ABSTRACT
We are entering the age of robots where autonomous robots will drive our cars, milk cows, drill for oil, invest in stock, mine coal, build houses, pick strawberries, and work as surgeons. Robots, in mimicking the work of humans, will also mimic their legal liability. But how do you sue a robot? The current answer is that you cannot. Robots are property. They are not entities with a legal status that would make them amendable to sue or be sued. If a robot causes harm, you have to sue its owner. Corporations used to be like this for many procedural purposes. They were similarly tethered to human owners. Over time, courts and legislators abandoned the model of treating corporations solely as property and increasingly treated them as an independent artificial person for litigation purposes.
Robots might also make a transition along those lines. If they do, which legal model should we adopt for robots? Are they more like an employee, a franchisee, a subsidiary, a child, an animal, a subcontractor, an agent, or something else altogether? Given the inherent path-dependence of procedural law, picking the right model will have important consequences and will be difficult to reverse …
Michalski, Roger, How to Sue a Robot (June 31, 2017). Utah Law Review, volume 2018, no 5, 2018.
First posted 2021-02-07 09:31:06
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