Jun 15, 2023 at 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Generative and decision-making artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming government, business, and society. AI provides significant benefits yet poses serious risks. This webinar will address these benefits and risks through the lens of three legislative aspects of AI - regulation, AI tools for better legislative policymaking, and new ways to draft legislation.

This webinar will focus on how the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine has operated during the Russia-Ukraine war and will feature two speakers from the Verkhovna Rada.

Join us for a lively discussion of legal regimes for vaccine development and distribution, key ingredients in a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts between government mandates and individual rights, and other pandemic legislative and legal issues.

COVID-19 has presented unprecedented challenges for legislatures and policymakers around the world. Please join us for a unique opportunity to hear from our esteemed panelists on how legislatures have responded to this ongoing crisis. Dr. Ronan Cormacain (British Institute of International and Comparative Law), Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov (Bar Ilan University), and Mr. Noah Wofsy (U.S. House of Representatives) will discuss emergency legislation and other challenges presented by lawmaking during a public health emergency, drawing on illustrative examples from various countries. Attention will be paid to COVID-19-related procedural changes in the U.S. House of Representatives, such as proxy voting.

In the webinar "Legislation as an Interdisciplinary Challenge", Professor Rossi starts from the finding that laws rely on a wide variety of expertise in evaluating their actual preconditions as well as in predicting their effects. Using the example of environmental law and the yardstick of German and European law, the webinar explores the question of how interdisciplinarity is taken into account in legislation, i.e. how democratic legislators generate the necessary expert knowledge and incorporate it into their primarily political decisions.

David Marcello draws upon his 1995 article published in 70 Tulane Law Review 2437, "The Ethics and Politics of Legislative Drafting." Although the article and this presentation deal with the political fireworks of a contemporaneous Governor's race, their central concern is not about Louisiana’s election but rather about the inescapably subjective nature of legislative drafting. Examples are taken from the US state experience, but the observations about subjectivity in the drafting process will resonate in jurisdictions across the globe.