Join us for a research presentation by Dr. Fanna Gamal, UCLA Assistant Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, to discuss her forthcoming paper, "The Algorithmic Racial Proxy." This event is co-sponsored by UCLA DataX and the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.
The Algorithmic Racial Proxy
California Law Review (forthcoming 2026)
About the paper:
To comply with antidiscrimination law, computer programmers tend to exclude race as a data input when constructing a machine learning algorithm. Yet scholars and advocates consistently argue that even these formally race-blind algorithms can nevertheless racially discriminate by relying on so-called “proxies for race,” or variables that have a strong correlation with race such as zip code, income, or prior criminal arrest. While a programmer wishing to respond to this argument might attempt to remove both race and all racial proxies from input data, their task is complicated by a key dilemma. That is, the definition of a racial proxy is far from obvious. In response to this dilemma, scholars, computer programmers, and advocates proffer various approaches to defining a racial proxy and solutions to the problem of racial proxy discrimination. Diverse as they are in their methodologies, these solutions share a common quality. Each relies on an underlying assumption about the relationship between race and the racial proxy, and these assumptions can have far reaching implications for the development and regulation of machine learning algorithms.
This paper examines the myriad definitions of a racial proxy proffered by courts, scholars, and state and private actors to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions that undergird beliefs about what gives a variable its “racial” character. It shows how this racial reasoning is often capricious, paradoxical, or internally inconsistent in ways that impact the regulation of algorithms. In response to the indeterminate definition of a racial proxy, the paper proposes a refocusing of the algorithmic antidiscrimination discussion away from the eventual outcome—the definition of the racial proxy—to the various political and economic processes that supply the outcome. A focus on process reveals that what is at stake in the ability to define a racial proxy is the authority to technologically embed race into the algorithms that increasingly structure human life. This ability to define racial proxies can include the power to produce new and meaningful classes of individuals that can later be exposed to differing resources, opportunities, subordination and privilege. The paper maps this process as a novel form of racial construction and a necessary site of legal thought and regulation.
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12:00 PM - Lunch
12:30 PM - Presentation
(Audience Q & A and networking to follow)
2:00 PM - Close
The Institute for Technology, Law & Policy is hosting a special off-site visit to the Wende Museum's exhibition, Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency. The event features a guided tour with Chief Curator, Joes Segal, and a group discussion on surveillance and research. Priority access for members of the ITLP Research Group.
About IRG:
The ITLP Research Group (IRG) is a fortnightly meeting of tech law and engineering faculty and students, visiting scholars, and tech and society researchers from across the UCLA community. The IRG provides a forum to present and discuss new scholarship and works-in-progress at the intersection of technology, law, and policy.
UCLA students and faculty interested in joining IRG for Fall 2025 can request invitation by submitting this form: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025
About the Counter/Surveillance Exhibition:
In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance. Online, personal data are automatically collected and analyzed on a mass scale. Algorithms watch, listen, track, and identify people, complementing and sometimes replacing human eyes and ears. Powerful combinations of surveillance software and hardware, such as surveillance cameras outfitted with real-time facial recognition, are conquering public spaces. These technologies are often misleadingly presented as though they were pure innovation and have no history.
The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.
The exhibition includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin.
About the Wende Museum:
The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. Wende is a German word meaning “turning point” or “change” that has come to describe the transformative period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future.
The Institute for Technology, Law & Policy is pleased to extend an invitation to all interested students to attend the Technology Law Specialization Information Session. Please join us for an introduction to the field, the faculty, and what it means to specialize in technology law at UCLA.
Learn about UCLA's world-class offerings in information law, intellectual property, privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence, antitrust, media, tech supply chains, tech finance, and more. Featuring a faculty line-up including Professors Mark McKenna, Laura Pedraza-Fariña, Julia Powles, Andrew Selbst, Xiyin Tang, Jennifer Dixton, and Sanford Williams.
The Institute for Technology, Law & Policy (ITLP) Research Group is happy to announce a new mini-series: The Anatomy of a Tech Antitrust Case. This series will be spearheaded by ITLP-affiliated faculty member and leading antitrust lawyer, Jennifer Dixton, and is a collaboration between ITLP and the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2).
Hear from the experts about what goes into investigating, litigating, and crafting remedies in today's biggest tech monopolization and merger cases.
The first installment will be on Thursday, September 25, from 3.30 to 4.30PM at the Law School (Room 2477), and will feature Dr. Yair Taylor.
Dr. Taylor is a senior economist at Cornerstone Research who consults on antitrust litigation, merger investigations, and complex commercial litigation. Before joining Cornerstone Research, Dr. Taylor served for over a decade as an economist in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), working on such high-profile matters as Halliburton/Baker Hughes, Aetna/Humana, AT&T/Time Warner, and UnitedHealth Group/Change Healthcare.
Part 1 of the series will explore the role of the economic expert and how it has changed as antitrust focus shifts away from industrial products to tech.
The ITLP Research Group (IRG) is a fortnightly meeting of tech law and engineering faculty and students, visiting scholars, and tech and society researchers from across the UCLA community. The IRG provides a forum to present and discuss new scholarship and works-in-progress at the intersection of technology, law, and policy.
UCLA students and faculty interested in joining IRG for Fall 2025 can request invitation by submitting this form: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025
On behalf of the UCLA School of Law and Samueli School of Engineering, the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy is thrilled to welcome renowned author Ted Chiang to UCLA.
Ted Chiang is an award-winning science fiction writer, well known for short story collections from Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) to Exhalation: Stories (2019). Chiang's "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker, with essential essays on the topic of artificial intelligence, including
“ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” and
“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art."
Join us for "The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art,” a special evening lecture with Ted Chiang, moderated by ITLP Faculty Co-Director, Professor Mark McKenna.
RSVP here.
The ITLP Research Group (IRG) is a fortnightly meeting of tech law and engineering faculty and students, visiting scholars, and tech and society researchers from across the UCLA community. The IRG provides a forum to present and discuss new scholarship and works-in-progress at the intersection of technology, law, and policy.
UCLA students and faculty interested in joining IRG for Fall 2025 can request invitation by submitting this form: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025
