A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments We thank our editor, Melody Herr, for her interest in this project and her unwavering support throughout; her enthusiasm has been infectious and has sustained our endeavors. Noor Alam, David Coady, Scott Dexter, James Grimmelmann, Rohit Parikh, Jari Råman, Andrew Strobert, and John Sutton all provided valuable comments on earlier versions of some chapters; we are grateful for their thoughtfulness and generosity. We thank Sean Sullivan for valuable help with regard to legal research resources, without which writing this book might well have been impossible. Material from this book has been presented at the European Conference on Arti‹cial Intelligence; the International Joint Conferences on Arti‹cial Intelligence; the Information Society Project at Yale Law School; the Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy; the First Taiwanese Logic and Analytic Philosophy Conference; the Philosophy Department at Chia-Yi University in Taiwan; and the Computer Science and Cognitive Science Colloquia at the CUNY Graduate Center. We thank audiences at these fora for their questions, interest, and feedback; they have greatly helped re‹ne our arguments. Our names appear in the author list in alphabetical order; their order is not intended to indicate an inequality of contribution. S.C. L.F.W. I would like to thank James Grimmelmann for many useful conversations and discussions; I’ve learned a great deal about the law from him. I thank him too, for letting me believe my intuitions were on the right track. Danielle Citron, Paul Ohm, Frank Pasquale, and Peter Suber offered many kind words of support and encouragement. I am grateful to Brooklyn College for a grant of reassigned time in fall 2008 and spring 2009. Scott Dexter helped me through many dif‹cult periods. I bear the deepest personal debts, as always, to my best friend, partner, and wife, Noor Alam; her love and affection enabled me to write this book. S.C. I thank my colleague and friend David Coady for his encouragement; my former supervisor Richard Sutcliffe for giving me leave to help write this book; and my former teachers Ross Clayton, Peter Craven, and Greg Reinhardt for their belief in my ability, the impression of which has remained with me over the years. I thank my parents for their nourishment and support in all. Most of all I thank Jane Brown for her patience, support , and love during the long gestation of this book. L.F.W. x / Acknowledgments ...