01
AI & THE LAW
(NEW PUBLICATION)
This timely volume is the first comprehensive study of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will dramatically affect the law, both as a profession and a regulatory domain, as well as society at large. The book invites everyone - those with prior knowledge of the topic and those without - on a literary voyage into demystifying the AI phenomenon. In equal part, a practice manual for lawyers, a governance guidebook for policymakers, a risk assessment toolkit for businesses, and a legal discourse that can be easily adapted for academia, this ground-breaking new publication discusses the technical capabilities of AI in the practice of law and its ethical, legal, political, and socio-economic implications. In shifting technological and regulatory quicksands, this volume fills a knowledge gap between the transformative forces of AI and the lagging grasp by key stakeholders. The book offers a toolkit for harnessing AI in the practice of law and for optimizing AI by society as a whole, aiming to prepare all stakeholders in the AI discourse to withstand the incoming AI wave.
02
The Human Lawyer in the Age of AI
AI trends are critical to legal education and training, most notably law schools and other providers of training to junior lawyers. This article contends that law schools should not only readjust existing curricula but devise wholly new ones to equip lawyers with the skillset of the future that is competitive not just with other lawyers but with AI. To use a metaphor, law schools should prepare lawyers that will survive the opening of the ‘AI floodgates'. Law schools would be well-advised to be the first responders to the incoming AI wave. Or else the human lawyers, though perhaps not at imminent risk of becoming a relic of the past, will be unprepared for the turbulence.
03
Reforming International Investment Law
Dessislav Dobrev’s contribution to Oxford’s Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy (2014-2015) explores the imbalances that are intrinsic in international investment law, with a particular focus on the dichotomy between obligations assumed by the foreign investor and the host government and the potential that investment law has to diminish the scope of state sovereignty. On the basis of this premise the author analyzes the feasibility of a general rethinking of the current framework for foreign direct investment in order to recalibrate the system and to rebalance the various interests at issue through a new international social contract. The author argues for the inclusion of an extensive range of obligations for investors under this new contract, including the governance of social issues such as environmental protection, human rights, anti-corruption measures, and labor standards.