Volume 92 Symposium (2023)

The George Washington Law Review Symposium
October 13, 2023
Legally Disruptive Emerging Technologies

This symposium will focus on the regulation of digital technologies that promise or threaten to disrupt the legal process itself. These technologies present new examples of familiar legal questions but their contemporary relevance pales in comparison to the utopian or dystopian visions of their advocates and critics. Cryptocurrencies, for example, offer novel challenges for securities regulators, because unlike most other payment mechanisms, they are specifically designed to avoid regulation and offer models for monetary policymaking and corporate governance that differ from existing institutions. Similarly, big data predictive technologies like neural networks not only are remaking commerce, but also could be harnessed by governments as an alternative to conventional legal rules. Most recently, large language models like GPT-4 are important new developments in the debate about regulating misinformation, but also could upend regulation by flooding administrative agencies with comments or perhaps could serve as a tool for scaling institutions of mass justice. This symposium will assess the challenge of applying current regulatory frameworks while also considering the long-term possible regulatory consequences of disruptive digital technologies.

It is our hope that the focus on how digital technologies may disrupt law will offer a unique opportunity to bring together scholars working on different digital technologies, particularly cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. Much has been written about regulation of both as well as in related contexts. But relatively little literature to date has focused on the point that regulating these technologies may be fundamentally different from regulating particular industries, because some of the most important applications envisioned by advocates of these technologies will affect the legal system itself. If ramifications for the legal and regulatory system of these technologies are among the most important in the long run, should that change how we think about the problem of regulation?