"Major Technological Questions": Courts, agencies should hesitate to interpret ambiguous pre-existing legal authority

The George Washington University Law Review has published "Major Technological Questions" John Duffy and I will provide a brief overview of our argument.

We argue that when significant new technologies and with them major new legal questions arise, all legal actors should typically view those questions as falling outside the ambit of pre-existing legal materials.

We'll elaborate more in several subsequent posts.

Where the relevant lawmaking body is a legislature as opposed to a common-law court, our approach can be viewed as favoring democratic action.

To the extent that our approach still has a deregulatory tilt, that tilt is a positive.

We'll apply our approach to some old technologies (the inventions of photography and airplanes) and then to some new ones (cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence).