Background
As sophisticated computation has become essential in more and more fields of human endeavor, interdisciplinary research has grown in importance. The interdisciplinary research area of computer science and law has risen to prominence recently and been showcased in, e.g., the 2019 Inaugural ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law, the 2020 Simons Institute Workshop on Algorithm Design, Law, and Policy, the 2020 DIMACS workshop on Co-Development of Computer Science and Law, and annual meetings such as the Symposium on the Foundations of Responsible Computing, the ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society, and the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
Computer scientists have often treated law as though it can be reduced purely to a finite set of rules about which the only meaningful computational questions are those of decidability and complexity. Similarly, legislators and policy makers have often advocated general, imprecisely defined requirements and assumed that the tech industry could solve whatever technical problems arose in the design and implementation of products and services that conform to those requirements. Central to the study of “computer science and law” is the replacement of these limited, disciplinary approaches with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and development. Ideally, computer scientists and lawyers should collaborate to create legislative language and technical definitions that are consistent and that capture broadly agreed-upon principles. Existing work on privacy, fairness, freedom of expression, and other essential social values demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinarity and provides examples of both success and failure in its execution.
Topics Of Interest Include But Are Not Limited To:
- Automation of legal reasoning
- Cyber espionage, cyber war, and cyber diplomacy
- Cybersecurity regulation, computer crime, online law enforcement, and digital forensics
- Digital intellectual property
- Encryption and lawful surveillance
- Fairness and accountability in machine learning, data analytics, and automated decision making
- Human-rights law and computer science
- Legal and public-policy aspects of network measurement and network architecture
- Legal aspects of open-source software
- Online market structure, platform monopolies, and antitrust law
- Platform governance, content moderation, disinformation, and freedom of online expression
- Privacy and data protection
- Public ledgers, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts
- Regulation of and liability for artificial intelligence
Submission Information
Submissions must be PDF files in double-column ACM format (see https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template) and no more than 10 pages long, excluding the bibliography, well marked appendices, and supplementary material. Note that reviewers are not required to read the appendices or any supplementary material. Authors should not change the font or the margins of the ACM format. Submissions not following the required format may be rejected without review.
All submissions must be received by 11:59 PM AoE (UTC-12) on March 15, 2022, using the submission server at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cslaw22. Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have already been published or accepted for publication or that are simultaneously submitted to and under review by other conferences or workshops with published proceedings. Simultaneous submission of substantially expanded versions to refereed journals is permitted. For example, authors of papers submitted to law reviews in the February-March, 2022, window may submit 10-page versions of those papers to CSLAW’22. Similarly, authors may simultaneously submit 10-page papers to CSLAW’22 and substantially expanded versions of those papers to journals in Computer Science and other disciplines.
All submitted papers will be evaluated based on their merits, particularly the extent to which their contributions are truly interdisciplinary. For papers that might raise ethical concerns, authors are expected to convince reviewers that proper procedures (such as IRB approval or responsible disclosure) have been followed and that due diligence has been done to minimize potential harm.
Submitted papers may be rejected, at the discretion of the PC chairs, for being out of scope. Authors who have questions about whether their papers are in scope are encouraged to ask the PC chairs before submitting.
Lightning Talks
There will be one “lightning-talk” session in which participants give very short talks on material that will not be published in the proceedings. Suitable topics include (but are not limited to) very recent or partial results, open problems, and announcements of computer science and law events and opportunities. Lightning-talk submissions will be due shortly before the symposium dates, and submission instructions will be posted on the symposium website at that time.
Proceedings Information
Symposium proceedings will be published in digital form only in the ACM Digital Library, and the papers will be accessible for free via an ACM OpenTOC posted on the Symposium website. At least one author of each paper is required to attend in order to present the paper and is expected to participate actively in the symposium. Presenters may attend remotely.
