We Robot

We Robot is the annual interdisciplinary conference on the legal, ethical, and policy implications of robotics and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2012 at the University of Miami School of Law by A. Michael Froomkin together with Ryan Calo (then Stanford, now University of Washington) and the late Ian Kerr (University of Ottawa). The three founders framed We Robot as a place where lawyers, philosophers, and roboticists would think together about problems that were still years away from the courts, and the conference is widely credited with catalyzing "robot law" as a distinct scholarly field.

The format is deliberate and unusual. Papers are submitted in response to a call for papers, peer-selected, and then paired with an assigned discussant (a "commentator") drawn from a different discipline than the author, so that a legal scholar's paper is typically commented on by an engineer, a philosopher, or a social scientist, and vice versa. Sessions devote most of their time to the commentator's critique and open floor discussion rather than the author's own presentation, and the conference is preceded by a day of hands-on workshops, demos, and doctoral colloquia. Papers are circulated in advance so the room can read them, and revised versions typically appear in law reviews or in the Elgar "Robot Law" volumes that Calo, Froomkin, and Kerr edited.

The hosting rotates by design, so the conference builds a network of tech-law centers rather than accreting to any single institution. Miami has anchored it and hosted the most editions; Stanford Law's Center for Internet and Society, the University of Washington's Tech Policy Lab, Yale's Information Society Project, the University of Ottawa's Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Boston University Law with the MIT Media Lab, and Windsor Law have each hosted at least one. In 2026 the conference moves to Europe for the first time, hosted by the Robotics and AI Law Society (RAILS) in Berlin.

We Robot's influence on the AV and AI regulation debate is difficult to overstate. Ryan Calo's "Robotics and the New Cyberlaw," first presented at We Robot 2014 and later published in the California Law Review, is the modal citation for the argument that robots are not simply "the internet with arms" and require their own doctrinal frame; it has shaped how the NHTSA, the FTC, and multiple state legislatures talk about autonomous systems. Madeleine Clare Elish's "Moral Crumple Zones," first presented at We Robot 2016, gave the field the now-standard vocabulary for how human operators absorb blame for automation failures and is cited across the aviation, self-driving, and clinical-AI literatures. Kate Darling's early We Robot work on social robots and anthropomorphism is the origin of the "legal protection for robots" line of scholarship, and papers by Woodrow Hartzog, Joanna Bryson, Neil Richards, William Smart, Jack Balkin, Meg Leta Jones, and Mary Anne Franks first surfaced at We Robot before entering the mainstream law-review canon.

Host rotation: 2012: University of Miami School of Law (Coral Gables, FL); 2013: Stanford Law School (Center for Internet and Society) (Stanford, CA); 2014: University of Miami School of Law (Coral Gables, FL); 2015: University of Washington School of Law (Seattle, WA); 2016: University of Miami School of Law (Coral Gables, FL); 2017: Yale Law School (Information Society Project) (New Haven, CT); 2018: Stanford Law School (Center for Internet and Society) (Stanford, CA); 2019: University of Miami School of Law (Coral Gables, FL); 2020: University of Ottawa (Centre for Law, Technology and Society), held virtually due to COVID-19 (Ottawa, Canada (virtual)); 2021: University of Miami School of Law (Coral Gables, FL); 2022: University of Washington School of Law (Tech Policy Lab) (Seattle, WA); 2023: Boston University School of Law with MIT Media Lab (Boston, MA); 2025: University of Windsor Faculty of Law (Windsor Law) (Windsor, Ontario, Canada); 2026: Robotics and AI Law Society (RAILS e.V.) (Berlin, Germany)