Artificial Intelligence and Legal Disruption

Date: Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Time: 4pm – 5pm (Hong Kong Time) via Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Hin-Yan Liu (Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law)

Abstract: Why is it that technological developments and societal changes must contort and accommodate the immovable bedrock of ‘the Law’?

Burgeoning ideas built around the concept of ‘Legal Disruption’ suggest that new and emerging technologies, and their social implications, reveal the arbitrariness and limitations of existing legal principles and processes. Artificial Intelligence, for example, presents liminal entities between agents and objects that confuse binary legal thinking. Worse still, if AI applications are understood as networks or complex adaptive systems, legal thinking is more or less locked out. Indeed, technologies such as AI threaten to alter the very axiology of contemporary societies which serves as the lynchpin of the law.

Yet, rather than precipitating a crisis for the legal order, the lens of legal disruption reveals other ways of doing regulation that can circumvent legal safeguards. This presents both challenges and opportunities which we will engage with during this event. The objective of introducing AI and Legal Disruption to the Law and Technology Centre at HKU is to deepen the comparative dialogue and collaboration as we collectively explore this broad problem-space.

About the speaker: Dr. Hin-Yan Liu relentlessly pursues the challenges to legal and regulatory thinking brought about by Artificial Intelligence and other new and emerging technologies. Dissatisfied with doctrinal attempts to accommodate revolutionary technological change, he has pioneered the concept of Legal Disruption that pits the law as just another moving part relating and adapting to change.  Hin-Yan is a native of Hong Kong, but is at home in Copenhagen, where he is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law. Before that, he has completed a tour of universities in London before embracing la bella vita at the European University Institute in Florence. With perpetually itchy feet and insatiable curiosity, Hin-Yan is constantly on the search for the next idea, the next journey, the next engrossing conversation, the next adventure.