Legal Priorities Research: A Research Agenda

[jonasschuett]

On behalf of the Legal Priorities Project, we are excited to finally publish our research agenda for legal priorities research: https://​​www.legalpriorities.org/​​research/​​research-agenda.html

In the first part, we argue that cause prioritization in legal research is both important and neglected, provide an overview of our philosophical foundations, and describe our methodological approach. In the second part, we present our current focus areas (namely, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, institutional design, and meta-research), identify promising research projects, and provide an overview of relevant literature. In the final part, we discuss two cause areas for further engagement (namely, space governance and animal law).

Authors: Christoph Winter, Jonas Schuett, Eric Martínez, Suzanne Van Arsdale, Renan Araújo, Nick Hollman, Jeff Sebo, Andrew Stawasz, Cullen O’Keefe, Giuliana Rotola

Acknowledgements: We are grateful for valuable comments, feedback and support from Alfredo Parra, Mark Eccleston-Turner, Leonie Kößler, Sean Richardson, Tyler John, Olavo Bittencourt, Lisa Forsberg, Kevin Tobia, Bradly Condon, Markus Anderljung, Seth Baum, Tobias Baumann, Haydn Belfield, Alexis Carlier, Devin Mauney, Peter Cihon, Frans von der Dunk, Dov Greenbaum, Ameen Jauhar, David Koplow, Sebastien Krier, David Manheim, Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Cecil Abungu, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, Gregory Lewis, Janvi Ahuja, Sarah Carter, Alasdair Phillips-Robins, Caleb Huffman, and the participants at presentations of the individual parts of this agenda.

[Eevee🔹]

I really appreciate the work you’re all doing! I’m interested in longtermism and liberal political theory, and the section on institutional design appears relevant to that.

[EdoArad]

This is amazingly comprehensive and I’m glad you took the time to make it accessible to people who are not involved with EA ideas.

Two interesting quotes from a brief glance:

Let us define “pleasure risks (p-risks)” as risks where an adverse outcome would prevent pleasure on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding all pleasure that has existed on Earth so far

[This references Michael Dickens’ post on “Disappointing Futures”, and I love the term “p-risks” 😊]

At present, very few people are working on animal law from a longtermist perspective, and very few people are working on longtermism from a multi-species perspective. [...]

We believe this separation between animal law and longtermism is a mistake, in both directions. [...]

As a preliminary matter, a question remains as to whether incremental or fundamental legal change would plausibly do the most good for animals. We believe that the answer to this question, which hinges on many difficult empirical and normative judgments, is highly uncertain. We also doubt that these strategies are mutually exclusive; for instance, some incremental changes for animals might also help make fundamental changes more feasible. Thus, we believe the optimal approach will likely include a mixture of both strategies.

[Eevee🔹]

Great work! I noticed that the first three pages of the PDF are not accessible, as it is not possible to select the text.

[Renan Araujo]

Thanks for bringing that up! That was unintended, we will work on solving that :)