Tech law seminar on the end of encryption

Class 01 (Law and technology)

1. Read our syllabus.
2. By Thursday at noon eastern: Create a list of 200 potential future technologies.
   1. Identify the first 100 technologies without using any external sources or tools.
   2. Identify the second 100 technologies by critically engaging with (and therefore not merely copy) external sources and tools (including generative AI).
   3. Ensure your document complies with the course instructions for assignments, name the file "Class01 TechnologyList.pdf", and upload it here.
   4. Bring a printed copy to class.
3. Read Law and Technology.
4. Browse the website for TechInLaw: The Technology, Innovation, and Law Collaborative.
5. Slides for class

Class 02 (Problem-solving overview)

1. Reflect on how you solve problems, and create a flowchart showing your problem-solving process. Bring a copy to class.
2. Read Peace Corps Theory of Change Model.
3. Read John Gilmore et al., Four Reasons Lawyers Fail to be Viewed as Strategic Advisors.
4. Read Ben W. Heineman, Jr., William F. Lee, and David B. Wilkins, Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century (pages 9 to 16 only).
5. Read Questions for the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy.
6. Create a vignette for class: Prepare a talk that, in no more than 60 seconds, presents an issue to your colleagues. The issue can be a topic, a challenge, or an opportunity. For example, "Covid-19" is a topic, "South Carolina's vaccine rate is too low" is a challenge, and "Can we use what we've learned during the pandemic to reduce the impact of other diseases such as the flu?" is an opportunity. The issue does not need to be legal in nature (although it can be). It does need to be understandable and otherwise accessible to your colleagues -- and your talk should provide the information necessary for your colleagues to meaningfully analyze it. You should also be prepared to answer any questions your colleagues pose about the issue.

Class 03 (Topic overview)

1. Re-read Law and Technology.
2. This semester we will use a structured problem-solving model to explore the implications of an end to modern encryption. This model will involve researching this topic, brainstorming challenges and opportunities, framing an underlying problem, brainstorming solutions, selecting and developing a best solution, and creating outputs with a view toward outcomes and impacts. ​Your charge is not to solve or even describe this entire topic but rather to make an original, credible, and meaningful contribution to an important dimension. Each step will require substantial research and reflection to combine knowledge, insights, and skills from inside and outside the law. In particular, many but not all of the frameworks, tools, impediments, risks, opportunities, issues, arguments, and strategies that you ultimate identify will involve law.
3. Reread the prior paragraph. It's especially important. What's the relationship between (1) your best solution and (2) your final deliverable?
4. Perform initial research to help you begin to understand (1) what data are encrypted, (2) how those data are encrypted, and (3) how that encryption might be broken.
5. Prepare to interview Professor Adam Scott Wandt, who will join us on Friday as our (virtual) expert, at length.
6. Read the two articles shared by Prof. Wandt:
   1. What Is Post-Quantum Cryptography?
   2. The Promise and Peril of Quantum Computing and Its Implications for Cyber Insurance
7. Consider how our logic model can help you prepare for this interview:
   1. Impacts: In the class sessions that follow, you will more effectively problem-solve our specific topic.
   2. Outcomes (to enable the impacts): You and your colleagues will understand more about this topic.
   3. Outputs (to enable the outcomes): You will obtain clear answers from me that connect my knowledge to climate engineering.
   4. Activities (to enable the outputs): You will ask initial and follow-up questions that are designed to solicit clear and relevant answers.
   5. Inputs (to enable the activities): You will have conducted the research (into our topic and into me) necessary to formulate effective questions.
8. Prepare an initial research strategy memo that sketches both a classwide research strategy and an individual research strategy.
   1. What are key procedural questions? What are key substantive questions? What subtopics seem especially important or interesting? What information, both in and outside law, would help to better identify problems and, eventually, solutions? What kinds of resources might help to produce that information?
   2. You may prepare this memo individually or in a group of your choice.
   3. Although I am far more interested in quality than quantity, I suggest about two succinct single-spaced pages per person in either prose or outline form.
   4. Bring two printed copies of this memo to class.
9. Document your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts up to class three.

Class 04 (Preliminary research)

1. As soon as practical
   1. Upload your memo from class three to our shared folder. (If you would like, you may make changes before sharing it.)
   2. Review your colleagues' memos from class three.
2. By Monday at 11:59pm
   1. In a shared document, identify a foundational subtopic that you will research for this week.
   2. Begin researching your subject using credible sources.
3. By Wednesday at 11:59pm
   1. Create a concise outline that helpfully summarizes the results of your research into your subtopic.
   2. Your outline should include citations (in any useful format) and be no more than one single-spaced page.
   3. Include essential details; exclude extraneous details.
4. By class time
   1. Read all of the outlines, identify connections and gaps, and prepare questions for discussion to advance our collective understanding of our topic. You will not present your subject in class; rather, you will answer your classmates' questions with a view toward advancing our collective understanding of our topic. This will require you to know more about your subject than you have shared in your outline.
   2. Document your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts up to class four.
5. Just for your planning
   1. In the following week, you will continue researching our topic and begin brainstorming challenges.
   2. We will be following a schedule similar to the 2024 course, except that I plan to remove the class session on criteria so we have more time to develop a best solution.

Class 05 (General challenges)

1. Continue your research. Acceptable memos will make a meaningful contribution to our understanding by synthesizing information rather than just collating it and by relating that information back to your specific subject and to our general course topic.
2. By Tuesday at 11:59pm eastern: Share your memo.
3. Read your colleagues' memos.
4. Individually brainstorm challenges related to our course topic.
   1. Spend at least one hour brainstorming so that you generate numerous challenges.
   2. Think creatively! Consider both the obvious and the bold.
   3. The focus of your brainstorming should be challenges that do not involve specific legal issues. However, keep track of potential legal issues that arise in the course of your brainstorming.
   4. Write each challenge in the form of a complete sentence.
   5. Organize your list only after you have completed most of your brainstorming.
5. Bring two printed copies of your list to class.
6. Read Hal Gregersen, Better Brainstorming.
7. Read Art Markman, Your Team Is Brainstorming All Wrong.
8. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 06 (Legal challenges)

1. Share your individual list of challenges and your group list of challenges (from last class).
2. Continue your research. I suggest that you focus on potentially relevant legal topics and issues. Acceptable memos will make a meaningful contribution to our understanding by synthesizing information rather than just collating it and by relating that information back to your specific subject and to our general course topic.
3. By Tuesday at 11:59pm eastern: Share your memo.
4. Read your colleagues' memos.
5. Individually brainstorm legal challenges related to our course topic.
   1. Spend at least one hour brainstorming so that you generate numerous challenges.
   2. Think creatively! Consider both the obvious and the bold.
   3. Write each challenge in the form of a complete sentence.
   4. Organize your list only after you have completed most of your brainstorming.
6. Bring two printed copies of your list to class.
7. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 06 (Underlying problem)

1. Share your individual list of challenges and your group list of challenges (from last class).
2. Review our course topic as well as our collective research and brainstorming to date.
3. Reflect! Consider themes and gaps. You might experiment with using generative AI tools to assist in your reflection.
4. Continue your research. I suggest thinking far upstream or far downstream of our topic. In other words, what are distant potential causes and distant potential effects of an end to encryption?
5. By Tuesday at 11:59pm eastern: Share your memo.
6. Read your colleagues' memos.
7. Read Thaisa Fernandes, "Learn About the "How Might We" Framework."
8. Write one clear, organized, and careful paragraph introducing our topic to a general reader with no technical or legal training. Then write another clear, organized, and careful paragraph continuing that introduction for a reader with legal training.
9. Ask a generative AI tool to do the same, and then compare the results.
10. Carefully construct three compelling "How Might We" ("HMW") questions that each capture an essential element of our course topic. (To reach three compelling questions, you will likely need to generate many more initial HMW questions that you then broaden, narrow, combine, refine, or set aside.) Be prepared to explain why your three HMW questions are the most important.
11. Bring two printed copies of your introductory paragraphs and your HMW questions to class.
12. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 07 (Research toward solutions)

1. The underlying problem you selected was (I think): "How might we protected people whose encrypted data has been decrypted?"
2. Continue your research. I suggest that you focus on potentially relevant legal topics, tools, and frameworks. Acceptable memos will make a meaningful contribution to our understanding by synthesizing information rather than just collating it and by relating that information back to our underlying problem.
3. By Tuesday at 11:59pm eastern: Share your memo.
4. Read your colleagues' memos.
5. Individually brainstorm legal solutions that address our underlying problem.
   1. Spend at least one hour brainstorming so that you generate numerous solutions.
   2. Think creatively! Consider both the obvious and the bold.
   3. Write each challenge in the form of a complete sentence.
   4. Organize your list only after you have completed most of your brainstorming.
6. Bring two printed copies of your list to class.
7. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 08 (Field trip)

1. By Tuesday at 5pm eastern: Review and submit the preparatory materials in our shared folder.
2. Continue your research.
3. Propose at least 10 solutions to our underlying problem. Consider both solutions that primarily implicate law and solutions that do not primarily implicate law. Your write-up for each solution should be at least one detailed paragraph. (Think who, what, where, when, why, and how.)
4. By Thursday at 11:59pm eastern: Share your solutions. (You may read the solutions before or after our field trip.)
5. Field trip on Friday!
6. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 09 (Solutions)

1. We will debrief our field trip as part of class 10.
2. Think about what makes a solution promising both for further development and for potential implementation. How would you procedurally and substantively evaluate solutions? (In other words: How would you go about evaluating them? And what would matter in your evaluation?)
3. Read all the solutions from class 8.
4. Critique all the solutions (including your own) one-by-one and as a whole.
5. Instruct a GenAI tool to critique your own solutions one-by-one and as a whole. Think carefully about both your prompts and the resulting outputs.
6. By Wednesday at 5pm eastern: Upload to our shared folder a single document containing all these critiques.
7. By Friday at 10:45am eastern: Read all the critiques of your own solutions and, if you would like, any of the other critiques.
8. In class on Friday, you will work together to select and begin developing best solutions. By the end of class you should have decided:
   1. Whether you will work on a best solution individually, with one or more classmates, or together with the entire class.
   2. What that best solution will be.
9. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.

Class 10 (Workplan)

1. Continue your work.
2. Continue coordinating so that, by the end of class 10, you can collectively propose to me:
   1. the form of a final class deliverable documenting your best solution.
   2. the form of a final individual deliverable supporting that class deliverable.
   3. a schedule, with milestones and deadlines, for the rest of the semester.
   4. any key topics relevant to our best solution that you would like to explore together in a class session.
   5. any initial requests for assistance from your professorial duo.
3. In class 10 we will also debrief our field trip.
4. Continue documenting your course-relevant inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts in and outside class.