Critical Legal Analysis of AI Regulation: Evaluating Theoretical and Legislative Approaches

Assessment (70% of overall mark): Essay

End-of-module essay (maximum 2,500 words, excluding footnotes in OSCOLA citation style, excluding title page). No bibliography is necessary.

The essay will be a scholarly piece providing critical analysis on a theme or themes covered in the module. By “scholarly,” this means that your essay must show that you have consulted with, and understood, not only the source material that you are analysing, but also a broad range of appropriate secondary academic literature on the topic.

Your essay must be primarily and fundamentally about the law on artificial intelligence and must overlap with the themes and content of the material covered in lectures. The essay should not be about some other facet of artificial intelligence (e.g. its technical capabilities). You may not address the same issue as you did in your first assessment, the video mini-lecture.

Some (purely indicative) themes might be:

• how a particular approach taken by law-makers follows or does not follow a particular rationale or combination of rationales proposed in the theoretical literature on regulation;
• how a specific legal instrument (or instruments) for regulating AI reflects / does not reflect / ignores certain ethical values proposed by experts in the field of AI ethics;
• the development of the EU AI Act through the legislative process, perhaps critically evaluating how and why certain Articles have changed or not changed over that process;
• the consequences of the EU AI Act, whether positive or negative (although this will be a broader exercise than the first assessment and must not overlap with content covered by your first assessment);
• the nature of the EU legislative process and how it has impacted on the development of the EU AI Act;
• a comparative analysis of two or more current or proposed legal instruments for regulating AI from two or more jurisdictions.

To reiterate, these are entirely indicative themes and you are welcome to write about other themes, provided they meet the criteria set out above. I will host an essay workshop mid-way through the module to address questions of scope, content, format etc., for this assessment.

Further information will follow, including marking criteria.