Some of the controversial themes that will be analyzed involve artists accused of obscenity and child pornography as well as of copyright and moral rights violations.

 

 

Techno-Rico:  The Laws of Robotics

Prof. Ian Kerr

 

We are entering an age of advanced robotics and automation. By the time that students enrolled in this course become established in their legal careers, it is anticipated that robots will be our surgeons and our domestic servants. Other complex services once offered by humans will be completely automated; these automated systems will become the proxy for human decision-making.

 

How do law and technology structure and constrain our possible future worlds? What laws or ethical rules ought to govern a society enmeshed in human-computer interaction? And how will these various codes enable and disable the possibility of achieving what is good, what is right and what is just?

 

The aim of this course is to interrogate the above questions through an exploration of the state of the art of robot and automation technologies and their introduction into society. Robots allow us to explore questions of legal ontology and epistemology, including what it means to know or enforce the law, the nature of rules and rule-following, what makes laws and their interpretation legitimate, the nature of just code, etc. We will also consider, more generally, the ethical and legal significance of populating robots in the workplace, market and home. Through a critique of existing and soon to be proposed ethical and legislative frameworks, we will contemplate the interrelationship between ethics, law and technology by thinking about the general goals of artificial intelligence, whether and how robots ought to be programmed, how automated systems ought to resolve conflicting rules and norms, and about the broader social implications of boarding this strange Mothership.

 

 

 

What you can expect...

 

ACADEMIC EXPECTATIONS


Because of the added exchange element to the courses, our time together will be very busy. The courses are designed to be extremely intellectually challenging, and each has a significant reading load. It will require an ability to balance work and play and the skill of working efficiently. The more of the assigned readings you can do in advance of the courses, the better off you will be.

 

 

 

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