Last week Vanderbilt’s Program on Law & Innovation held our Second Annual Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Law, and it was a truly wide-ranging and inspirational set of presentations and roundtable discussions.

One way I think about this topic is to (artificially) unpack it into four themes, as shown in this 2×2 space:

The idea is that AI will both be deployed in legal practice and, as it is deployed in society generally, will raise ethical and policy concerns requiring legal responses. In both of those realms, work is needed on the theory and research side to facilitate and manage how AI is applied in practice.

Our workshop presentations and discussions covered all the boxes, and many demonstrated that the boxes are not hermetically sealed—some themes and questions are cross-cutting. Indeed, several participants have engaged in a lively post-workshop email discussion on the extent to which using AI in dispute resolution could lock in doctrine or could be “programmed” for creativity, a question that requires engaging both theory and practice.

Even if one is skeptical about how soon we will see “general AI” coming online, if ever, there’s no question that “weak AI” is getting stronger and stronger in both the AI for Law and Law for AI realms. There’s no way to navigate around it! We engaged it in the workshop starting Thursday with big picture overviews of the two overarching themes by Oliver Goodenough (AI for Law) and John McGinnis (Law for AI). Friday had both deep dives and high-level theory in play. For example, Michael Bess asked how we should act now to avoid pitfalls of ever-stronger AI. Dan Katz discussed his work on predicting legal outcomes with AI tools combined with expert and crowd predictions. Jeannette Eikes outlined an agenda for building AI-based contract regimes. John Nay used topic modeling to parse out features of Presidential exercise of power that would have taken years to accomplish using traditional research methods. Cat Moon and Marc Jenkins unpacked AI in the legal practice world, showing where it faces uptake bottlenecks, and Doug Fisher kicked off a discussion of what AI means in the AI research world. Jeff Ward offered an insightful examination of the challenges AI will present for Community Economic Development programs, as well as the uses CEDs can make of AI. In short, we covered a lot of the boxes, and more!

Many thanks to this year’s participants—I’m looking forward to planning next year’s gathering as well!