Personalised Law / Law by Algorithm: Oxford Business Law Blog Annual Conference 2022
The Oxford Business Law Blog has organised another successful annual conference, focusing this year on personalised law, and ‘law by algorithm’
This year’s conference was organised as a response to two recent books: ‘Personalised Law’ (OUP) by Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat, and ‘Law by Algorithm’ (Mohr Siebeck) by Horst Eidenmüller and Gerhard Wagner.
One panel was devoted to each book. In the first, panellists interrogated the extent to which giving effect to Ben Shahar and Porat’s prescription (to leverage technology to drive personalisation in the design of legal rules) would represent a change, and, to this extent, whether such a change was desirable. In the second, panellists responded to Eidenmüller and Wagner’s call for greater exploration of the implications of the technological revolution for private transactions and dispute resolution, interrogating issues of feasibility as well as more normative questions. The overall result was a rich scholarly conversation, spanning multiple areas of substantive law (both private and public) and drawing on a range of methodologies, which confirmed the case for research-driven, technologically-informed and (legal) subject-matter-specific responses to proposals for AI-driven changes to law-making and legal practice.
The conference featured a large number of members of the Oxford Law Faculty, including Horst Eidenmueller (lead organiser on behalf of the OBLB team), Luca Enriques, Kristin van Zwieten, Ariel Ezrachi, Rebecca Williams, Timothy Endicott, Sandy Steel, Wolfgang Ernst, John Armour, and Birke Haecker.
In line with past practice, proceedings from the conference have been converted into a special series of blog posts that are currently being featured on the OBLB. There, you will already find Professor Haecker’s ‘Personalised Law and Personalised Transactions: The Case for an Opt-In Model’, Professor Endicott’s ‘Law is Impersonal’, and Professor Williams’ ‘Personalised Criminal Law’. Readers of the Blog will see other posts coming out of the conference published in the coming fortnight.
The OBLB academic editors from the Oxford Law Faculty (Eidenmueller, Enriques, Helleringer, and van Zwieten) thank Javier Paz Valbuena and Vasile Rotaru, two of the Blog’s associate editors and doctoral students in the Faculty, for their work in helping to organise the conference.
The conference was financially supported by the Faculty’s MSc in Law and Finance program.
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