Conference | AI Rights & Wrongs: Launch of COMPASS? Program at NYU Law

AI Rights and Wrongs: Law, Power, and Accountability

Inaugural conference of the NYU COMPASS Program

Confusion dominates AI law and policy. As AI companies warn of existential risks posed by their products while simultaneously racing to build them, their policy proposals swing between deregulation, self-regulation, and preventive regulation. Governments hesitate and equivocate as the regulatory gap expands. Meanwhile, analysts hold widely differing views of AI’s nature, with contrasting legal consequences—from treating AI systems as ordinary software products to granting them rights. The general public, left out of the policy process, is making its voice heard through movements against data centers and initiatives to ensure that AI systems serve the rights and well-being of humans and the natural world.

To better orient debates on AI law and policy, NYU Law’s Center for Human Rights & Global Justice is launching COMPASS (the Commons on Machines, Policy, Automation & Society). COMPASS is an interdisciplinary program that produces research-grounded analysis and recommendations on a wide array of issues: the legal status of AI; its social and environmental impacts; AI companies’ legal accountability for harms associated with their products; and national and international inequalities in AI development and deployment.

Rather than focusing on speculative future scenarios, COMPASS examines the concrete, real-world choices that need to be made today. It asks questions that receive insufficient attention: who benefits from different policy options? Whose voices are taken into account, both nationally and internationally? How should accountability be understood in the era of AI? What legal and policy options are needed to address the effects that AI is already having on individuals, societies, and the natural world?

On October 23, COMPASS will bring together leading scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss these issues across distinct areas of law and policy.  

Keynote Conversation

The conference will feature a keynote conversation between Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Harvard professor Jill Lepore and NYU Law professor and COMPASS Director César Rodríguez-Garavito.

Professor Lepore will discuss her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. The book offers a sweeping history of how AI and data dependency have hollowed out liberal democracy, replacing human self-governance with algorithmic control while simultaneously eroding the natural world. Lepore argues that this "government without consent" was never inevitable and that the Artificial State can be dismantled, but only once its history is told.

Schedule of Events

The conference will be structured around four thematic panels addressing key issues within the COMPASS agenda: the legal status of AI systems, their social and environmental impacts, corporate liability for AI-related harms, and government digital infrastructure and regulation. View full schedule and list of speakers. 

Registration

This event is open to the public. Registration is required.

CLE credit is pending review and approval.