Symposium Description:
Join us for Being Human in the Age of AI, a symposium exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping the law’s most basic assumptions about the human person — from the privacy of the mind to the boundaries of legal responsibility. Across four panels, we trace an arc from the innermost self outward: how neurotechnology and algorithmic design test the limits of cognitive liberty; how deepfakes and biometric systems unsettle the law of identity; how automated decision-making challenges due process and the right to be heard; and how courts and legislatures are struggling to define what AI fundamentally is. Attendees will hear from leading scholars, technologists, and practitioners grappling with these questions in real time, as courts issue rulings, states pass conflicting statutes, and AI companies themselves debate the moral status of the systems they build.
Panel 1 — The Last Private Place: Neural Data, Digital Addiction, and the Law of Cognitive Liberty
As AI and neurotechnology move ever closer to the mind, this panel asks what it means for the law to protect mental privacy, attention, and cognition. Panelists examine neural-data statutes, addictive product design, and AI companion chatbots through privacy law, consumer-protection authority, and product liability. The central question: when does personalization shade into manipulation, and can existing law protect the user’s inner life?
Featuring Francis Shen, Matt Lawrence, and Tracy Shapiro, moderated by Vincent Joralemon.
Panel 2 — Your Face, Your Voice, Your Self: Deepfakes, Biometrics, and the Law of Identity
Generative AI can now clone a voice or fabricate a likeness, while biometric systems increasingly identify and track people through their faces and bodies. This panel examines the emerging law of identity from entertainment, civil-rights, and legal-scholarship perspectives. At its core is a single question: who controls identity once it becomes data?
Featuring Jennifer Rothman, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, and Mary Anne Franks, moderated by Sonia Katyal.
Panel 3 — The Black Box on Trial: Algorithmic Decisions, Due Process, and the Right to Contest
Algorithms now sit inside decisions that once guaranteed a hearing — bail, parole, benefits, medical coverage — often without one. This panel traces the fight over trade-secret protections shielding algorithmic decision-making and the limits of current AI audit tooling. Panelists debate whether courts, auditors, or legislatures are best positioned to deliver a meaningful “right to contest” an automated decision.
Featuring Rebecca Wexler, Deb Raji, and Sean Quinn, moderated by Colleen Chien.
Panel 4 — Person, Product, Tool, or Speaker? AI’s Contested Legal Status
While AI companies fund research into whether their own models might have morally relevant experiences, more than a dozen states have moved to declare by statute that AI cannot be conscious. This panel asks whether the law actually needs to resolve what AI fundamentally is — product, speaker, agent, or person — or whether courts are already deciding “who pays” case by case. Panelists bring perspectives from products-liability scholarship, First Amendment law, and in-house AI governance.
Featuring Catherine M. Sharkey, Janel Thamkul, and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, moderated by Pam Samuelson.