Claudio Novelli (Yale University – Digital Ethics Center), Luciano Floridi (Yale University – Digital Ethics Center; University of Bologna- Department of Legal Studies), Sofia Ranchordas (Tilburg Law School; Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali), Antonino Rotolo (University of Bologna – Department of Legal Sciences), Leendert Van der Torre (Universite du Luxembourg), and Liuwen Yu (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)) have posted Conceptual Sandboxes: A Proposal for Experimental Lawmaking on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Multi-stakeholder drafting of laws and regulations is praised for bringing diverse perspectives into the drafting process. However, it frequently leaves the meaning and implications of key legal concepts insufficiently specified, and not as a deliberate use of vagueness. Drawing on the EU AI Act’s Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment regime and the US Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, we illustrate how multistakeholder drafting can defer conceptual choices, creating costs for the interpretation and implementation of law. We propose a new experimental method, inspired by regulatory sandboxes, to address this problem before laws or regulations are enacted: conceptual sandboxes. A conceptual sandbox is a pre-codification controlled environment where lawmakers and stakeholders test and compare candidate concepts alongside the norms and institutional arrangements by which they operate. Combining conceptual engineering with methods from software and requirements engineering, we specify a six-phase protocol that maps contested concepts, predicts the effects of enacting them, stress-tests those predictions, compares alternatives, re-engineers the concept, and audits the result after enactment. A counterfactual application of the original Article 27 of the AI Act illustrates how the protocol can expose weaknesses in legal design before enactment.
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