AVRIL LAVIGNE CLET - CENTER FOR LAW AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

AFRICA'S PREMIER RESEARCH CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Providing legal and policy solutions for the responsible adoption of 4IR technologies

Focus Areas

Research

Our work focuses on eight core frontier technologies: Blockchain, artificial intelligence, Big Data, robotics, drones, 5G, Internet of Things, and quad computing. Our researchers explore in depth the underlying legal and policy issues on each of these technologies.

Teaching and Training

Our faculty together with our partners offer various short courses and masterclasses to industry and midcareer personalities. We also mentor students through guided research, focusing on working with each student through the journey of producing specific, rigorous and groundbreaking work. Through strategic partnerships, we provide our students with internship to selected institutions.

Policy

We aim to influence the legal and regulatory frameworks for the responsible adoption and governance of frontier technologies, and influence thought leadership in this area at a national and continental level.

Industry

Our incubator provides practical skills to law students on the advisory lifecycle of tech companies, and trains them to work towards being trusted advisors. Our instructors take students through the development of appropriate skills to tech companies of varying sizes. Sessions cover relevant themes like designing an effective risk strategy, preparing relevant company policies, building ethically sensitive products, running legal sensitivity analyses. We also provide free legal advice to start ups within other incubators on some of the legal and policy issues they must consider in their evolutionary journey.

Research at CLET

CLET brings together researchers and practitioners interested in deepening their knowledge or investigating previously unexplored questions on law and emerging technology. Our faculty facilitates collaborative undertakings that work towards making a contextually relevant contribution to the conversations on the impact of frontier technologies on the law and society.

As part of our process of stimulating contextually relevant policy interventions and approaches to the questions we are interested in, we work with small cohorts of students to produce robust research on our areas of thematic focus.

Our inaugural cohort of researchers comprises of seven students working on our first series of working papers covering specific questions on artificial intelligence; big data, health information and policy; big data and national identification systems; data governance, politics and multinational corporations; taxation of digital assets; regulatory concerns around blockchain technology; and the legal and policy issues on the use of unmanned autonomous weapons.

Ongoing and future research at the Centre covers key broad and themes incuding governance, health, security, the economy and human rights.

Cras est Lex (Tomorrow’s Laws)

The current legal design has enough room to address only a limited number of the questions emerging with the development of next frontier technologies. CLET is keen on stimulating the necessary conversations focused on guiding the search for a Legal Design for the Fourth industrial revolution. We will host our first lecture in this series soon.

Law Elections and Politics

The impact of technology on elections is now well documented. However, there are not enough answers to the underlying questions. This is a critical area of interest to our researchers and our work focuses on providing those much needed answers.

Clusters and Hangouts

From the earlier days of its conceptualization, the law has always evolved from conversation and debate. Our clusters and hangouts provide spaces for collaborative discussion, healthy and penetrative debate, and policy and scholarly incubation of varying kinds and that addresses different levels of interest. We emphasize to both industry and students how crucial it is that the thought process is philosophical and theoretical as it is practical.

Humans 4.0 Initiative

Beyond blurring the lines between our interactions with technology and our environments, frontier technologies are altering what it means to be human. Our research examines the various policy, social welfare, human rights, and other dimensional issues that the law must, as a matter of urgency address.

Student Driven Initiatives

Our student driven initiatives provide room for our students to initiate and incubate ideas, projects and solutions to individual human, societal and business needs that they identify. We lend them support in facilitating the structuring of critical relationships, without superintending their creativity. These initiatives prove that lawyers are as creative as their industry counterparts. These spaces also facilitate the building of relationships between students of different colleges and law students, and allow them to co-create the ecosystems of the future.

  • Research at CLET

    CLET brings together researchers and practitioners interested in deepening their knowledge or investigating previously unexplored questions on law and emerging technology. Our faculty facilitates collaborative undertakings that work towards making a contextually relevant contribution to the conversations on the impact of frontier technologies on the law and society.

    As part of our process of stimulating contextually relevant policy interventions and approaches to the questions we are interested in, we work with small cohorts of students to produce robust research on our areas of thematic focus.

    Our inaugural cohort of researchers comprises of seven students working on our first series of working papers covering specific questions on artificial intelligence; big data, health information and policy; big data and national identification systems; data governance, politics and multinational corporations; taxation of digital assets; regulatory concerns around blockchain technology; and the legal and policy issues on the use of unmanned autonomous weapons.

    Ongoing and future research at the Centre covers key broad and themes incuding governance, health, security, the economy and human rights.

  • From the earlier days of its conceptualization, the law has always evolved from conversation and debate. Our clusters and hangouts provide spaces for collaborative discussion, healthy and penetrative debate, and policy and scholarly incubation of varying kinds and that addresses different levels of interest. We emphasize to both industry and students how crucial it is that the thought process is philosophical and theoretical as it is practical.

  • The current legal design has enough room to address only a limited number of the questions emerging with the development of next frontier technologies. CLET is keen on stimulating the necessary conversations focused on guiding the search for a Legal Design for the Fourth industrial revolution. We will host our first lecture in this series soon.

  • The impact of technology on elections is now well documented. However, there are not enough answers to the underlying questions. This is a critical area of interest to our researchers and our work focuses on providing those much needed answers.

  • Beyond blurring the lines between our interactions with technology and our environments, frontier technologies are altering what it means to be human. Our research examines the various policy, social welfare, human rights, and other dimensional issues that the law must, as a matter of urgency address.

  • The impact of technology on elections is now well documented. However, there are not enough answers to the underlying questions. This is a critical area of interest to our researchers and our work focuses on providing those much needed answers.

News and Events

Events

Mon Feb 17
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

General introduction to 4IR technologies, advanced legal research, and orientation into CLET

Fri Feb 28
2:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Lower Lecture Auditorium, School of Law, Makerere University

Wed Mar 18
2:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Lower Lecture Auditorium, School of Law, Makerere University

Fri Apr 17
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Contact Us

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