Compiled by Athena Smith.
Articles
Will the Supreme Court Finally Dismantle Bivens’s House of Cards?
Mary Hampton Mason and Laura Katherine Smith described Nielsen v. Watanabe—an Eighth Amendment case which the Supreme Court will hear in November—and how it could end remedies under Bivens, which allows a federal agent to be sued for violating someone’s constitutional rights. Mason and Smith argued that an end to an already hollowed-out Bivens would be doctrinally sound and necessary for Congress to take action and design real federal constitutional accountability.
Retiring the fiction of individual liability invites reform far more meaningful than briefly reviving Watanabe’s one Eighth Amendment claim. History suggests this must come from congressional oversight, public pressure, political consequences, official-capacity suits for declaratory and injunctive relief, and direct judgments against the United States.
Who, If Anyone, Should Have a License to Kill AI?
Lisa Klaassen and Kevin Frazier explained that kill switches for artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly appear in legislation as solutions to AI threats, but the specifics of who is authorized to control the switch, when the shut off could be justified, and what it would entail are unclear. Klaassen and Frazier recommend greater transparency from labs about their safeguards, research to develop and share mitigations, and increased internal testing.
Fearing the possibility of existential risk, both federal and state officials have proposed legislation to mandate the implementation of kill switches at leading AI companies. In a traditional factory, such a switch would perhaps involve a lever with the power to shut off all the machines in one fell swoop. For AI systems, however, it’s trickier to describe what exactly a kill switch would entail, who would hold the authority to trigger it, and how it would be enforced in practice. The recent surge in interest in such a far-reaching power invites serious scrutiny of these questions.
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