Legal education after complexity theory

Campbell Law Innovation Institute
Assembling
Published in
41 min readAug 9, 2021
The connections in a human brain

The Law’s Hidden Order

Learning the law must include learning about the order present in the legal system. Even the most die-hard devotee of practical and experiential legal education should affirm this statement because the order of the law is fundamental to legal practice. It may be “theoretical” to talk about the order in the law, but it is also essential because theoretical knowledge of the order in law is important to the legal profession in that a fundamental role for lawyers is to be public citizens. The Preamble of the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility defines the role of a lawyer this way: “A lawyer, as a member of the legal profession, is a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” While the meaning of this rule is not entirely clear, the Model Rules attempt to clarify it with the following passage:

As a member of a learned profession, a lawyer should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge in reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education.[1]

Order is what makes the rule of law “non-arbitrary” and what makes “thinking like a lawyer” a worthwhile (and possible) pursuit. It would make little sense to endorse a disorderly system of legal rules, and it would be an appalling society that required allegiance to a chaotic legal system. The rule of law in such a society would be immoral and the state would be despotic or anarchical. Either way, it would a totalitarian regime. Clearly, the Model Rules anticipate that a lawyer will be familiar with the order that is present in the legal system that makes the rule of law. It should be an obligation of all legal educators, then, to understand and teach about the order within the law that justifies it as a rational and moral institution.

The history of legal philosophy, at least since Plato, has attempted to understand how the law is justified (or not justified) by understanding how the law is ordered and to what purposes. This was true of medieval Christians, who viewed civil law as reflecting an order in the Eternal plan that exists in the Mind of God (the Logos) that shapes the natural world. Later thinkers took similar approaches of attempting to derive the order of law from a presupposed transcendent Order, so as to justify the rule of law as a divinely sanctioned use of power that finds authority in Christ. Modern secular thought has looked to secular sources of order: tradition, logic, state action, and natural science. The rule of law today is understood as protecting human rights, but the source of those rights (and therefore, the order in the law) is hotly contested. Some of the most trenchant legal disputes in society touch on the moral meaning of human rights and the nature and limits of their legal enforcement. The way we conceptualize the order in the law is essential to the way we defend claims that law is justice and contributes to the common good of society. The challenge for legal education, then, is to teach students enough about jurisprudence to justify the rule of law by finding a moral order with it might reflect and promote.

Objectivity: The Problem of Modernity

This is a particularly difficult problem for lawyers working in a modern society where justification is sought in the rational objectivity of the order that law imposes. Modern social thought is defined by a spirit and a commitment to certain principles of thought that are held to be essential to rationality itself. In the description of law must be justified by objective rationality. And this distinguishes it from the view of law that was held in the medieval world. Thomas Aquinas, for example, claimed that law that is not moral is not law at all. This view, known as classical natural law, was based on the naive realism of the classical era.

This belief in naive realism was rejected by modern thinkers, beginning with Descartes who came to view it as outdated and dogmatic. This led to the rejection of natural law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously called the natural law “nonsense on stilts” (quoting Bentham). The modern legal theorist was called on to develop a theory of law that is not rooted in faith or the authority of the Church to interpret religious tradition, or even in the authority of jurists to interpret cultural tradition.

Modern legal theory is distinguished by its claims to be based on objective observation and reason. And essential to this task was the goal of freeing social thought from metaphysical claims about the nature of the moral good. These claims, that human nature has a comprehensive purpose (telos), and that society should be arranged so as to help bring that purpose about, were determined by early twentieth century thinkers to be irrational. For the sociologist, Max Weber, for example, to eliminate teleological reasoning was essential to the process of rationalizing society. The goal of the social sciences was to determine the right relations between persons that are not derived from or indexed to claims about what the proper goals of human life ought to be. Coming to understand the purpose of one’s life was held to be an individual pursuit, not one that is forced by the state or other social institution. The goal of law in this view was to achieve a minimal set of objectively fair rules that allow for social harmony among individuals pursuing their own moral purposes. This was the high hope for law at the outset of the twentieth century, but it quickly proved itself to be fraught with issues that go to its core assumptions.

It is useful for understanding these issues, to look to the development of modern natural and social sciences. By the late eighteenth century, the natural sciences, for which Isaac Newton’s mechanics was the exemplar, had achieved a revered status in the social sciences, challenging conceptions of what it means to be human and how human sociality works. Scientific studies of human beings began when philosophers like David Hume (1711–1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) laid the foundations for positivism (the belief that fact and value are dichotomously separated). Adam Smith (1723–1790) introduced economics. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) laid the groundwork for modern social thought. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) contributed theories of evolution in the late 19th century. Carl Menger (1840–1921) developed the modern price theory. And by the early twentieth century, the academic study of psychology was founded by theorists like William James (1842–1910) and medical practitioners like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Psychology was quickly transformed by behaviorists — notably John B. Watson (1878–1958), who argued that a true science must focus exclusively on observable behavior. Modern anthropology also began during this period with the development of ethnography and the methods of field research by early anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942). These scientists of the human were immediately successful in describing previously unknown aspects of the diversity and complexities of human life.

Nonetheless, as the twentieth century progressed, the tensions in the project of modernity became clear. Bruno Latour describes these tensions in his long essay, We Have Never Been Modern.[2] These problems with modernity come from the tensions between two conflicting dimensions. One is purity, by which Latour means the belief that science ought to be purely objective and free from political and personal idiosyncrasy. This aspiration for an objective social science holds forth the possibility of a point of view that lies outside of human psychological and cultural construction — outside of the mind and culture. The other dimension Latour calls hybridization. He means that even while modernity seeks purity, it discovers the impossibility of escaping culture and psychology. For Latour, this means that modern thought has never achieved its ambition of attaining a rational and objective account of society. Instead, by the mid-twentieth century, it appeared that the mind cannot escape from itself or from the cultures that human minds collectively form over time.

These tensions quickly became apparent in early twentieth-century legal theory, which had ambitions of becoming modern. It did this in two ways: Legal Formalists sought to develop a rigorous method, and it turned the scientific method on itself, by looking at law as a human phenomenon that could be productively studied using the scientific method. Initially, the efforts to scientize the law sought to establish law as an objective science by viewing legal reasoning as a disciplinary method. That is to say, legal formalism viewed legal reasoning as an objective study of logically necessary principles, rather like geometry. The pure principles of law could be inductively determined from examining multiple instances of their existence in the appellate case law that became the source material for legal education. In this way, the legal formalists thought that they could establish an independent science of legal rules, that would progress objectively and scientifically.

But the purveyors of this presumed science were not aware of the cultural specificity of what they sought to achieve. The concept of law was a European and later an Anglo/American phenomenon. Other cultures have rules and ordered societies, but the application of the concept of “law” to these practices must be made cautiously if one is to avoid cultural imperialism. Ancient China had Confucian rules of social order — very rigid and formal ones — but they are not “laws” in the Western sense.

This was a point made clear by legal scholars who called themselves Legal Realists. Some of them had professional training in anthropology and sociology — people like the famous University Chicago Law School dean, Karl Llewellyn, who described in his early work titled On the Cheyenne Way[3] how disputes were resolved among the Cheyenne people of North Dakota. Llewellyn and his Legal Realists were aware that a legal system is the product of a shared legal culture, that it is not determined entirely by discovering objective rules, and that the value of legal reasoning for predicting the outcomes of legal matters was limited. While the Legal Realists reached a variety of conclusions, Llewellyn defined the “core” who believed that law depends on shared formal meaning and shared understanding of legal propositions. When you hear lawyers speak of “thinking like a lawyer,” they refer to this shared understanding and the process of disclosing meaning within the standards of the profession. But legal reasoning does not define a theory of law. In fact, since the whole system of democracy depends on the non-lawyers’ respect for the law, a theory of law must describe why and how the general public gives respect to jurists and lawyers. To illustrate this, consider Justice Sotomayor‘s dislike of lawyer jokes. She reportedly will not allow them to be heard in her courtroom because she believes that they weaken the legal system. They undermine the respect for the law, for judges, and for lawyers on which the rule of law rests. Law is respected because it reflects the way a culture has responded to great questions about the nature of the person, the meaning of the state, the goods that can be pursued in common, and those that can only be pursued individually. Examination of the rules alone could not explain these issues, and therefore the Realists sought to understand law through interdisciplinary projects that brought in anthropology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences.

Thus, the problem of modernity, the tension between the search for pure objectivity and the inevitable hybridization of objectivity in personal and cultural subjectivity, was evident from the start. Formalists could not explain enough of the lived experience of law, and so Realists looked to insights in other disciplines. But as the century progressed these other fields would be called into question as well.

Objectivity failed to resolve choices among competing alternative and conflicting values. Many of the deepest controversies in our society today reflect continued disagreements over which alternatives will guide policies that force choices between competing values. Family, personal integrity, health, prosperity, work, and property, these are concepts that have formal, legal meanings. They also have broader cultural meanings than are known in their ordinary use. For most people, they point well beyond their conceptual boundaries to greater values that are difficult to describe. The continual question for all responsible citizens is this: Do the cultural choices we encounter broaden and refine the resources of the human spirit? Is our law good? Does it meet our needs and encourage human flourishing? Is our state living up to our expectations for it? These are questions that are essential to the rule of law because they give law authority that withstands the claims of immediate need and the threat of coercion. The modern legal theorist needed a way to describe how these questions were being answered, but also to maintain the pure objectivity of the theory. This tension was insurmountable.

Many theorists, including some within the philosophy of science, have argued that pure objectivity is not possible, that the observer is always biased, even by the theoretical presuppositions that pre-exist the observation. Two approaches to philosophy had a significant impact on legal theory. In the anglophone world, philosophy, including the philosophy of law, was dominated by analytic philosophy. While this is a term that is applied to many different philosophers and is therefore difficult to define, it is characterized by a concern with coherent usage of language and conceptual clarity. It accepts that pure objectivity is impossible; and so, limits the role of philosophy to providing logical analysis of language and words. Clarity and coherence are its goals, not a statement about the nature of reality or transcendent meaning. It responds to the tension in the problem of modern philosophy with modesty.

The exemplar of the analytic approach was HLA Hart’s, book The Concept of Law,[4] was the most important book in legal theory during the twentieth century. Hart developed a complex argument that views the formalist/realist debate as misses the issue of authority. The formalist is viewing legal specialists as the only relevant interpretive community, and the Realist is looking to outsiders. The key to understanding Hart’s theory is his attempt to understand law from an internal perspective, by which he means that of an imagined typical non-lawyer. He is a ‘soft positivist’ which means that he believes that law does not depend on moral sentiments, other than a few claims that legitimate the law-making processes. But moral sentiments play no role in law beyond legitimating the rule-making process. It was this aspect, the positivism, of Hart’s project that attracted the most attention and controversy. Hart famously engaged in a public debate with Lon Fuller, a Harvard Law professor, and Ronald Dworkin, a philosopher. Both Fuller and Dworkin believed that Hart’s positivism was not correct. For Dworkin, the more philosophically sophisticated of the two, the concept of law could not be defined without reference to moral sentiments, which often supplement legal rules in cases where law is indeterminate. This happens frequently, so Dworkin believed that the concept of law itself depends on the connection between law and moral sentiment. He called this the ‘semantic sting’ argument. [5]

Among anthropologists, the most closely related to analytic philosophy is Clifford Geertz, who called his work The Interpretation of Cultures[6] and believed that law is culture, by which he means a system of significations. The goal of the anthropologist is to “thickly describe” the way that symbols are present in actual use within a culture, and then to interpret how the users of the symbols are “imagining the real.” He views cultural systems as intimately related to narratives of reality as such, and since the law is culture, he believed that legal systems “imagine the real” through the symbols that are present in the legal system. This ties law to religion, in particular, which typically has a comprehensive account of reality. Examples of Cultural Interpretation in legal analysis can be found in Lesley French’s work on law and Tibetan Buddhism. [7]

To understand how these arguments exemplify the problem of modernity, it is useful to consider the other major philosophical camp, which sought to derive objective understanding from pure observation of lived experiences — the experience of things as they are — was the project of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology.[8] Husserl’s project was limited to introspective analysis of phenomena as they present themselves to the mind. His method was to “bracket” the assumptions about the reality of things and study the experience itself. (He called this the eidetic reduction). Husserl believed that this was a fully modern project because he conceived of it as determining the objectively necessary features for having the experience (transcendental phenomenology). But from the start, he attracted the criticism of the analytic philosophers. His colleague, Gottlieb Frege, who is sometimes considered to be the founder of analytic philosophy, broke with Husserl, finding his work to be solipsistic. [9]

Husserl was soon eclipsed by his more famous students. A very influential argument was advanced by Martin Heidegger, who studied under Husserl in the 1920s. He argued that comprehensive narratives (metaphysics) are not grounded in objective facts, but in cultural hegemonies that serve the powerful elites in legitimating and perpetuating their authority.[10] The pure encounter with reality that modern thought seeks, he argued, requires experiencing the world without bringing concepts to bear on the experience. He believed that a ‘bracketing” of concepts is necessary to know Being as such. In his later writings, he argued that technology tends to work against such an encounter and creates value in concepts of utility and efficiency. Rather than seeing things as they are, we tend as technological creatures to ask how we can use the Beings we encounter, including human beings. Technology implicates morals of the market in which we never get to know the value of people in themselves, but only their usefulness to us for our own projects. He believed that the way out of this dilemma was to empower the State to use power to enforce tradition. This aspect of his work has been viewed as the source of his endorsement of Fascism. He was a Nazi who turned against his mentor, Edmund Husserl.

In 1959, Jacques Derrida deepened Heidegger’s argument by questioning whether structural analysis of phenomena is objective in the sense of being free from culture and history. Structuralism was a view that was rapidly gaining support and was particularly influential among anthropologists like Claude Levi Strauss. Structuralism was developed by psychologists who believed that certain psycho-social structures are universal for all people, regardless of culture.[11] They seek to interpret cultural artifacts for their relation to these universal structures. An example of structuralism can be found in the mythological studies of Joseph Campbell. Although his relationship to structuralism is contested, his conceptualization of universal myths exemplifies the core claims of Structuralism. Campbell became famous by giving George Lucas an outline of the Hero’s Quest, which he held to be a universal story that transcends cultural manifestations.[12] Legal anthropologists like Paul Bohannan took up the structuralist method to examine law and legal institutions for the structures that are universal among legal cultures.

Derrida argued that structuralism is not purely objective, since all structures always already have a history that makes understanding possible. He argued that the original insight that led to the history of a conceptualization of a structure is not a “positing” but a creative impulse that he refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. His concept of deconstruction involves disclosing the originality which is the generative moment in understanding.[13] Critically, for neither Heidegger nor Derrida is pure observation possible. Applied to analytic philosophy, they argue that the pretext to conceptual clarity and coherence is nothing more than a veiled appeal to culture-bound preferences for some normative values of judgment and argument. That is to say, science itself is gendered, racist, and arbitrary. Critical studies have gone so far as endorsing this view of natural science.

In law, Derrida has had more impact than Heidegger. His work on “deconstruction” has been influential for Critical Race theory and some feminist theories. Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, argues that while Derrida, Paul de Man, and others, developed their method of deconstruction to further philosophical claims about the nature of language and meaning, it was altered by its introduction into the legal academy; where deconstruction had to be translated and altered in significant ways, making it more flexible, practical, and attentive to questions of justice and injustice. In an essay titled, “Deconstruction’s Legal Career,’ Balkin describes some of the changes that deconstruction underwent as it moved from philosophy to literature and then to law. “Its transformation eventually produced a deconstructive practice that emphasizes sensitivity to changes in interpretive context, a pragmatic approach to conceptual distinctions, and careful attention to the role of ideology and social construction in legal thought.”[14] This critique also suggests that Latour’s analysis applies to deconstruction, which has been called “post-modern’ for its open rejection of the modern hope for objectivity.

Understanding these challenges, some philosophers have attempted to discern the truth-function in law as a science. For example, Brian Leiter looks to the work of Willard Quine, whose project called “naturalized epistemology,”[15] attempts to give a scientific account of how knowledge is formed. Quine argued that what is particular about scientific knowledge is its reliability. That is to say, that science is the best method for getting reliable predictions about future events. He would like a theoretical account of knowledge that puts reliability at the center. This approach is called “pragmatism,” and it is has a distinguished career in law, if not in mainstream philosophy. It is associated with C. S. Pierce, William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.[16] Leiter, who is the Karl Llewellyn Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Chicago, argues that this is precisely what the Legal Realists sought to do and that jurisprudence should be “naturalized’ along the lines of Quine’s epistemology, by adopting pragmatism as its ideal. He describes what this would look like in his work on the conception of naturalized jurisprudence. Note that this can be viewed as a noble attempt to save modernity by looking to reliability for the pure objectivity that modern thought has failed to find.

Information Science and the Question of Order

The problem of modernity arises in a new form from the science information, with two dimensions: First, digital information has no implicit meaning. Second, it is necessarily incomplete. This was a breakthrough achieved as a result of Shannon information theory. Shannon was an employee of Bell Labs in the 1940s who was given the assignment of figuring out how to send a telephonic signal down a long wire without distortion. Electromagnetic interference, which can be caused by many natural phenomena such as sunspots, adds “noise” to the signal being translated. In his efforts to solve this problem, Shannon described a theory of information set out in terms of order and randomness. In an excellent book, Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,[17] James Gleick describes Shannon information theory as having three conclusions:

* Information is a measurement of uncertainty about whether the received impulse is a signal or noise.

* Information is therefore about surprise. That is, if a signal is common, then it contains less information than if it is novel.

* Conceptually, Shannon information is indistinguishable from Entropy, the concept in physics that describes how energy in a system dissipates.

Shannon information means that the more random a series of signals is, the more information it contains. After Shannon, entropy came to be described as the amount of information needed to describe a precise physical state. John Wheeler, a renowned physicist, argues in a famous paper, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” that “information gave rise to everything.”[18]

The brain’s ability to understand — to give meaning to information — involves more than simply receiving digital information through neural impulses. It requires integrating the information received through the sense-organs with prior existing patterns and socially constructed meaning. Meaning is always constructed in a brain, and the brain is conditioned to understand the world in particular ways, by developing within a cultural context. Experience gained by living within a cultural context actually shapes the brain’s neural pathways, empowering the brain to understand the world it encounters within a particular cultural milieu or setting that provides context.

And second, development came from mathematical logic, which underwent a dramatic challenge in the early twentieth century as it became clear that geometry itself depends upon presuppositions about the nature of objects. The Euclidean geometry that had been taken as evidence of the rational structure of God’s creation, and thereby the existence of the God who is known primarily as Logos (order).[19] As mathematics developed, its close connection with the experience of the world was challenged by concerns about an order that might transcend perception. It became much more abstract, and the connection of it to physical reality became more suspect. The relatively simple theories of mathematics that were developed by neo-Kantians and American pragmatists like C.S. Pierce, were challenged by non-Euclidean geometries that sought to expand vector analysis beyond two or three dimensions, into an infinite number of dimensions (called a Hilbert space after the great mathematician, David Hilbert).[20] Mathematical logic showed, moreover, that any formal mathematical system relies on formulations that lie outside of the system. This was the contribution of Kurt Gödel.[20]

An implication of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems is that the precise conceptual statement of lived experience is impossible. Every description of a lived experience is necessarily incomplete. The neural scientist, Miguel Nicolelis describes what he has called “Gödelian information,”[20] by which he means the reservoir of memories and apprehensions that are encoded in the analog medium of folded proteins. This analog residue allows the mind to form meaning from intuitions and pre-conceptual awareness. Nicolelis offers this example.

Suppose a recently wedded couple enjoys their first honeymoon breakfast on a hotel balcony facing the Aegean Sea, on the Greek island of Santorini. As a typical Greek rose-fingered dawn unfolds in classic Homeric splendor, their hands touch and they exchange a brief passionate kiss. Fast forward 50 years into the future. On the date of what would be the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary, the only living witness of that first morning, the widow, returns to the same Santorini hotel balcony and orders the same Greek breakfast at dawn. As soon as she tastes her lonely meal, although half a century has elapsed, she again vividly experiences the same profound feeling of affection produced by the hand caress and the kiss shared with her beloved groom. And even though the skies are clouded this time around, and there is no wind, at that instant she feels almost transported to the original Santorini sunrise and experiences, once again, the sweetness of an early morning Aegean breeze brushing her hair as she touches the love of her life. For all intents and purposes, the widow is now experiencing the same sensations she felt half a century ago.[21]

Nicolelis suggests that the information retrieved after fifty years is full of meaning for the widow, but the meaning is not captured in the information as it was originally perceived. The information is held as Gödelian information, which means that it includes apprehensions and intuitions that are not discrete objects of thought. The widow would never be able to convey the experience of love, tenderness and loss. That is because although “the Gödelian information can be partially projected into Shannon Information and transmitted in the form or oral or written language, it cannot be fully expressed in those reduced digital terms.”[22] When one attempts to communicate the ineffable in an experience, the communication does not occur simply by transferring information.

Another two examples further illustrate this point. Consider two statements: the first is Romeo’s statement that “Juliet is the Sun.” The second is the statement that “a corporation is a person.” Both of these statements are literally false. Juliet is not the sun, of course, and any reasonable person would know that. And a corporation is not a person — it is a person only in a formal, legal sense that defies natural reason and common sense. What the philosopher, Stanley Cavell, says of the first statement, “Juliet is the Sun,” can equally apply to both statements. He says that the statement is not intended for just anyone. It is intended for people who already understand the analogy, and in this sense looks beyond itself for its meaning. It is a statement made for those who already “get it” (like an inside joke) and it invites the listener into a relationship of mutual understanding — it elicits allies.[23]

The significance of Gödelian information, Nicholelis suggests, lies in theuniqueness in evolved systems. It is a result of the unique experiences that contributed to the evolution of an organism, which includes the common experiences of a particular species, but also the unique experiences of an individual being. Evolution occurs through an incalculable number of highly particular events that shape the outcome of an organism, and so too an individual brain is shaped by countless particulars. Human understanding is a result of these particulars. And so, the idea of a purely objective observation point, free from the idiosyncrasies of individual psychology and culture, appears to be impossible within the current description of neural science and anthropology. And thus, Latour’s description of the problem of modernity, the tension at its core that prevents it from being realized, is to some extent confirmed by conclusions of the scientific method that inspired it.

Legal theory has yet to be influenced deeply by these developments. However, the Oxford philosopher, Luciano Floridi has written a number of deeply probing works on the implications of information science for philosophy.[24] He is critical of the way that philosophers have conceived of their work in recent years, and he argues that the whole field needs to be re-envisioned to put concepts of information and computation at the center of knowledge and ethics. Floridi’s work has had limited influence on legal thought, but one fellow Italian scholar, Massimo Duarte, has attempted to describe the implication of Floridi for law.[25]

Complexity science is another development that has not provoked deep reflection on the philosophy of law as of yet. Brian Tamanaha, who writes on the sociology of law from a pragmatic perspective, has written some on emergence, but drawing from a nineteenth-century understanding of the phenomenon, related to the chemical reaction that yield substances that are unlike the reactants. This seems misdirected.[26]

What Legal Education Must Become

Given this brief outline of the intellectual history of the concept of order in legal theory, one might ask what it suggests about the study of law. The answer should be abundantly clear. Legal study is not simply about learning some useful tools for legal analysis that can be sold in the marketplace for legal services. Here I want to draw a distinction between two metaphors for the academy. One model likens the law school to a factory. This nineteenth-century model was advanced by Charles Evans Hughes, the 11th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. It views students as the raw material to which value must be added, by shaping and molding the student into a product for productive use. It is outdated pedagogy: the idea the law schools’ primary purpose to be like an assembly line that produces a product for the legal services industry. The other is a model, a more promising one, is of liberal learning associated with Robert Maynard Hutchinson and the history of Western Civilization programs.

The Factory Model

The factory metaphor was exemplified for me by an encounter I once had with the Associate Dean of a major law school, who referred to her students as the “Product.” She is not alone, there is a growing trend throughout American education to view the students this way. Some argue that this trend can be traced to the late nineteenth century. Anthony Kronman, who is a former dean at Yale Law School makes this claim in his book, The End of Education.27] Others, like Columbia University religious studies professor Mark Taylor, trace the trend to Immanuel Kant, who wrote in his 1798 work, Der Streit der Fakultaten (On the Conflict of the Faculties)[28] that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by a division of labor so that there would be a specialist for every branch of knowledge.” This idea of a division of labor, of course, invokes Adam Smith’s pin factory. This is the factory notion of education that looks to specialization as a means of achieving economies of scale. It is not at all clear that it works for educational institutions, particularly in the current conditions of globalized and networked communications.

There are several flaws with this model that seem to get overlooked despite their obviousness. First, this view is immoral since it implies that a student is an inert object that can be packaged for retail at the end of an assembly line. Students are commoditized — turned into products for consumption by someone else. The problem with this view of course is that human beings should never be treated as objects. They are never merely “means to an end,” as philosophers and theologians have always argued. Treating them in this way dehumanizes them and devalues them. And it is not a liberalizing view in the sense that it does not seek to set the student free — to cultivate the autonomous thinking and independence of students. It does not cultivate wisdom or ask the student to engage in the type of open and truth-pursing discourse that is essential to democracy.

It is also, ultimately, a self-defeating model for legal education in an age of very rapid technological development, since the old ways of organizing for business are rapidly becoming obsolete. In the nineteenth-century factory model, which has deeply influenced legal education, specialization is the key to productivity. The factory line workers specialize in very narrow skills, and no one person is capable of building the product alone. In legal education, this assembly-line model means that students are viewed as raw material to which value must be added, piece by piece, by deeply siloed area experts whose expertise is defined by very narrow fields of vision. The education of the student as a whole person is devalued. The impact of this narrowness of focus is explored in 2019, McKinsey & Company produced a report, “Transforming Expert Organizations,”[29] which examines, in part, the costs to law firms and their clients. The Report identified several psychological factors typical among lawyers that work against change. These include a mindset that views people as having fixed abilities and denies the realities of intellectual growth and ability. Citing the work of Carol Zweck[30] on the impact of mindset, the Study suggests that lawyers tend toward limiting mindsets, which can undervalue people and their innovative ideas.

Also relevant is the Dunning–Kruger effect,[31] which is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their ability in an area. It is a form of the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability, particularly in adjacent or tangential skillsets to an area of expertise. In general, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence in a field. Where they are considered experts, their beliefs about their abilities often exceeds the limits of their area of expertise. For lawyers and law professors, this means that they often believe they know more about areas such as economics, political theory, and philosophy than is warranted.

The Report identified several consequences of the psychological resistance to change that is particularly damaging for law firms and clients. These include:

  • Expertise is “valued for its own sake, rather than being seen as a part of contributing to customer value.” This means that lawyers are often demonstrating their pride in their area of expertise, rather than trying to solve the problems of their clients. In legal education, it leads to the value of being rude and impatient, (styled as being “rigorous”), rather than being educators of the whole person.
  • Knowledge is shared via “ad hoc apprenticeships.” Sharing knowledge is not incentivized. This aspect inevitably leads to institutional biases, where “in’ groups help those like them and socially benefit from excluding those who are criticized for being “different”.
  • Experts assert ownership over “tasks” and fail to improve “the way organizations perform tasks.” Institutionalized specialization
  • Finally, there is a glaring lack of teamwork, no “end-to-end ownership” of the client’s experience, and a failure to create and enforce “standard ways of working.”

According to the Report, these values and practices are entrenched in the legal profession. In law schools, they are reflected in the structures of faculty specialties, clinical education, and the attachment to outdated ideas about teaching professional identity. Nevertheless, the McKinsey Study argued that change is possible. Better practices can be developed that focus on delivering value to clients; developing disciplined managers, standardizing processes and products where possible; and encouraging lawyers to be creative innovators.

Today, business is being transformed by the rapid growth in artificial intelligence. In the past decade, AI achieved a breakthrough that is known as deep learning. Since its inception in the 1950’s, AI experienced a few decades-long “deserts” when little progress was made. But about a decade ago, a team of computer scientists led by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun developed deep learning, which involves training multiple layers of simulated neural nets to recognize progressively sophisticated distinctions.[32] For example, in image processing, an early layer may detect the edges of objects, while a top layer may recognize words or numbers. The team was awarded the Turing Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 2019. The significance of this breakthrough is greater than may be immediately apparent. Deep learning is the latest step in the evolution of the social and political sciences since it allows for the detection and manipulation of subtle patterns in the data of human activities including basic social functions, such as grammar and syntax of communication. These developments shed new light on the nature of practical reasoning about politics, law, and ethics. The nature of moral obligation, human dignity, the common good, justice, and virtue are given new light by the powerful new tools that deep learning is bringing about in fields as diverse as the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Digital humanities shape anthropology, economics, literature, and even feminist thought. All areas of human inquiry where pattern detection is a goal can greatly benefit from the new technology since it enhances human cognition at a basic level. A new challenge for society at all levels will be to understand and cope with all of the new insights into the nature of human communications and social networking that will result. At the more practical level, this means studying, reflecting, teaching, and learning about the new tools and the changes they have in society.

The techno-social dimension is easily ascertained; we are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. Klaus Schaub, the founder of the World Economic Forum, argues in his book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution,[33] that technological innovations have driven economic and social change, radically transforming society. Foundational work in applied ethics, which informs law and regulation, is urgently needed to comprehend the technical issues presented by the new technologies. There is nothing new in this. For example, the development of coal-fueled steam engines freed human beings from the limitations of animal power. Gasoline and electricity extended and refined that freedom. The information age is profoundly altering the moral and legal needs of society and calling for new approaches that encompass the new understandings brought about by the changes. In Competing in the Age of AI, [34]Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karmin R. Lakhani explain,

As digital technology increasingly shapes ‘all of what we do’ and enables a rapidly growing number of tasks and processes, AI is becoming the new operational foundation of business — the core of a company’s operating model, defining how the company drives the execution of tasks. AI is not only displacing human activity; it is changing the very concept of the firm.[9]They claim that “no field of human endeavor will remain independent of artificial intelligence.” This opinion is widely shared among AI experts and social theorists who study technological change. As a result, we live in a time of great promise and great peril. The world has the potential to connect billions of people through digital networks, dramatically improve the efficiency of organizations, and manage assets in ways that can help regenerate the natural environment, potentially undoing the damage of previous industrial revolutions.[35]

As Iansiti and Lakhani suggest, the impact of AI is not limited to natural scientists and technologists.

Critically, they note that AI has created new business models that are far more competitive in the current information environment than the outdated models of 19th-century industrialism. Also critically, the current information age demands attention to the information structure of the firm. Focus on information, not labor, is the key success, but most law firms need to be re-designed for AI. An AI operating model should be designed to unleash the power of AI. This means creating a platform for business operations that can rapidly respond to digital agents in the form of applications that address a variety of different situations. Clearly, the business side of law firms will benefit from more knowledge of the critical business aspects of their operations. These aspects include more precise risk/return analysis on individual legal matters, better control over operating expenses, more effective marketing, and better financial analysis. On the practice side, applying AI to law as big data has allowed for argument analysis, which reveals the preferences of judges in expressing particular issues, prediction of future laws and regulation, and the drafting of contracts, forms, and even court briefs.

The scope of change is not merely superficial; they are also deeply philosophical. And that means that they profoundly alter the assumptions on which society has been based. The consequences are looming. The AI revolution is also unprecedented in its challenge to human self-understanding and therefore the nature of ethical reasoning. In his book, The Fourth Revolution,[33] Oxford philosopher Luciano Floridi argues that the current age should be likened to a Copernican revolution because breakthroughs of the information sciences have displaced human beings from any claim of uniqueness or superiority, and revealed that we are nothing other than information, just like every other creature. Humans differ in degree of intelligence from other animals, but not in kind. And, eventually, we can imagine artificial intelligence will surpass human reasoning in most specific tasks.

Viewed as information systems, human beings organize into social structures, called complex adaptive systems (CAS). Using advanced AI and vast data sets of law, it is now possible to detect and describe the CAS that exists in the law. This is a new frontier for understanding the nature of law since it demonstrates empirically that law is not simply a system of rules, but a system that exists because of social interactions that it influences. Law influences social interaction, even as it is being shaped by that interaction. The source and limits of order in the law can be seen anew, as powerful deep learning reveals previously hidden patterns that lie undetected in the data of the law. This new awareness, an outgrowth of the new understanding of information, is changing society and transforming the way the legal services industry operates, the way law is practiced by licensed attorneys, and the way law is understood by academics. The implications of this revolution in legal thought are profound since they challenge the basic assumptions about the nature and purpose of politics; for example, the goods that human beings can pursue together through the political organization, the nature of law in a constitutional democracy, and even the moral meaning of human life.

The Liberal Learning Model

To respond to these challenges, a new view of education is needed. The nineteenth-century model of expert specialization does not serve the needs of today, where interdisciplinary studies are of critical importance. Since AI is not constrained by disciplinary boundaries, increasingly the problems faced by society — indeed, by clients at every level — are understood to have multiple dimensions that require multiple areas of expertise. While this observation may be obvious in a high-tech corporation, it is equally true of an indigent client or pro se litigant, who might have financial, social, psychological, medical, and other issues beyond the law that need to be redressed. A lawyer’s ability to zealously represent the needs of the client must be able to engage with multiple disciplines that will share in being guided by machine learning and data. Moreover, the lawyer is called upon to understand and speak publicly about the needs of society, in the role of the lawyer as a public citizen.

The new technology must be managed by natural and social scientists with great technical skill and knowledge, but it also requires a new engagement with what Robert Maynard Hutchins memorably called the “Great Conversation” of the humanities.[36] At issue from Hutchins’s perspective is the fact that, on many levels, AI challenges the way human beings understand themselves and their place in the world. Since the general goal of AI is to mimic human intelligence, it requires deep and detailed understanding of how the human mind works. It also rests on the profound transformation of fundamental understanding of the nature of existence itself (what philosophers call the “ontological question”). Information science has displaced the human brain as the sole possessor of reason, and in fact has shown it to be a common natural phenomenon. It has also shown that information itself is a fundamental component of existence, even at the quantum level. Together, these two insights challenge the traditional understanding of what is sometimes called the “moral anthropology,” or the self-understanding of the moral nature of human beings. For this reason, once again, the humanities are on the agenda since the question, ‘what is the meaning of human life?’ is put at issue.

Hutchins’s Great Conversation is the educational goal of encouraging students to see themselves as inheritors of the intellectual history of learning and thought on the great questions of human value and meaning. They are the benefactors of ancient Greek thought on virtue from Plato and Aristotle; on Christianity from figures like Augustine of Hippo, Dante, and the medieval scholastics; of modern skeptical philosophes like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Darwin; and social scientists like Weber, Levi Strauss, and Robert Bellah. They are latecomers to this great conversation, but they, too, have something to contribute. The ability to think clearly about the Great Conversation and to participate for oneself goes to the essence of the concept of liberal arts education. As Hutchins described it (pardon the sexist language):

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.[37]

Hutchins believed that the goal of liberal education is the creation of an educated person who “comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject matter.” Liberal learning applied to the field of law, therefore, seeks to identify the fundamental questions that are foundational to American law, in the belief that knowing and understanding these fundamental questions is essential to the liberty of the student and of society. Today, AI is challenging the foundations of the Great Conversation, calling on the traditions of human thought to be refreshed and reconfigured. In its broadest sense, the Innovation Institute is thus at the vanguard of epic change in how humanity understands itself and its place in the moral order of the universe.

A similar view is advanced at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics in AI. Speaking about its mission, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chair of the Steering Group of the Institute for AI Ethics, observed that their Institute “just doesn’t expect the technologists to come up with the ethical answers, or the computer scientist to work out the most creative and valuable ways their technology might be used.”[38]

…. How do we integrate an artistic and humanities-based view of the world with our scientific outlook? That is what makes this a unique opportunity.”[39]

Oxford chose a philosopher, John Tasioulas, to be the founding director of their Institute. In his opening address, he stated,

AI will continue to have transformative effects on many parts of life, from medicine to law to how we do democracy. I do not want AI ethics to be seen as a narrow specialism, but to become something that anyone seriously concerned with the major challenges confronting humanity has to address. AI ethics is not an optional extra or a luxury, it is absolutely necessary if AI is to advance human flourishing.[40]

Ultimately, this is a task that requires insight from the humanities — particularly from philosophy and theology — since it engages questions about human meaning, the nature of mind, knowledge, and being itself, as core issues in understanding, developing and wisely implementing the tools that will recreate society and reorient human understanding. As Tasioulas explains:

Science can tell us the consequences of our actions but it does not tell us which goals we should pursue or what sacrifices are justified to achieve them. In so far as we are going to have AI as part of the technological solution to societal challenges, we inevitably have to address the ethical questions too. AI ethics is a way to get clearer about the value judgements involved and to encourage a more rigorous and inclusive debate.[41]

The same concern for understanding how AI is challenging moral understanding and raising new questions about what it means to live well in the world should be fundamental to legal education today, since the changes that are occurring in law are not limited to the addition of new technologies for doing the traditional tasks of lawyering.

Legal education must be responsive to the changing needs of students and the newest innovations in legal practice models, management, and the delivery of legal services. The factors that necessitate reform were identified in a 2020 report of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Education (the “Report”) stating,

The world is transforming at an accelerating pace. The practice of law in the United States is also transforming, albeit more slowly than the world and markets in which it operates. Technology, globalization, and mobility are core enablers of these shifts, and the legal profession and the delivery of legal services are not immune from their inevitable impacts.[42]

The Report calls for changes in legal education that the Commission believes are essential if the profession is to meet the needs of the future, rather than entrench the practices of the past. As described previously, the changes that are occurring in law are not limited to the addition of new technologies for doing the traditional tasks of lawyering. They are deep and fundamental changes that hold implications for the proper role and function of the rule of law in the American democratic plan.

The ABA Commission cautions that if legal education fails to attend to the coming changes, it could cripple the profession and have drastic consequences for the American democracy. The lawyer’s role in society is evolving, and if lawyers are not responsible self-regulators, they will be regulated by outsiders and lose the autonomy that they have enjoyed.

The profession could be radically transformed by outside regulation. Historically, lawyers have assumed that they will determine the design and delivery of their services, but this assumption is yielding to new economic factors. This assumption is under attack, since clients now have greater access to data about law firms and their operations, they are in control to a greater extent than in the past. Clients can now decide which firms to engage and which to avoid based on data about likely outcomes and comparative cost. This is creating a “buyer’s market” for legal services in which clients are looking more towards deliverable skills and efficacy, and less to pedigree. This is an industry-wide change that is led by the consumers of legal services. A substantial shift is already evident in some practice areas, and the trend is likely to continue. Clients are not willing to pay for an AmLaw100 firm if the service can be provided by an AmLaw200 firm at a lower price and substantially similar quality. The same can be said for legal service providers at all levels. In the contemporary competitive market, competency and cost-effectiveness are more important than pedigree and reputation. This is transforming corporate legal services and presents a substantial opportunity for down-market law schools that can deliver highly skilled lawyers who lack the prestige of their often less-skilled counterparts at more prestigious law schools. The concept of pedigree is economically inefficient, and it is increasingly viewed as a means for the prejudicial replication of hierarchy. The ABA Report states,

The profession must leverage technology and other innovations to meet the public’s legal needs, especially for the under-served. The profession must embrace the idea that, in many circumstances, people other than lawyers can and do help to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed.[43]

The Report calls for greater attention by law schools to use the new technology and new practice models to create educational programs that support access to justice. This is a worthy goal, but it does not offer a complete description of the changes that need to occur.

The Report argues that “[w]e must have a defensible rationale for what we retain in our current education and licensure model. We must also be prepared to lead radical and systemic change if we are committed to the future of access and service, and to the rule of law.” And it recognizes that the path ahead is uncertain and requires interdisciplinary investigation. The Report notes, “We should collaborate across and beyond the legal profession to identify the competencies needed in the rapidly evolving legal services landscape. Law schools and employers should work together to ensure these competencies are being developed.” The Report concludes,

In our closed competitive system, entrenched institutional governance and culture are common across educators, regulators, and the profession. The system prioritizes preserving the status quo, rather than taking bold collective risks to meet the challenge of a transforming world. This inclination to minimize change further stymies efforts to improve inclusivity.[44]

The pathologies of the nineteenth-century industrial age have been well-documented.[50] But they are exacerbated by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which has a two-fold impact: one techno-social, and the other humanistic. Goals for legal education must include teaching about technology and data science. There are two dimensions to this: the law regulating AI and the AI deployed in legal practice. Both aspects are needed. Teaching about the regulation of AI cuts across the boundaries of several traditional fields. Clearly, privacy, civil rights, torts, contracts, and business entities law are implicated. But a complete understanding of the regulation of AI also requires some understanding of the social ethics and political theory that are influenced by it. In sum, the ABA Commission cautions that if legal education fails to attend to the coming changes, it could cripple the profession and have drastic consequences for the American democracy. The lawyer’s role in society is evolving, and if lawyers are not responsible self-regulators, they will be regulated by outsiders and lose the autonomy that they have enjoyed.

Legal education must prepare lawyers to cope with the vast potential for good and ill that AI holds. It seems clear that AI must be carefully regulated and integrated into the legal system. Shannon Vallor, an AI ethicist, argues that AI applications typically create consequences that are difficult to know in advance and are far-reaching in their scope. This means that they require constant study and evaluation. Their impact on human rights and, critically, on the quality of life that they promote, must be closely considered because even well-intended and seemingly harmless technologies can have a significant impact of society. Consider, for example, how Facebook, which was intended as a way for friends to stay in touch with one another, has morphed into a key element in what Shoshona Zurbric calls “surveillance capitalism”[55] or the trade in private information, which is altering the processes of democratic discourse and transforming traditional legal concepts of public and private. The application of AI in legal technology should be particularly concerning, given the foundational role that law plays in democracy. In a recent book, Open Democracy, French scholar Hélène Landemore, describes the challenge posed by technology as the recognition that civic republicanism is a system based on “the people’s consent to power, rather than the people’s exercise of power.”[56] The rise of populism, she argues, is a response to this new awareness which has revealed that representative democracy has privileged ruling elites and entrenched a ruling class. This is true in law as well as political theory. The scope of the change is indicated by recent developments in the philosophy of law, which seeks to develop theoretical accounts of law as a generalized human artifact. Simply put, law today is being understood in new ways that require computer modeling and rethinking the natural law as information of the sort that is capable of being used by a digital computer. This means legal practice must be re-conceived for an age when algorithms and networks run the world.

And, so, there is no certainty that our society needs (or even wants) the “product” of law schools if that product is uncreative and unimaginative and lacks self-criticism. The thoughtless lawyer who is just following orders from the client exemplifies what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil — the thoughtlessness that makes anything acceptable. The problem with the factory approach to legal education is that it cultivates banality. It functions in the interest of the law schools and of the law firms at the expense of the long-term interests of students and the needs of society for sagacious citizen lawyers. In the long run, it undermines the rule of law and the objectives of a democratic society.

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Notes

[1]. The Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct contain this passage:

As a public citizen, a lawyer should seek improvement of the law, access to the legal system, the administration of justice and the quality of service rendered by the legal profession. As a member of a learned profession, a lawyer should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge in reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education. In addition, a lawyer should further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority. A lawyer should be mindful of deficiencies in the administration of justice and of the fact that the poor, and sometimes persons who are not poor, cannot afford adequate legal assistance , and . Therefore, all lawyers should therefore devote professional time and resources and use civic influence in their behalf to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel. A lawyer should aid the legal profession in pursuing these objectives and should help the bar regulate itself in the public interest.

[2] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993)

[3] Karl N. Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebol, The Cheyenne Way (1941)

[4] H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (3d ed, 2012)

[5] See, Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (1986).

[6] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1956)

[7] Rebecca French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995).

[8] See, Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol. 1 (Dermot Moran, trans. 2001).

[9] For an introduction to Frege, see Anthony Kenny, Frege (1995); for a discussion of Frege and Husserl see Clair Oriz Hill and G. E. R. Haddock, Frege or Husserl? (2000)

[10] See, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, trans. 1962).

[11] Claude-Levi Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962).

[12] Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (3d ed 2008); for a discussion of the connection to Star Wars and other movies see, How mythologist Joseph Campbell made Luke Skywalker a hero, CBC Radio blog (Sept. 2003) available at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-mythologist-joseph-campbell-made-luke-skywalker-a-hero-1.5262649

[13] See, Leonard Lawler, Derrida and Husserl, The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002).

[14] Jack Balkin, “Deconstruction’s Legal Career,” 27 Cardozo Law Rev. 719–740 (2010).

[15] W. V. O. Quine, Naturalized Epistemology in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969)

[16] See, Susan Haack, Pragmatism, Old and New (2006).

[17] James Gleick, Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2012).

[18]] John A. Wheeler, Information, Physics, Quantum (1989)

[19] This is a traditional Roman Catholic understanding of God, which contrasts with, for example, Calvinism, which conceives of knowledge of God primarily through divine Will. This is a conception of God that is related historically to the rise of contemporary Islamic thought.

[20] For an introduction to David Hilbert, see Luke Heaton, A Brief History of Mathematical Thought (2017).

[19] For an introduction to the Incompleteness Theorem, see John L. Casti, Gödel, A Life of Logic.

[20] Miguel Nicolelis, The True Creator of Everything (2020). 36–37.

[21] Id. at 37–38.

[22] Id. at 38.

[23] Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (2002).

[24] Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of information (2011)

[25] Massimo Durante, Ethics, Law and the Politics of Information (2020).

[26] Tamanaha, Brian Z., “Law’s Evolving Emergent Phenomena: From Rules of Social Intercourse to Rule of Law Society” (March 26, 2018), Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper №18–03–03, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3149771

[27] Anthony T. Kronman, Educations’ End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2008).

[28] Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Mary J. Gregor trans. 1992)

[29] Available at https://www.scribd.com/document/302854564/Transforming-Expert-Organizations-Final

[30] Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2019).

[31] David Dunning, The Dunning–Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance, 44 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 247–296 (2011)

[32] James Vincent, Godfathers of AI’ honored with Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computin , The Verge, (March 27, 2019) available at https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18280665/ai-godfathers-turing-award-2018-yoshua-bengio-geoffrey-hinton-yann-lecun

[33] Klaus Schaub, The Fourth Age (2017).

[34] Marco Iansiti & Karmin R. Lakhani, Competing in the Age of AI, Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World (2020),

[35] Id. at 3.

[36] Id.

[37] Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution (2014).

[38] Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Arts Education. Encyclopedia Britannica (1952).

[39] Id.

[40] Available at https://www.schwarzmancentre.ox.ac.uk/ethicsinai

[41] Id.

[42] Inaugural director and academic team appointed to new Institute for Ethics in AI, News and Events, Oxford University (September 11, 2020). Available at https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-09-11-inaugural-director-and-academic-team-appointed-new-institute-ethics-ai

[43] Id.

[44] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/leadership/office_of_the_president/futureoflegaleducation/

[45] Id.

[46] Id.

[47]

[48] Shoshona Zurbric, Surveillance Capitalism (2019).

[49] Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy (2020) xvi.

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