REGISTER
Friday, November 1
8:00 REGISTRATION & BREAKFAST
9:00 WELCOME
Floyd Abrams and David Schulz (Yale)
9:10
KEYNOTE: The Challenge of a.i. accountability
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign at Brown University
9:35
Algorithmic Accountability
The growing reliance on A.I. to deliver core services across the administrative state raises novel questions of accountability for this new paradigm of governance. In addition to well-documented challenges related to bias and explainability, the black box nature of these systems and existing trade secret doctrines mean that integration of A.I. into government services has the potential to upend both traditional public oversight and the relationship between public sector agencies and private sector contractors. This panel will assess the impact A.I. is having on traditional accountability paradigms and explore the new avenues that are being proposed for providing the transparency needed for democracy to function.
Moderator: Michael Karanicolas (UCLA)
Panelists:
Kevin DeLiban (TechTonic Justice), Ellen Goodman (Rutgers), Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown), Marlena Wisniak (European Center for Non-Profit Law)
11:00 ALGORITHMIC SUNSHINE
New technologies, including artificial intelligence, hold the potential to revolutionize governments' ability to provide transparency to their ongoing operations and to empower journalists and researchers to make sense of government-generated data in ways never before possible. This panel will consider how some cutting-edge technologies can make transparency and accountability more efficient and effective. It will assess strategies for using these technologies to shine light on government conduct and consider challenges that from the adoption of these technologies may present.
Moderator: Stephen Stich Match (Loevy & Loevy)
Panelists:
Abdi Aidid (Yale), Adam Marshall (Reporters Committee of Freedom of the Press), Michael Morisy (MuckRock), Bobak Talebian (Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy), Ariana Tobin (Pro Publica)
12:10 NETWORKING LUNCH
1:20 SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTABILITY
To hold social media and other platforms accountable for their actions requires a detailed understanding of how they work. Platforms can implement voluntary transparency measures to facilitate that understanding; government actors can demand that platforms share data. Absent that, we must rely on the work of journalists, academics, and other researchers to figure out when, why, and how platforms deliver which content to which users. Yet, researchers too often face the threat of civil or criminal liability for doing that necessary work. This panel will address the state of the law governing platforms, examine mechanisms for shining light on their inner workings, and assess ways to hold them accountable.
Moderator: Chris Bavitz (Harvard)
Panelists:
Ethan Zuckerman (UMass Amherst), Sunoo Park (New York University),
Andy Sellars (Boston University)
2:35 BREAK
2:45 ELECTION LIES AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Democratic accountability requires fair elections and an informed electorate. New information ecosystems, however, facilitate the dissemination of lies and misinformation in ways that have fueled a partisan divide and undermined democracy, causing some to seek regulatory solutions that are incompatible with our current understanding of First Amendment protections. This panel will consider a range of problems at the intersection of elections and communication, with a focus on litigation options for combatting misinformation without violating free speech rights. The discussion will explore the use of defamation suits, Ku Klux Klan Act claims, and other mechanisms for holding accountable those who knowingly spread false claims for electoral advantage.
Moderator: RonNell Anderson-Jones (University of Utah)
Panelists:
Renee DiResta (former researcher, Stanford Internet Observatory), Mike Gottlieb (Wilke Farr & Gallagher), Cameron Kistler (Protect Democracy), Lyrissa Lidsky (University of Florida)
4:00 BREAK
4:10 THE RIGHT TO PROTEST
This panel will search for lessons that may be learned from the tumultuous season of protests the nation experienced last Spring—a turmoil that threatens to resume given extreme partisanship this election year. This discussion will explore the extent of First Amendment protections for protesters and journalists who report on them; viewpoint neutrality in the regulation of protests; and limitations on the disparate enforcement of protest rules and ways to enforce them. The panel will also assess the special considerations that arise when protests take place on campus, such as the role of campus police and cooperation/ collaboration between universities and law enforcement investigations of protestors or student groups.
Moderator: Jonathan Manes (McArthur Justice Center)
Panelists: Emily Bazelon (New York Times), Vera Eidelman (ACLU), Lisa Hoppenjans (Washington U., St. Louis), Wadie Said (U. Colorado)
5:20 END OF DAY
Saturday, November 2
8:30 Networking Coffee Bar
9:00 ACADEMIC FREEDOM & CLINICAL EDUCATION
Law school clinics provide essential legal services to marginalized clients and provide valuable educational opportunities to students. Increasingly, government officials, powerful economic and political interests, university donors, and other outside interests have attempted to interfere with law school clinics’ client representation. This panel will address the scope of the problem and the impact on client representation; when such interference infringes on the academic freedom of clinicians and runs afoul of legal ethics rules; and how clinicians can respond to attempts to interfere with their case selection and litigation strategy.
Moderator: Tobin Raju (Yale)
Panelists: Robert Kuehn (Washington U., St. Louis), Andy Geronimo (Case Western), Clare Norins (U. Georgia), Jane Kirtley (Minnesota)
10:00 BREAK
10:10 ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF CLINICS AND METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
Today, many law school clinics and other NGOs aim to support local journalists who lack access to the legal services needed for effective investigative reporting. This panel will explore the impact these efforts are having and discuss what metrics are needed to show the value of this work to funders and other stakeholders. Panelists will provide perspective from the philanthropy and consulting worlds as well as from nonprofit newsroom incubators and legal services providers outside the media sector. What can clinicians learn from the scaling of nonprofit newsrooms and the growth in legal services in other areas?
Panelists: Lindsay Green-Barber (Impact Architects), Michael Ouimette (American Journalism Project), Josh Stearns (Democracy Fund), Katie Waldo (We the Action)
11:30 BREAK
11:40 CLINICS & CLIENTS
Clinics in the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN) regularly provide the pro bono legal services that local, independent and online journalists need to do their jobs. This panel of clinics and their clients will present some success stories from the past year. They will discuss the legal theories that carried the day and brainstorm ways that other clinics might replicate and on their successful strategies.
Moderator: Heidi Kitrosser (Northwestern)
Panelists: Susan Seager (UC Irvine) & Ben Camacho (Knock LA), Jennifer Borg (Yale), Paula Burke (RCFP) & Brittany Hailer (Pittsburgh Institute for Non-Profit News), Thomas Leatherbury (SMU) & Steven Monacelli (Protean Magazine), Heather Murray (Cornell) & Max Siegelbaum (Documented)
1:00 BOXED LUNCH
1:15 OPEN FELN STEERING COMMITTEE MEETING
2:30 DEPART
AAC2024 is hosted by the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, programs of the Information Society Project.
This Conference is made possible by generous support received from: John S and James L. Knight Foundation