Category Archives: Law

#WeRobot 2021 Starts Today!

Join us for the 10th Anniversary Edition – Register Here. All events will be virtual. All times are US Eastern time.

At We Robot we ask (and expect) that everyone reads the papers scheduled for Days One and Two in advance of those sessions. (The Workshops do not have advance papers.) In most cases, authors do not deliver their papers. Instead we go straight to the discussant’s wrap-up and appreciation/critique. The authors respond briefly, and then we open it up to Q&A from our fabulous attendee/participants. Click on the paper titles below to download a .pdf text of each paper. Enjoy! Or you can download a zip file of Friday’s papers and Saturday’s papers.

We Robot 2021 Program

Download full schedule to your calendar.

We Robot 2021 will be hosted on Whova. We’ve prepared a We Robot 2021 Attendee Guide. You can also Get Whova Now.

We Robot 2021 has been approved for 19.0 Florida CLE credits, including 19.0 in technology, 1.0 in ethics, and 3.5 in bias elimination. Details here.

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We Robot is Next Week!!!

WeRobot 2021

We Robot, now heading into its 10th anniversary, is the leading North American conference on robotics law and policy. The 2021 event will be hosted by the University of Miami School of Law on September 23 – 25, 2021.

NOW VIRTUAL
Due to safety concerns we’ve decided to take We Robot to a fully virtual format again.

Earn CLE
19.0 Florida CLE credits approved, including 19.0 in technology, 1.0 in ethics, and 3.5 in bias elimination.

Register Today!

New virtual prices:
Workshop on Sept. 23: $25.00
Admission for both days, Sept. 24 & 25: $49.00
All students and UM Faculty for all 3 days: $25.00

Although we’d looked forward to welcoming you back to Coral Gables and will not be able to see you in person, we look forward very much to your virtual participation in We Robot 2021. The heart of We Robot has always been its participants, and we will do all we can to preserve that. See you (virtually) soon!

For more information, visit WeRobot2021.com

See Full Program

September 23 – 25, 2021

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Some People Can’t Stand This

If you are not subscribed to the weekly Short Circuit summary of interesting (primarily) appellate cases, then you ma be missing a lot of summaries about important cases involving civil liberties, especially (these days) strange affirmances by courts of appeal of qualified immunity decisions in police violence cases. Sample:

Coleman County, Tex. jailer watches a suicidal man wrap a phone cord around his neck and pass out. Instead of calling 911, the jailer calls his boss, who arrives ten minutes later. Only then does the jailer enter the cell, unwrap the cord, and call paramedics—but neither try to resuscitate the man, who dies. Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: “Qualified immunity is not the judicial equivalent of the Armor of Achilles, an impenetrable shield that governmental actors can wield to insulate themselves from liability no matter how flagrant their conduct.”

You are certainly missing out on consistently dark, or at least grey, humor such as this:

Gov’t contractor affixes ankle monitor to one-legged man waiting to stand trial on gun charge. Guess which leg. While the man’s prosthesis and monitor stay at home, he commits a murder. Can the victim’s family sue the gov’t under the Federal Tort Claims Act for negligently hiring the contractor—a company knee-deep in litigation for a history of falling down on the job? D.C. District Court: No.

And yes, both the court and Short Circuit had the good grace not to suggest that plaintiffs did not have a leg to stand on.

I’m not 100% on board with the sponsoring organization, the Institute for Justice, but it’s often out there where libertarianism meets liberalism, so there’s considerable common ground. And the newsletter is consistently good.

Posted in Law | Comments Off on Some People Can’t Stand This

We Robot Paper Submission Deadline Extended One Week

Everyone says it’s harder to get things done under COVID, so we’re extending the deadline for submission of paper abstracts to We Robot 2021 by one week – to midnight US East Coast time on February 8, 2021.

We will attempt to keep to the rest of the schedule, but paper acceptance notices may end up slightly delayed also.

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Sincerely, Estella

From the DNC last night:

Posted in 2020 Election, Immigration | 1 Comment

Closing in on Next Time

I was clicking about to see if there was a Miami chapter of Never Again Action when I stumbled on this gem,

“In the winter, 10% of U.S. Jews are in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties,” said Eva Shvedova, the museum store and group tour manager at the Jewish Museum of Florida, where I took in a tour during a Miami Cultural Crawl. “There are about 600,000, mostly in Broward County,” she said, “and 124,000 Jews in Miami-Dade alone.”

Why not? Jews are many things, but they aren’t stupid. With sultry temps about 80 degrees all week, plenty of action and the ability to make foolproof plans in the winter, Florida is a guaranteed warm and pleasant destination.

10%??? That’s too good a statistic to check for veracity. Although they did get the weather wrong as it’s only February, but rather than warm and pleasant it is already more like hot and humid — one might say, almost oppressive.

Which brings me back to Never Again Action, I didn’t find a local branch, but did find their bright yellow T-shirts. On the radio this morning they were talking about California’s apology for the Japanese Internment. Given the ramped-up national campaign against immigrants, and the policies of deportation and cruel detention, a T-shirt doesn’t seem like quite enough of a response somehow.

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