Judging Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

The introduction of any new technology challenges judges to determine how it fits into existing liability schemes. If judges choose poorly, they can unleash novel injuries on society without redress or stifle progress by overburdening a technological breakthrough. The emergence of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles will present an enormous challenge of this sort to judges, as this technology will alter the foundation of the largest source of civil liability in the United States. Although regulatory agencies will determine when and how autonomous cars may be placed into service, judges will likely play a central role in defining the standards for liability for them. How will judges treat this new technology? People commonly exhibit biases against innovations such as a naturalness bias, in which people disfavor injuries arising from artificial sources. In this paper we present data from 967 trial judges showing that judges exhibit bias against self-driving vehicles. They both assigned more liability to a self-driving vehicle than they would to a human-driven vehicle and treated injuries caused by a self-driving vehicle as more serious than injuries caused by a human-driven vehicle.

Keywords: judges, courts, autonomous vehicles

JEL Classification: k20