•  32
    This Chapter provides a short undergraduate introduction to ethical and philosophical complexities surrounding the law’s attempt (or lack thereof) to regulate artificial intelligence. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed a simple thought experiment known as the paperclip maximizer. What would happen if a machine (the “PCM”) were given the sole goal of manufacturing as many paperclips as possible? It might learn how to transact money, source metal, or even build factories. The machine might …Read more
  •  325
    Corporate Identity
    In Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self, Bloomsbury. pp. 203-216. 2022.
    Any effort to specify identity conditions for corporations faces significant challenges. Corporations are amorphous. Nature draws no hard lines defining where they start or stop, whether in space or time. Corporations are also frustratingly dynamic. They often change the most basic aspects of their composition by exchanging parts, splitting and merging, changing ownership, and reworking fundamental internal operations. Even so, we apply corporate identity conditions all the time. Both law and co…Read more
  •  289
    The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck
    Erkenntnis 88 (3): 1331-1346. 2021.
    One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution sh…Read more
  •  9
    Correction to: Corporate Essence and Identity in Criminal Law
    Journal of Business Ethics 171 (4): 833-833. 2021.
    A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04827-y.
  •  449
    Illusions of Affection: A Hyper-Illusory Account of Normative Valence
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6): 6-29. 2021.
    This article challenges the orthodox position that some smells are pleasantly fragrant and some tactile sensations are painful. It proposes that the affective components of our experiences are a kind of illusion. Under this alternative picture, experiences that seem to have positive or negative affect never actually do. Rather, the affective component is hyper-illusory, a second-order misrepresentation of the way things actually seem to us. While perceptual hyperillusions have elicited scepticis…Read more
  •  59
    The Extended Corporate Mind: When Corporations Use AI to Break the Law
    North Carolina Law Review 98 893-932. 2020.
    Algorithms may soon replace employees as the leading cause of corporate harm. For centuries, the law has defined corporate misconduct — anything from civil discrimination to criminal insider trading — in terms of employee misconduct. Today, however, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and big data allow automated systems to make many corporate decisions, e.g., who gets a loan or what stocks to buy. These technologies introduce valuable efficiencies, but they do not remove (or even always re…Read more
  •  39
    Limiting Identity in Criminal Law
    Boston College Law Review 60 2011-2099. 2019.
    People change with time. Their personalities, values, and preferences shift incrementally as they accrue life experience, discover new sources of meaning, and form/lose memories. Accumulated psychological changes eventually reshape not just how someone relates to the world about her, but also who she is as a person. This transience of human identity has profound implications for criminal law. Previous legal scholarship on personal identity has assumed that only abrupt tragedy and disease can cha…Read more
  •  32
    Successor Identity
    Yale Journal on Regulation 36 1-44. 2019.
    The law of successor criminal liability is simple—corporate successors are liable for the crimes of their predecessors. Always. Any corporation that results from any merger, consolidation, spin-off, etc., is on the hook for all the crimes of all the corporations that went into the process. Such a coarse-grained, onetrack approach fails to recognize that not all reorganizations are cut from the same cloth. As a result, it skews corporate incentives against reorganizing in more socially beneficial…Read more
  •  13
    Privileging Privacy: Confidentiality as a Source of Fourth Amendment Protection
    Journal of Constitutional Law 21 (2): 485-542. 2018.
    Police do not need a warrant to search information that we reveal to third parties. This so-called “third-party doctrine” is supposed to tell courts when our personal information is no longer private, and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment. In the modern world, the doctrine goes too far, leaving much of our most intimate information exposed. We have little choice but to trust third-parties like cell companies, internet service providers, email providers, and the like with most of th…Read more
  •  293
    Corporate Essence and Identity in Criminal Law
    Journal of Business Ethics 154 (4): 955-966. 2018.
    How can we know whether we are punishing the same corporation that committed some past crime? Though central to corporate criminal justice, legal theorists and philosophers have yet to address the basic question of how corporate identity persists through time. Simple cases, where crime and punishment are close in time and the corporation has changed little, can mislead us into thinking an answer is always easy to come by. The issue becomes more complicated when corporate criminals undergo any nu…Read more
  •  13
    Retribution and deterrence currently drive the politics and scholarship of corporate criminal law. Since the potential harms and private gains of corporate crime are so large, corporate punishment under these theories must be exacting...too exacting. In fact, it is difficult under current law to punish many corporations formally without killing them. Ironically, this fact leads to the under-punishment of corporations. Prosecutors — understandably hesitant to shutter some of the country’s largest…Read more
  •  23
    Corporate Criminal Minds
    Notre Dame Law Review 91 2049-2090. 2016.
    In order to commit the vast majority of crimes, corporations must, in some sense, have mental states. Lawmakers and scholars assume that factfinders need fundamentally different procedures for attributing mental states to corporations and individuals. As a result, they saddle themselves with unjustifiable theories of mental state attribution, like respondeat superior, that produce results wholly at odds with all the major theories of the objectives of criminal law. This Article draws on recent f…Read more
  •  22
    Functional Corporate Knowledge
    William and Mary Law Review 36 1-44. 2019.
    The line between guilt and innocence often turns on what a defendant knew. While the law’s approach to knowledge may be relatively straightforward for individuals, its doctrines for corporate defendants are fraught with ambiguity and opportunities for gamesmanship. Corporations can spread information thinly across employees so that it is never “known.” And prosecutors can exploit legal uncertainties to bring knowledge-based charges where corporations were merely negligent in how they handled inf…Read more
  •  80
    Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons
    with Joanna J. Bryson and Thomas D. Grant
    Artificial Intelligence and Law 25 (3): 273-291. 2017.
    Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such …Read more