This is a call for submissions for abstracts for the Routledge Handbook on AI, Law and Society (forthcoming in the Routledge book series on AI, Law and Society). We are now open for submissions of abstracts.

Deadline for abstract: 1 May 2024. After all submissions are reviewed all selected submissions will be asked to proceed to submit a first draft (see the time plan  for this further down in this text). Submit your abstract (400 words), with a title, author name(s), contact information, and affiliation(s) to: matilda.arvidsson@law.gu.se with “AI Handbook abstract” as subject line.

What is the Handbook and what are we looking for?

The Handbook is looking for shorter chapters of ca 4-5000 words of critical scholarly interventions focusing on a specific topic or approach to AI, law and society. The texts will be comprehensive and give an overview of the research field of the topic/approach. The text can build on your previous scholarship, but it can also be an entirely new contribution.

The Handbook especially (but not exclusively) welcomes submissions on the following themes:

• Socio-legal and legal-political implications of AI in a variety of geographies, spaces and jurisdictions
• AI, law and fundamental values/principles in society
• Legal-political organisation of societies through and/or in resistance to AI (e.g. distributive, anarchist approaches, non-capitalist approaches, rights-based approaches)
• Environmental and embodied normativities and AI
• Posthuman, speculative aesthetics, new materialist, more-than-human, indigenous, decolonial, TWAIL, critical race, feminist, and other critical legal approaches to AI
• Historical analyses of, and approaches to, law, AI and related technologies
• AI, law and archival practices
• AI, law and political economy
• AI, automation and decision-making in law and governance
• AI, law, and the changing politics of digital and cyber space
• AI, digital twinning, and the regulatory and experiential challenges they give rise to
• AI, human and more-than-human rights
• AI, law and the (re)configuration of life
• Food security/food, AI and law
• AI (distribution of) global resources and law
• AI, law and discipline (Foucauldian and otherwise)/criminal law
• AI, law, and artistic praxis (intellectual property and beyond)
• All kinds of theoretically bent analyses (new/experimental or based on established theories) of the use, regulation, experience, and the socio-political impact of AI
• New challenges and methodological approaches to the legal study, use and regulation of AI
• Empirically based socio-legal analysis of/through AI

We are specifically looking for submissions from the following themes, topics and encounters:

• Decolonial perspectives on Law and AI
• Indigenous and other-than-Western approaches to AI, law and society
• Empirically based chapters showcasing other-than-Western AI, law and society in specific countries, regions, and geographies.

Background:

AI is a field of technologies rapidly growing in use and impact in society. At times it is envisioned as responding to pressing problems and human concerns, and at other times it is perceived as a probing problem and threat to humanity. The transition in a range of areas towards the implementation of AI technologies – for example in legal tech, med-tech, reg-tech, automated decision-making, consumer goods, and warfare technology – has fundamentally changed the social and political landscape in which legal norms emerge and are implemented. It has also changed how legal and political governance is designed, carried out and put under scrutiny. While scholars and practitioners disagree on the use, usefulness and problematics emerging through this transition, most agree that AI is not an a-political technology. Rather, it comes with its own political and legal normativity, as well as with demands for new types of regulatory frameworks governing – and indeed curbing – its legal and political power and impact. Moreover, AI has moved the legal imaginaries of what subjectivity, agency and legal personhood is or can be. The latter include areas of artistic practice as well as the question of what the defining elements of what and artificially intelligent system is – and therefore also what a human or non-human non-AI agent in contrast is or can be.

While AI is often understood as a question mainly concerning tech-intensive societies and such areas of political and legal normativity its increased use and implementation also carries with it renewed concerns about global extraction of resources – such as mineral and metals – from parts of the globe already made vulnerable through colonialism, global economic inequalities. This also includes the labour conditions through which extraction is carried – conditions that are for the most part illegal in the jurisdictions where the goods of the technologies enabled by such labour are enjoyed. The social and political implications of AI are thus affective on a global and even extra-planetary scale.

The present Handbook invites new ways of thinking about the various connections between AI, law, politics, and society. More broadly the Handbook is concerned with addressing the normative fields of the emergence, use, regulation, experience, and impact of AI and related emerging technologies.

The Handbook on AI, Law and Society adopts an open approach to AI. This means that the Handbook welcomes analyses of AI and related technologies and technological phenomena – such as blockchain, DAOs, and digital twins – from any institutional setting. This is inclusive of technological, political, legal, financial, and governmental designs of which AI is part.

Contributions can be theoretical, analysing conceptually the use, regulation, experience, and the socio-political impact of AI; they can be historical, outlining changes in how AI and related technologies have emerged and are governed; they can be material-empirical oriented, tracing or mapping the geo-political legal realities and labour embedded in AI; and they can assume a more contemporary-diagnostic approach, exploring, for example, the emergence of post-national or post/hyper-capitalist AI-governed spaces, agencies, and new subjectivities. The Handbook is committed to inviting abstracts that discuss AI-human-non-human links and formations, not only from “Western” perspectives and legal traditions, but also from de-colonial, TWAIL, and related perspectives.

The book Handbook is intended as a critical intervention at the interface of law, social and political theory, and AI studies. The Handbook’s interest in the social and political implications of AI in relation to law and normative power suggests a re-thinking of what and where law is, as well as what role AI plays – or indeed should play – in the making of law, politics, and society. The Handbook does not prescribe specific methodological approaches but invites and encourages a plurality of methodological strategies that can shed light on the intersection of law and AI and related emergent technologies.

Time plan

1 May 2024                 Abstract submissions deadline

1 October 2024           Submissions first draft

15 January 2025         Submission final draft