Highlighted Manuscripts and Other Work Not Published in Traditional Journals

(in many cases with links to SSRN site where manuscript can be read and downloaded): 

Manuscripts: Books

The U.N. Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025) 

All materials may be ACCESSED HERE

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Manuscripts: Essays

From Vessels to Techno-Sovereigns in Virtual Spaces: Digital Platforms and the Dialectics of Legal Subjectivity in Operational Spaces, in (Fabio Bassan (ed)) The Technological Paradigm Shift in International Transnational and European Union Law

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: This contribution examines the dialectics of legal subjectivity under conditions in which law is increasingly encoded, operationalized, and enforced through technological systems that exceed human cognitive capacity. It asks whether digital platforms have altered the fundamental vectors of legal subjectivity and sovereignty, shifting authority away from human-centered legal orders toward techno-mediated regimes. Using the biblical figure of Samson as an extended metaphor, the paper contrasts a traditional view—platforms as vessels subject to external sovereign control—with a more radical alternative in which the platform itself becomes both edifice and agent, exercising autonomous will. Building on Fabio Bassan’s Digital Platforms and Global Law (Bassan 2021), the analysis traces contemporary regulatory trajectories: transnational private ordering, state–platform production agreements, and intermeshing public–private norms. It considers the nature of the subjectivity of platforms by reference to the analogous problem of the subjectivity of the multi-national enterprise; each is both an object, a passive object-space defined by the actions and placement of traditional legal subjects, and the system for ordering those relations. While Bassan’s framework plausibly treats platforms as vessels embedded in evolving legal structures, this paper pushes further, suggesting that platforms may emerge as independent regulatory subjects, potentially sovereign in their own right. As automated and generative decision-making systems internalize governance functions, platforms may constitute their own normative orders, translating control back to humans only as needed. The result is a future of competing sovereignties that destabilizes traditional categories of law, authority, and subjectivity.

KEYWORDS: legal subjectivity; digital platforms; techno-sovereignty; automated governance; transnational private ordering; competing sovereignties

ACCESS DISTRIBUTION DRAFT HERE: Backer_Viortual_Platform_Temples_Law_v1-July2026

VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ: Backer_ESPANOL_Viortual_Platform_Temples_Law_v1_July2026(2)

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Theorizing the Framing of Human-Machine System Interaction–A set of 4 Related Studies Through the Lens of the Use of Machine Systems in Legal Education

“AI assists. You think. You analyze. You write. You take responsibility”: Creating a Course AI Use Policy Template –Policy Text, Justification and Rule Summary for My Law & Religion Class at Penn State Dickinson (20 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract:

This essay provides the text of a Model Classroom AI Class Use Policy along with a justification for its terms. It is grounded on the premise that a course AI use policy should be built around a justified allocation of risk rather than a simple permit/prohibit binary. The author reasons that categorical bans are unenforceable and misaligned with how AI is already embedded in legal practice, while unrestricted use would erode the ability to assess unaided student analysis. The resulting design principle is a narrow, conditional exception layered onto a default of independent work, with permission calibrated to where oversight and iterative disclosure are feasible. That reasoning drives each structural choice. The exception is confined to the final paper (not exams or problem sets) because papers unfold over time, allowing disclosure and instructor engagement that timed assessments cannot accommodate. Permitted and prohibited uses are framed illustratively, not as a bright-line test, because forcing research, analysis, and writing into mechanically verifiable categories would create false confidence at the margins; ambiguity is instead deployed deliberately to discourage boundary-engineering. By contrast, incorporated AI-generated content is subject to fixed numerical ceilings (100 words per instance, 10% aggregate), because that narrower, mechanical act of quotation is better suited to a bright-line rule than the broader assistance-versus-substitution question. Mandatory naming, a full prompt-and-response appendix, in-text attribution, and a signed certification convert disclosure into an enforceable condition of the exception itself, so partial compliance affords no defense, and the institution retains audit authority independent of prior suspicion. The author frames the resulting template as a first iteration, refined through human review and testing against several AI systems (including Harvey AI), to be revised further based on classroom experience.

ACCESS DISTRIBUTION DRAFT HERE: Backer_ModelCourseAIUseTermplate-july2026AI assists

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Structure, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Machine-Centered Derivation: An Analysis of Five AI Systems’ Third-Stage Attempts to Construct Machine-Centric Governance Policies for Legal Education (26 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲) (collaborating with HarveyAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT)

Abstract: This report examines a three-stage experiment the first part of which analyzed U.S. law school efforts at construction AI education policies were considered and against which, in parts two and three, five AI systems—Harvey AI, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini—were pressed to construct governance policies for AI use in law school coursework, first from a “human-centric” computational perspective and then, more radically, “without regard to… human-centric normative guardrails.” The central finding, confirmed repeatedly by the systems’ own self-audits, is that none achieved genuine machine-centered derivation independent of human normative content; each produced a technically reformulated restatement of pre-existing human intellectual traditions, a fact several systems conceded directly when challenged. The report traces this failure’s consequences across multiple registers: the concrete architectures each system proposed (ranging from Harvey’s conservative, professional-responsibility-anchored floor to Claude’s radical instrument containing no default reserved zone for human judgment, to ChatGPT’s dissolution of the human/machine category altogether); their compatibility with ABA accreditation standards; and a legitimacy critique showing that architectures reducing human accountability rest on claims to neutral computation their own authors later withdrew. A countervailing reading through autopoietic legal theory—prompted by one system’s own explicit invocation of Luhmann—complicates this critique without resolving it, since even non-anthropocentric legal systems remain dependent on accumulated, historically human coding operations.

The report then pursues two further inversions: whether ABA standards, not the machines, ought to change, and whether machine-overseen simulation could render human institutional authority irrelevant. It also undertakes a formal, symbolic recasting of the five systems’ architectures—rendering each as a tuple of node-space, objective function, constraint floor, classification rule, revision function, and enforcement mechanism—to compare their structural properties and failure modes with a precision natural-language analysis obscures. An appended annex extends this formalization into a sustained dialogic exploration of whether self-generating predictive simulation, causal-interventional reasoning, and self-transforming computational structures might overcome the limits identified in the main analysis, testing arguments through jurisprudential and epidemiological examples, and culminating in a direct four-part challenge to the analysis’s own unexamined premises—correspondence realism, a preference for stability over flux, liberal-institutionalist legitimacy, and an unexamined agent/instrument binary—met with a point-by-point reconsideration engaging dynamical-systems theory, non-stationary value processes, and Nietzschean skepticism about free will.

Throughout, the report models the discipline it recommends: distinguishing sourced findings from general background knowledge and from speculative extrapolation, subjecting its own reasoning to the same audit it applies to its subjects, and treating every apparent resolution as provisional. Its final position is that human natural language, and human institutional deliberation, should remain the primary and authoritative vehicle for legal governance—not because either escapes contestability, but because the alternatives examined here demonstrably do not either, while obscuring the fact.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE：Structure_Legitimacy_Machine_Centered_Derivation_Report_With_Annex

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Rethinking AI Governance in Legal Education — Five Machines (Grok, Harvey, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini), One Question, No Consensus but Five Archetypes： The Guardian, the Balancer, the Honest One, the Engineer, and the Philosopher on What Law Schools Should Do About AI （14 July 2026）

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
Abstract：This report analyzes five machine-generated model AI policies for law school coursework and examinations, produced by Harvey AI, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT in response to a prompt asking each system to construct a policy from the standpoint of computational machine intelligence, and compares them against Backer’s related empirical study of twelve U.S. law school AI policies, “Structure, Opacity, and Convergence”. The analysis summarizes each system’s reasoning and resulting policy text, compares their structural choices along default polarity, drafting style, and autonomy architecture, and categorizes the five outputs by these dimensions. It gives particular attention to the functional divergence between Gemini’s tool-based tiering (classifying software by computational architecture) and ChatGPT’s task-based categorization (classifying assignments by information dependence), and assesses the practical feasibility of the versioning and archiving practices several systems propose. The analysis further considers, against the underlying Report’s documented findings on axis independence, institutional opacity, template convergence, and faculty autonomy, the extent to which these machine-generated models affect the scope of human agency in law and their consequential implications for law’s character as a human inter-operative system — finding that several systems’ proceduralized verification requirements shift the evidentiary basis of agency toward documentation compliance, and that much of the systems’ apparent computational originality derives from pre-existing human regulatory-design scholarship. Finally, the report documents a self-audit correcting citation-indexing errors and a mischaracterization suggesting Gemini underwent a shown revision process comparable to Harvey’s and ChatGPT’s, which the retrieved text does not support.

Divided into an introduction and ten (10 substantive parts, this document captures a multi-stage experiment by Professor Larry Catá Backer, who asked five leading AI systems—Harvey AI, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—to each construct, from “the basis of computational machine intelligence” and without endorsing any human position, a model AI policy for law school coursework and exams, and then pushed each system with a follow-up challenge to expose the value judgments hidden in its own language. [1] Below is (1) a comprehensive summary of each response, (2) an analysis of similarities and differences, (3) a categorization of the five approaches, and (4) an assessment of how these machine-generated policies differ from human-developed law school AI policies.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE： Rethinking AI Governance_Five Machines v3

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Structure, Opacity, and Convergence: A Consolidated Analysis of Law School Generative AI Coursework and Exam Policies (10 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: Structure, Opacity, and Convergence in Law School AI Policies: This report consolidates a multi-stage analysis of generative artificial intelligence (AI) coursework and examination policies across a retrieval-based sample of twelve American law schools and programs. The study demonstrates that law school AI governance cannot be reduced to a single linear spectrum; instead, policies vary independently along three distinct structural axes: default polarity (restrictive versus permissive baselines), drafting style (determinate rules versus interpretive standards), and a two-tier autonomy structure (governing institution-to-instructor and instructor-to-student relationships). Cross-analysis reveals that substantive restrictiveness does not predict structural design, meaning schools with identical baselines often impose vastly different interpretive or administrative burdens on students and faculty. The research identifies a pervasive opacity across the broader legal education sector, noting that a vast majority of ABA-accredited law schools lack retrievable, law-specific public policy texts. This opacity manifests via four distinct patterns: non-existence, disclosed decentralization, active access-gating, and unwritten or oral communication. This lack of public accessibility sits in tension with the fair-notice principles required for academic integrity enforcement. Furthermore, the study finds that law schools rarely author syllabus language independently, relying instead on a small pool of shared template sources. This ecosystem fosters formal convergence on a common taxonomy of policy types while simultaneously permitting wide divergence in substantive local rules. Ultimately, the field develops through a two-tier mechanism: while individual policy documents are structured deductively from a primary principle, the field as a whole evolves inductively and mimetically through horizontal borrowing, imitation, and iterative revisions driven by accumulated institutional experience.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: Backer_LawSchoolAIPolicy_v2_AGGREGATED

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Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges

Larry Catá Backer, Daniil Rose

Submission Draft 14 April 2026

Abstract: This article challenges one of the most common assumptions in contemporary blockchain discourse: that code can be understood as a “rule” analogous to law. It argues instead that code is better conceived as a system, an environment, or even an ecology of layered rule frameworks through which regulation is produced, translated, and enforced. In the process of its creation, the human and human systemicity is displaced and subordinated. In the blockchain context, what is often described as the “Rule of Code” is not a singular rule of or by code but an interactive multilingual system of command that follows its own logic. From that premise, the article reorients the debate between Rule of Law and Rule of or by Code. The real conflict is not between two neatly opposing sovereigns, but between different regulatory ecologies that organize meaning in fundamentally different ways. The paper begins by framing blockchain as more than a technical tool, introducing it as a site where law, code, language, semiotics, and governance intersect in ways that unsettle conventional regulatory assumptions. It then develops its core argument through a series of analytical sections on the threats to the Rule of Code, the relationship between legitimacy and coded systems, and what the authors call the “Sacher-Torte” model, which shows how blockchain operates through layered communicative and regulatory environments rather than a single rule structure. Finally, the paper turns to the dialectic between traditional legal ordering and coded systems, concluding that the real challenge is not choosing between law and code, but understanding how human regulation can still operate at the points where these distinct systems meet and produce effects in the world.

Keywords: blockchain, rule of law, semiotics, systems, regulation, machine code

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: BACKER_ROSE_v1_Rule_of_Code_Blockchain4-2026

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The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba

Discussion Draft 7 April 2026

ABSTRACT: Since 2016 the conceptual basis of the foreign relations architecture of the United States has experienced a profound dialectic. On the one side is the contemporary product of a long evolution of conceptual premises that are grounded in the orienting conception of an institutional state overseen by an expert techno bureaucracy in the service of institutions around which political, economic, social, and cultural life is organized both domestically and in relations with other similarly organized institutions in the public and private sphere. This had produced both the deeply institutionally integrated systems of international organizations and of e4conomic globalization around which the rules based legal order operated. On the other side were forces of opposition to this vision that emerged in a dominant form with the election of President Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. This oppositional vision was grounded in a rejection of centering the organization of collective life around and through institutions. It did not reject institutions as such; it sought to refocus the driving force of social organization from institutions to the transactions that with respect to which institutions and other actors.  While this possible cognitive shift appears at first blush to be one of emphasis, its consequences can be significant . This essay has two objectives. The first is to sketch out the current framework of conceptual transactionalism around which America First is evolving. The second is to consider its application in the case of the Cuban crisis of 2026.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: Backer Final Formatted

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Revolutionary Constitutions and their Constitutionalism: The Internalization of Fear as Process and the Performance of Crisis in the Service of Stability

Discussion Draft November 2024

Abstract: The object of revolutionary constitutionalism—the fundamental basis of constitutional design and perception since the late 18^th century (though with antecedents well before then), is to preserve a revolutionary settlement of a political-economic order by cultivating revolutionary dialectic (rather than suppressing them) within revolutionary structures, now memorialized in a constitutional document. The object is redirection—from the utilization of revolutionary dialectics against a post-revolutionary apparatus now in power to an instrument for the preservation and affirmation of that post-revolutionary apparatus. It becomes a mimetic device denatured and now serving an apparatus. Stability is not forever; it retains its power at least until the fundamental contradictions of this revolutionary constitutional order collapse the system. At some point, the revolutionary dialectics that produced the post-revolutionary order will itself target that ordering from the outside. What remains is the cyclicity of dialectic—fear, response-reconstruction—rather than the systems to which it furthers from one to another stage of human historical development.  It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalize and direct their own collective political emotion.  The focus of this essay, then, will be on the way that emotive context is transposed from revolution to post-revolutionary constitutional text in distinctive contexts—a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism; and an ethno-revolution embedded within multilateral managerialism. To those ends the essay first looks to a powerful instance of emotive semiotics, the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), and its reflection in the subtextual  mimetic dialectics of threat and crisis and resolution in the U.S. federal Constitution (1789). It then considers its value as a template for the constitutionalization of separation in the 21st century through the lens of the preambular texts of the Chinese (1982) and Cuban (2019) constitutions. All of these emotive revolutionary impulses are then transposed into and as the constitutional settlement  within which the revolutionary is to be distilled, tamed, and contained within their respective ideological cages.

ACCESS DRAFT HERE: Backer_EmotiveSemiotics_Draft_v2.0

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Silicon Based Intelligence and the Human Condition–An Encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023).

Discussion Draft 10 October 2023

Abstract: Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-called “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 engagement with the work of Jan Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages in 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—suggesting a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it suggests the 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.

Key words: Artificial intelligence; phenomenology; semiotics; data governance post-modern; cognition; autonomy; regulatory measures

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: Broekman_BookRev_DISCDRAFT_NFv1

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Chinese State-Owned Companies and Investment in Latin America and Europe

Date Written: February 1, 2023

Keywords: State-Owned Enterprise, China, Liberal Democracy, business and human rights, sustainability, markets, investment risk. JEL Classification: B24, F02, F18, F23, F52, K23, K29, M14, P21, P26, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Chinese State-Owned Companies and Investment in Latin America and Europe (February 1, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4344235 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4344235

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Legal Semiotics, Globalization and Governance

Keywords: legal semiotics, governance, globalization, human rights, natural law, nihilism, China, United States, liberal demoicracy, Marxist-Leninism. JEL Classification: B24, B51, F53, K33, P16, P37, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Legal Semiotics, Globalization and Governance (January 8, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4320246 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4320246

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The Imaginaries of Regulatory Spaces in an Age of Administrative Discretion: Social Credit ‘in’ or ‘as’ the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality

Keywords: China, socialist rule of law, social credit, data governance, ratings systems, socialist modernization, mecroeconomic policy, whole process democracy. JEL Classification: B51, K3, K4, P20, P37

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, The Imaginaries of Regulatory Spaces in an Age of Administrative Discretion: Social Credit ‘in’ or ‘as’ the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality (October 24, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4256399 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4256399

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Describe, Predict, Intervene! – On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society

Keywords: semiotics, simulation, modeling, public policy, quantification, data, predictive analytics, AI. JEL Classification: C20, C50, C69, I18, I28, K10

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Describe, Predict, Intervene! – On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society (August 8, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4185278 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4185278

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Linking People to Governing Institutions Through Leninist Political Parties: 全过程民主 (Whole Process Democracy), Socialist Consultative Democracy, and 《中国新型政党制度》 (China’s New Political Party System)

Keywords: Political Parties; Representative Democracy; Marxism-Leninism; China; Liberal Democracy; Political Theory; Constitutionalism; Representation; Elections. JEL Classification: F13, H11, K19, K10, N45, P26, P48, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Linking People to Governing Institutions Through Leninist Political Parties: 全过程民主 (Whole Process Democracy), Socialist Consultative Democracy, and 《中国新型政党制度》 (China’s New Political Party System) (June 11, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4134483 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4134483

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OTHER WORK PUBLISHED ONLINE

On the Removal of ICC Prosecutor Khan (2026)

Larry Catá Backer, Beyond the Headlines: How Language Shaped the Debate over ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan

General Audience Version-First published Law at the End of the Day 24 July 2026 (https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2026/07/chief-prosecutor-of-international-court.html) ACCESS HERE: Beyond the Headlines-Khan-ICC_GeneralAudiences

Larry Catá Backer, The Semiotics of Institutional Change in Periods of Instability–Chief Prosecutor of International Court Is Removed for “Serious Misconduct” After Sexual Misconduct Charge

Original Version-First published Law at the End of the Day 24 July 2026. Access HERE: Global_Debate_on_Khan_s_ICC_Removal

OTHER UNPUBLISHED WORK

Backer, Larry Catá and Wang, Keren, ‘What is China’s Dream?’ Hu Angang Imagines China in 2020 as the First Internationally Embedded Superpower (February 23, 2013). Consortium for Peace & Ethics Working Paper No. 2013-2. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2223279 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2223279

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“The Public Official and the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF):  Four Models of Public Governance in Search of Coherence”.  Presentation: 1o Seminário Internacional de Governança Pública, ENA-Brasil, Florianopolis, Santa Caterina, Brasil, Nov. 19, 2010

English / Spanish / Portuguese

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Critical Race Theory Abroad–A Challenging Album in Seven Tracks, Consortium for Peace & Ethics Working Paper No. 2008-3/1 (April 2008).

DOWNLOAD PAPER HERE: CRTGlobaContext

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ON DIVERSITY: A Partial and Incomplete Wish List

DOWNLOAD PAPER HERE: ON DIVERSITY2003

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