Larry Catá Backer, “Trust platforms: The digitalization of corporate governance and the transformation of trust in polycentric space,” Regulation and Governance (2024) doi:10.1111/rego.12614
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Abstract: This contribution considers the revolution in the concept and practice of trust in corporate governance that first moved from trust in“people” to trust in“compliance,” setting the stage for the digitization of trust measures and the digitalization of compliance. Part One examines the fundamental challenge, one that arises from the near simultaneous shift in cultural expectations about trust from trust in character to trust in measurement, and then the rise of cultures of data driven systems of compliance and accountability. Part Two then considers the transformation brought by challenge responses in the form of three closely interlinked impulses: digitization, digitalization of compliance-accountability regimes, and the emergence of platforms as spaces for trust interactions among stakeholders. Part Three then examines the current shape of these iterative dialectics, including connections between platforms and polycentric trust governance, and the detachment of trust from the entity that is its subject.
“Social Credit “in” or “as” the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality,” The China Review 24(3):71-106 (2024)
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Abstract: Chinese social credit (SC) and SC systems (SCSs) represent a wide spectrum of measures, practices, and administrative styles clustered around the quantification of objectives and expectations targeting people, groups, and activity and their interactions in all spheres of collective organization. Their overarching policy goal is “trustworthiness” in collective life. At one end of the spectrum are formalized systems of public and private credit rating and assessment systems coordinated by ‘administrative organs at all levels of government. At the mid-point are many forms of compliance/assessment systems aided by big data and generative AI. At the other end are all systems of data-based compliance and assessment systems managed by public or private institutional organs. As a form of socialist legality, SCSs function as substantive law, as process, and as a mediating space between administrative and political authority. The research question in this article is straightforward: in what ways are SCSs embedded in the conceptualization and implementation of socialist legality? Two sub-questions emerge: (1) how does that embedding shape the character of SC “as” or “in” the cage of regulation through which Chinese legal structures are ordered, and (2) in what ways does the implementation of SC through platforms change or displace traditional forms of the administration of law?
Larry Catá Backer, Panel Discussion: How to Become a Full-Time Law Professor – A Workshop for Aspirants, Journal of Legal Education 73(1):113-135 (2024)
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Abstract: Today’s practice of law is a global practice. Therefore, it is essential that the law school graduate is competent, comfortable and effective representing any client in the world, whether in person or via the worldwide internet. Hence, law schools must directly and indirectly expose today’s law student to faculty who hail from a variety of backgrounds in terms of race, gender, sexual preference and orientation, age, education, professional and personal background, culture, scholarship, interests, and intellectual perspectives.
This panel continues the NPOC’s strong decades old, commitment to diversity and inclusion from the Dean’s Suite to the Classrooms. We sought to strongly encourage and provide step-by-step guidance to those seeking to enter the Legal Academy.
Larry Catá Backer, The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition: An Encounter withJan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023)
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Abstract: Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (socalled “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.”) and generative predictive analytics and its models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based intelligence. Humans are compelled to do this because they have trained themselves it believe that nothing exists unless it is rendered meaningful in relation to the human itself. Beyond that—nothing is worth knowing. It is only to the extent that other selves, even those created by humanity, relate to humans, that they become of interest—and most be regulated, possessed, controlled, and managed—with respect to its interaction with or use by humans. Still, the human self-projection into the digital, and now more consciously the world around them, produces profound changes in the way that the human (and humanity) understands themselves and the way they order the world they inhabit. This work explores the semiotic trajectories made inevitable by the rise of projections of the human into digital plains, and by the possibility of the attainment by those projections of sentient autonomy. It undertakes that exploration through a deep dialectic engagement with Jan Broekman’s, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages with and seeks to burst through the semiotic barriers of the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops further—up and out of the human. It animates Broekman’s insights and considers the possibility of semiotic objectivity connected to but autonomous of the human, pointing to a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it exposes for order complexities and challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere. The consequences for regulatory approaches are then outlined.