On September 4, 2025, ALI member Ashley S. Deeks, the Class of 1948 Professor of Scholarly Research in Law at UVA, was the focus of a faculty panel discussing her new book, The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability. The event was held at the University of Virginia School of Law and hosted by the Law School and its LawTech Center.
In The Double Black Box, Deeks explores how the opaque nature of national security decision-making is further complicated by the integration of artificial intelligence. The book examines the accountability challenges that arise when AI systems are used to support or even make autonomous national security decisions, compounding the difficulty of understanding and overseeing both human and machine decision-making processes.
The panel featured commentary from national experts in law and technology:
Asaf Lubin, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Martin S. Lederman, Georgetown University Law Center
Alan Rozenshtein, University of Minnesota Law School
Danielle K. Citron (moderator), UVA Law and Director of the LawTech Center
Deeks, a former White House associate counsel and deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council, is a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law and an elected member of the American Law Institute. She is also a contributing editor to Lawfare and a senior fellow at both the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare and the Miller Center.