Law and Robotics Conference Seeking Paper Proposals, and HRW’s Tom Malinowski Releases Video That I Will Always Treasure

Ordinarily I would leave events posting to our regular postings, but I fell behind and wanted to flag the upcoming Friday deadline for paper proposals for the “Law and Robotics Conference.” It will take place on April 8-9, 2013, at Stanford Law School (the conference follows on the highly successful law and robotics conference that took place at University of Miami last year).  The call for papers says that the conference is open to papers in all fields of law, and specifically mentions international and comparative law, so I thought it would be of interest to OJ readers.  Matthew Waxman and I plan to submit, for example, a proposal on comparing self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems (I’ve been exploring some of these ideas, brainstorming for the paper, over at Volokh). I am 100% certain the conference will be terrific with outstanding papers and great discussions.  Here is the link if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, over at Lawfare, Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski, Benjamin Wittes, Matthew Waxman, and I have been debating the recent HRW report calling for a ban on “Killer Robots.”  Tom’s latest response – though mostly a serious discussion, well worth reading, though I’m afraid it doesn’t finally manage to persuade me – has a video at the end that I will always, always fondly treasure.  It’s great.   (It’s in Hindi, and though I didn’t know Tom knew Hindi, I’m going to trust his subtitles.)