Introducing the Cambridge Research Group on Private Actor Responsibility

Oh, hi everyone. Today we're here at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, just to introduce the new Cambridge Research Group on Private Actor Responsibility. And I'm here with Andrew and Henning. So without further ado, why don't we just start with very brief introductions and then we can talk more about the work of the group. Andrew, would you like to start? >> Thank you very much. So I'm the International Law Academic here in the faculty, also fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre. >> Right. So I'm Henning Grosse Rueschmann. I'm a professor of law here at Cambridge, mainly working on IP law and tech and sort of aspects of international economic law. >> And I'm Nina. I'm just a PhD candidate helping out with the work of the research group. So Andrew, let's start with you. How would you describe the work of the research group on private actor responsibility to someone outside the field and what are the big questions the group is trying to answer? >> Thank you. So the plan for the research group was to have a space where people who are interested in questions of private actor responsibility could meet to talk about those issues but from a very much an interdisciplinary perspective but also a kind of Chatham House style perspective. So the idea was to have a free-flowing discussion rather than perhaps a presentation of a paper and then a more formal Q&A. The hope is that by doing that we can bring together people from different disciplines, different areas of law as well as different disciplines to think about persistent questions which are sometimes very topical but often quite structurally embedded so they've been going for a long time in new and exciting ways. >> Mhm. So Andrew, could you maybe expand a bit more on how the group started and kind of behind the scenes elements of the the thinking behind the research group? >> Thank you. Yes, so Henning and I always had a strong interest in private actor responsibility typically in the area of corporations, but we came together a couple years ago to do the first event which was focused on corporate responsibility for historic injustices. So, um on that basis, we decided actually there was quite a strong appetite for thinking about these questions more broadly. But we also thought there are difficulties already in thinking about the questions in new ways because so many of us are entrenched in thinking about them in a particular perspective or, you know, we take for granted that corporations are very powerful and often have resources that rival that of many states. But what hadn't been done as much was to think about why it is that we're in this position, what legal and other technologies are used to actually produce this particular circumstance, and what kind of research questions, interdisciplinary research questions, would lead to new and novel research in this area, and to a better understanding of why we end up in the position we end up today where it seems like, in some cases at least, it's very difficult to hold private actors responsible for their conduct. Um and it's very difficult also to fully appreciate the relationship between private and public actors and why it ends up being that so much work that we might otherwise think that we should hold the public actor to account for is actually been done by private actor. So, we both come from slightly different but but related fields of of legal research, um and that's initially what sort of started the group. But we very quickly realized that actually, in order to really get access to these questions and to think in new and creative ways about them, we needed a distinctly interdisciplinary uh perspective, and the group kind of was born from that. >> Um and then, Henning, could you um try to explain to our viewers uh why this um topic of private actor responsibility is such an important area of research today? >> Right, I think it's always been an important area of research, and of course people have done research with on that topic across different domains. But as Andrew was saying, we are trying to bring all of within law lots of different domains together and also bring in external expertise or people from other disciplines interested in that. So, for example, one of the reasons I think it's really crucial to look at this now is because while we always had private ordering, like the idea that companies not only or not only companies or any sort of private individual actor not only trying to perhaps influence policies made by the state, international organizations, or other public policy makers, we by means of technology and other means of sort of amplification of these effects of private ordering, we see completely new sort of dimensions of that, right? So, just take the platform economy where major platforms not just sort of engage in market environments with users and compete to some extent, maybe divide up markets, but also basically set the rules, right? And they can just rely on very basic notions of party autonomy, freedom of contract to do that, and they can amplify find that by means of technology, right? And you see it in the AI space very much similar developments where because of the geopolitical current races amongst for for domination, there's hardly any chance of effective regulation. So, for because regulation sort of as a tool for control diminishes, there is, I think, a strong need to look at the consequences of that and to also to think about what might be tools to address that within private law, within public law, or outside law altogether. >> Mhm. Um and how does the group approach all of these very important questions? So, Andre, if you could expand a little bit about the the aims, the methods, and the different perspectives that we're trying to bring together. >> So, first of all, the the group is meant to be very creative. So, the idea is that we're really open to different ways of thinking about these problems. As besides here as Henning said that some of the new challenges arise because of the developments in technology, which pushed us to sort of the vanishing point of law, the perhaps the limits of law. So, by having people in different backgrounds and different expertise, we can think critically about what what the law is doing and also where the limits of that are. But also we acknowledge that in thinking about private access, we're not just concerned about the kind of legal technologies that are used to make some of these things possible, but also the digital technologies or the actual physical technologies behind it, the economic implications, the social implications, the political reality. And it's only by thinking about all these things together that we can then and I'm thinking then about the relationship between the private actor and the public actor that we can perhaps start to really get to why some of these problems have been so entrenched, have lasted for such a long time, and why today with technology they might be particularly acute. So, to answer your question, the methodologies are diverse, you know, we're looking at different perspectives. That's the precisely the reason. We have a number of different speakers who come to address the group from all around the world, sometimes online, sometimes in person. Um and they often bring very specific expertise or they look at very specific issues, but the group as a whole can kind of take in into account different aspects and different perspectives. So, the aim therefore is to kind of bring together all of these and to use that to think critically about some of these systemic and and very current problems. >> Amazing, thank you. Um and then we talked a lot about um the big tech, right? And the responsibility of of tech companies. So, is that really um the the only or kind of the the main topic that we're trying to cover? Are there any other topics that we're trying to >> we want to go our thinking around responsibility way beyond this particular aspect of big tech actors, right? The that is when it comes to the deployment and use of technology one of the key domains, but you can also think more broadly about phenomena like the Anthropocene, so the the idea that humanity basically is now the determining factor of life on our planet and the survival of the planet itself. And that essentially, of course, is due to those who had the most impact on the maybe emissions which create climate change, on the loss of biodiversity. And again, often this is not solely private actors, but it is private actors. And it's also private actors who do a lot of sort of responsible um mechanisms trying to avoid harm and minimize harms, right? So so we're looking at that broader domain of the environment. Um maybe also sort of uh more uh affected indigenous and other sort of groups by uh private actors. And uh we have, as in Andrew sort of suggested earlier, we've started out actually thinking about historic injustices, often which still manifest themselves to some extent here in the present, right? And um for me, one of the scenarios where I come to sort of think about more about that is that Cambridge we couple of years back done an inquiry uh on the legacy of slavery of the university, its colleges, its alumni, and so on. And and looking at at that, right? Because the buildings not this one particularly, because it's a new building, but many buildings in Cambridge date back to periods where the transatlantic chattel slave trade, for example, brought riches to this country as to many other sort of European countries. And many of these sort of impacts still resonate today. So so I think we're we're certainly going to go beyond Big Tech, and we've done some of that. And of course there's more to come in the future. >> So Nina, I wonder if I can ask you a question as well now. So what made you interested in joining the group? >> Um so my kind of main area of interest is broadly human rights and my PhD is actually on human rights theory and jurisprudence and so on. Uh but my um kind of personal affinities uh draw from these this area of um corporate responsibilities, private sector responsibilities and so on uh and from this area of business and human rights which I've I've made clear to you to both of you how much I um uh well disagree with the slow development of the area of business and human rights how it lacks um real regulation. A lot of it is based on soft law which is not binding. Um and obviously that's a problem because of everything that we talked about today. We have all of these extremely powerful um actors, private actors that are almost having the power of public actors, of of the states um and the the budgets of ones as well without any real corresponding responsibilities that come with it. So there's a lot of human rights harms, human rights abuses that stem from it and in all of these um areas that we talked about, big tech, environment, some historical operations and everything, all of that is extremely uh in my opinion um unregulated as of yet and um which stems which which then leads to a lot of human rights harms um and that that was just a um something that I'm personally >> [laughter] >> passionate about. Um and Henning, what are we hoping to accomplish with the work of the group? So I mean more broadly, more long-term, where do we see the the the work going? >> Um so I think in a way this has come out of ideas Andrew and I had talking to people around Cambridge. So, I don't think we have at the moment a fixed plan for the next 5 years, whatever. We are experimenting with ways to engage people locally. I think Cambridge for someone who's come here like from like different jurisdiction, not studied here 10 or so years ago. For me, one of the main things what this place has to offer, which I think the group can tap into to to a large extent, is expertise from all different domains and people working together and being sort of in a in the vicinity of a relatively small place geographically. So, to get people from within Cambridge, lots of people are coming to visit this place luckily. Like we have lots of good people coming from all over the world to to visit this place. Been able to sort of tap into that. Um but also so I think like to maybe experiment with digital technology as a means to bring in people. So, I think we're going to over the next 1 or 2 years see how we can engage with anyone who's interested and maybe that's a call for those of you who feel that this is an interesting topic. Think about maybe like what and how your research might contribute to it. We'd be very happy to hear from you. Um so overall I'd say it's uh something where by means of experiment and going back to Andrew's first question answer to the question like it's not about formally presenting a paper. It's about maybe getting together getting people together to think about a more systemic issue or maybe trying to identify some of these more systemic issues in ways perhaps we don't see from our specific sometimes more narrow um you know, perspectives on on on law, tech, um the society, the economy, and so on. Yeah. >> And if I can just uh ask another question kind of expanding on that. So we talked about the broader topic private sector responsibilities, but perhaps the viewers might want some specific details of like topics that we're that we have already tackled and then we plan on tackling. >> Yeah, so I can maybe add one or two which we have so far covered and we'll hopefully be able to share some video content on that. So the way we've usually done this is that we have sort of a broader discussion with a couple of people interested and then maybe later the speaker or the main presenter if that person was willing to do so would sort of have a shorter interview as we're doing as we're doing now. So we've done that for example in relation to questions on the role of class action litigation in the US and in Europe in order to tackle harm which might result from artificial intelligence applications. So we had Albert Fox Cahn and really interesting discussion around that. We had Julie Cohen looking um at questions about the corporate sort of structuring and financing of Big Tech. So and I think we had >> Recently we had Andrew from Melbourne Law School talking about the role of Facebook in Myanmar and the question of responsibility for genocide. >> Oh perfect. Thank you and thank you Andrew so much and thank you to the viewers for joining joining us today. Make sure to tune in for other recordings on private sector responsibility. >> Thank you.