AI and Equality by Design
This event is a collaboration between the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group and the Future of Technology and Society Discussion Group

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly offered by proponents of its use as a tool for overcoming human biases, errors in judgment, and irregularities in decision-making, promising to provide a greater measure of predictability and consistency in decisions and, therefore, in the rule of law. For its critics, generating consistency in decision-making is a means of entrenching and amplifying discriminatory practices in a way that reproduces privilege and inequality in human relations through the use of pattern discrimination and predictive analytics, while simultaneously rendering these practices less transparent, explainable, and contestable. In both cases, technology is catapulted to the forefront of law as constitutive of lived realities and the governance of human relations, whether in the private or public sphere, rendering law perhaps nothing more than a technology too soon to become obsolete. Algorithms feed neural networks with neo-liberalism’s relations of power and inequality, and thus have the capacity to “bake in inequality,” to reproduce bias, and effectively to pass off the descriptive output of “code” as law, and such “law” as the normative aspirations of justice. More than ex post remedial mechanisms in law are needed to address such harms: if the rule of law is to retain its comparative advantage, an “Equality by Design” enforceable default for computer programming, consistent with the aim of a “human-centred approach” to AI governance, is required. Borrowing from well-established “Privacy by Design” principles, this chapter argues for similar, strengthened implementation in domestic law and policies for equality as the default value-based inclusive design for machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics.

Bita Amani

Bita Amani is full professor at the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, affiliated faculty in Cultural Studies, and adjunct faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is a founding members of Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s, serving as a Co-Director (currently acting Director) since its inception and organizing an annual visiting speaker series and International Women’s Day Conference for over fifteen years ((femlaw.queensu.ca). She is a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, and Visiting Research Fellow with the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. Bita teaches courses in intellectual property (IP), information privacy, and feminist legal studies (workshop), and is currently working on several issues related to equality, including AI governance and discrimination, food law, tech governance and intellectual property, care work and caring relations. She is a member of the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights. Publications include “AI and Equality by Design” (2021) and “Implementing Triage-Bot: Supporting the Current Practice for Triage Nurses” (with Kim Sears et al, 2024), as well as the following books: State Agency and the Patenting of Life in International Law: Merchants and Missionaries in a Global Society, (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009); Trademarks and Unfair Competition – Cases and Commentary on Canadian and International Law Second Edition (Toronto: Carswell, 2014, with Carys Craig); and The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals, (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2024, with Profs. Caroline B. Ncube and Matthew Rimmer (eds)) – including her chapter on SDG 10 (reduced inequalities within and among countries), “Some More Equal than Others: Critical Contexts for the (False) Promises of Intellectual Property Rights.

Dr. Amani has served as consultant to the Ontario Advisory Committee on New Predictive Genetic Technologies as a member of the Subcommittee on Gene Patenting (2001); to the provincial government on the e-Laws project for the Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario) Office of the Legislative Counsel (OLC) as editor and annotations editor for the online delivery of access to laws; and served briefly as a legislative drafter with the OLC. She was co-investigator on a report on the policy implications for women and children of recognizing foreign polygamous marriages in Canada funded by the Status of Women Canada and the Department of Justice; and, published a book chapter on novel food regulation in Canada as one of six projects commissioned by the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health (NNEWH), funded by the Bureau of Women’s Health and Gender Analysis (Health Canada). In 2003, she was a delegate of the Women’s Intercultural Network, an NGO with Special Consultive Status to the Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC), for UNCSW 67 in New York. She is called to the Bar of Ontario (2000).
Date: 21 May 2025, 15:30
Venue: Faculty of Law - Seminar Room F
Speakers: Speaker to be announced
Organising department: Faculty of Law
Part of: Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group 2024/25
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Maisy Bentley