Whare you doing, Dave? I'm calling my lawyer...

December 9, 2006 3:46 PM

Legal thought and science fiction?

I was wondering if there have been papers published, or perhaps even journals or groups devoted to, "science fiction" legal issues. The thought that prompted me to ask this was wondering if we someday somehow make a Wintermute/HAL/Multivac/etc, what sorts of legal rights would it have? Citizenship? Could it claim freedom from its creators under the 13th and 14th amendments? What I'm looking for are studies or papers that look at what legal issues would actually be raised, what could be argued, etc. Kind of like military war games where military planners look at various scenarios, but instead here it's looking at possible legal scenarios. I'm looking for "serious" articles, or at least as serious as they can be when dealing with these issues, rather than just purely narrative stories. Perhaps some student wrote about this in a law review, things like that.

posted by Sangermaine to law & government (9 comments total)

Er, the title was supposed to be "What are you doing..." ::sigh::
posted by Sangermaine at 3:47 PM on December 9, 2006

There are some, although perhaps not as many as you might like. One good resource is SSRN, where I found a few things that might meet your criteria:

Legal Personality for Artificial Intellects: Pragmatic Solution or Science Fiction?

The Constitutional Implications of Human Cloning

Of Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning

etc.
posted by Partial Law at 4:12 PM on December 9, 2006

Even though it's not science fiction related, Coyote v. Acme might still fit your criteria of a legal scenario structured around fictional characters.
posted by MsMolly at 4:50 PM on December 9, 2006

Sorry, I don't know any "serious" articles, but Charles Stross' Accelerando! does elaborate this issue, if I remember correctly. It is a good book, and it can be downloaded for free.
posted by kolophon at 5:01 PM on December 9, 2006

Unfortunately, I can only offer an odd tangent to your question:

The recent failed television series Century City attempted to transplant the legal firm genre (as seen in The Practice and Boston Legal) into the realm of science fiction.
posted by The Confessor at 5:19 PM on December 9, 2006

Derek Parfit's book Reasons and Persons is a work of philosophy, focusing on issues of personal identity and ethics, that uses numerous sci-fi examples to explore the philosophical issues. I don't know that it addresses precisely the question that interests you, but it's worth reading.
posted by jayder at 7:59 PM on December 9, 2006

Perhaps the ASPCR is what you're looking for?
posted by Aquaman at 1:46 AM on December 10, 2006

Sadly, the (American) legal academy disfavors this kind of speculative writing. The actual legal system can't deal with any that isn't a case in actual controversy, and this tends to influence what law reviews deem to be publishable.

I've always thought this is a problem, because events move faster than courts, and that regularly leaves us with no legal solution to problems which come upon us and which were quite forseeable. The problem with Taliban detainees are a great example -- it was obvious that our next big class of POWs would likely be non-state irregulars responsive to organizations which would never cleanly surrender, but we nevertheless failed to develop a legal framework for their custody, because it wasn't timely to do so.

Human cloning is another great open issue. While pretty much everyone agrees that clones will be people, in the sense of having full individual rights, there isn't the slightest consensus about what legal relationship, if any, they will have to the people who are source of their DNA. Parents? Siblings? Unrelated?

In the context of intelligent machines, one probably ought to analogize to the law of ownership and treatment of animals. Animals have no rights, but it nevertheless recognized that animals have sensation and that gratuitous cruelty can be proscribed, and punished. It is an entirely legislative matter as to what cruelty is useful, and what is gratuitous. Distinctions which would be barred as arbitrary in other contexts are permitted in the context of animals -- in other words, because we like dogs better than pigs, it's illegal to hang a dog up by its hindlegs, cut its throat, and then eat the meat, but perfect legal to do the same to a pig.

Any theory of the "rights" of machines would thus be likely to involve a prior legislative determination that the machines could feel or could have a similacrum of feeling such that permitting humans to cause them the similacrum of pain was, at some moral level, inhumane, and a subsequent legislative determination that such inhumanity lacked sufficient economic utility to be permitted.

One would have to believe that no one is likely to engineer machines to have anything like actual feeling (faked feeling, another matter), and thus that a question of rights would be unlikely to be joined.
posted by MattD at 9:13 AM on December 10, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Not what you're looking for, but rather a Science fiction story by Heinlein, that goes into the topic a little differently: "Jerry Was a Man"
posted by Goofyy at 1:57 AM on December 11, 2006