The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is pleased to share that essays by Ralph Richard Banks, Faculty Director, and Hoang Pham, Director of Education and Opportunity, have been published in the Stanford Law Review Online.

In the first essay introducing the Special Collection on Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Civil Rights, Banks along with Guy-Uriel Charles, Spencer Overton, and Victor Y. Wu (JD `25, PhD `28) argue that artificial intelligence often produces racial disparities even without discriminatory intent or formal racial classifications, making disparate impact the principal framework for addressing AI-driven discrimination. They contend that the Supreme Court’s growing commitment to constitutional colorblindness threatens that framework and propose reconstructing antidiscrimination law around effects-based principles suited to an AI-pervaded world. Read Antidiscrimination Law in an AI-Pervaded World here.

In the final Essay of the collection, Pham, Hannah Cha (MS, Computer Science `26), and Rashon Poole (MS, Computer Science `25) argue that contemporary disputes over “AI bias” are best understood as normative disagreements about representation—whether AI systems should mirror the world as it is or be designed to promote a more inclusive future. Drawing on examples spanning from college admissions to AI-generated images of historical figures, the authors show that accusations of bias often mask deeper disagreements over what a system should depict or optimize for, rather than technical flaws in the algorithm itself. The Essay traces how this representation dispute complicates the application of antidiscrimination law to AI. Rather than proposing a single definition of bias, the authors close with an inquiry-based, context-specific framework meant to help stakeholders navigate what’s actually at stake in a given AI dispute. Read Unpacking AI Bias and the Antidiscrimination Law Dilemma here.

Much of this work grew out of the Antidiscrimination Law x AI Convening hosted earlier this year at Stanford Law School by the Center along with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School and the Multiracial Democracy Project at the George Washington University Law School. The convening brought together two groups that rarely openly converse: AI researchers and technology company representatives on one side, and civil rights lawyers, nonprofit leaders, and legal academics on the other. Read more about the conference here.

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