By Gwyneth K. Shaw
The pace of innovation — and its potential consequences — is sparking debates on a broad set of societal fronts. Recently, the fifth edition of Berkeley Law’s Race and Tech Symposium focused in on how race, technology, and legal frameworks intersect, through a series of fascinating conversations about what’s happening and what needs to change.
Co-hosted by the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (BTLJ) and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, the event addressed the ways in which preexisting power dynamics are mimicked in technology-driven spaces and how those legacy structures can be reshaped — from copyright and patent law to social media moderation.
“Amidst the rise of innovation and AI applications that are becoming ubiquitous throughout our daily touchpoints, we really felt that this conversation of technological innovation could not take place without addressing the history behind these frameworks and how they have been and are continuing to be shaped,” says Nadia Ghaffari ’26, BTLJ’s co-symposium editor and one of the conference organizers. “We strived to engage scholars and experts on historical treatment of underrepresented creators in copyright law, the racial disparities in patent law and innovation, and the challenges and opportunities for diversity in content moderation on social media platforms — as part of envisioning the future and a more equitable digital world.
“The symposium brought these conversations to the forefront with actionable steps around how to responsibly, meaningfully, and justly advance our digital landscape — at every stage of technological development.”
Co-Symposium Editor Niyati Narang ’26 said she and Ghaffari looked for experts who thought creatively and expansively about both the current state of the law and where the law can go.
“Berkeley Law students do not accept the status quo without serious investigation and we wanted to bring together panelists who would encourage students to think boldly about their future careers and how they can use the law to effectuate the change they hope to see in the world,” she says.
Echoes of history
The symposium — a collaboration between Berkeley Law’s student-run technology journal, its hub for innovation, intellectual property, and the law, and the Coalition of Minorities in Technology Law — began in 2020, when student organizers seized an opportunity to advance the struggle to make technology an instrument for social change. Subsequent conferences have focused on the criminal justice system, privacy, and health equity.
A recording of the event is available on BCLT’s B-CLE platform.
Scholars from all over the country spoke at this year’s virtual conference, and several Berkeley Law professors moderated panels. In addition to opening remarks from University of Pittsburgh Law School Professor Anjali Vats and a keynote address from Southwestern Law School Professor Kevin J. Greene, the four sessions considered the historical implications of minority copyright owners on current law; how to cultivate racial diversity in inventions and patent applications; the hurdles to equitable moderation of social media platforms; and how to chart a course for a more inclusive future in the innovation sector.
Opening the symposium, Vats praised the organizers for assembling a panel of scholars who are “truly extraordinary and indeed innovative in approaches to thinking about race and rights.”
“The legal and ethical guardrails that we build, especially vis a vis capitalism, knowledge, and privacy, determine how much innovation infringes upon rights,” she added.
Ghaffari says the symposium was organized so participants could take away the importance of approaching the technologies around us with informed criticisms of their social construction and historical development, in order to imagine their most effective future deployment and understand how to mitigate their risks utilizing tools of law and policy.
The panel on cultivating diversity in innovation was a prime example. The session was moderated by Berkeley Law Professor Colleen V. Chien ’02, who noted at the beginning that white and Asian inventors are extremely overrepresented in the sector. While Black Americans comprise 14% of the population, only 4% of scientists and 2% of inventors are Black.
Panelists outlined some of the historical reasons why that’s true. For example, Northwestern Professor Rayvon Fouché discussed how the pre-14th Amendment exclusion of Black people from the patent system continues to marginalize their descendants.
Fouché, who’s at work on a project about what he calls this “residue of inequity” and how it resonates in the relationship between Black people and technology today, cited the sidelining of inventor and patent drafter Lewis Latimer from the history of the development of the light bulb as one instance of this phenomenon.
University of Chicago Kent Professor Jordana Goodman offered another perspective on how the patent system reflects the mindset and practices of the dominant group. Using three patent applications — for a hair sponge designed for Black hair, a Kosher ink for longer-lasting writing, and a turmeric powder for wound healing — Goodman showed how a lack of understanding of non-dominant religions and races skewed the patent process against inventors from minority or marginalized communities.
To meet the goal of making the process more equitable, she recommends adding an anthropologist to the U.S. Patent Office staff, reconsidering the agency’s method of categorizing products, and developing an appeal process that allows room for cultural reconsideration.
Forming the future
In his keynote speech, Greene engaged head-on with the idea that today’s innovation environment can be seen as “institutional racism manifesting itself in a new medium.” A former copyright litigator who represented music industry clients like Public Enemy and Harry Connick Jr. before moving into academia, Greene expressed deep unease with some of the practices used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
“Even as I delve into more optimistic views of AI, I still come away feeling very much not happy about AI and its possibilities, particularly in connection with so-called ‘marginalized communities,’” he said. “The possibility of exclusion and the same old thing seems very high to me.”
That theme ran through the panel on diversity in content moderation as well, confronting accessibility and combating bias in the algorithms that determine which posts we see.
Berkeley Law Professor and session moderator Sonia Katyal raised the important role of theory, particularly Critical Race Theory, in examining technology and its role in society.
The symposium was exceptional, she said, “not just because it focuses on issues of discrimination in intellectual property and information law, but because, as a person of color in the field of intellectual property, I often think about how important it is to have exactly this conversation that this conference is devoted to. The question of how to harness the tools of tech, IP, and informational infrastructure and how to deploy these tools in the service of anti-racism and other issues is of supreme importance.”
Those conversations were exactly what organizers were hoping to foster, Ghaffari says.
“Seeing renowned scholars in the field in conversation with each other, speaking to each other’s works and sharing their collective insights around our digital world was incredible,” she says.
Narang agrees.
“This symposium married Berkeley’s dual commitments to innovation and inclusion, demonstrating the importance of using an intersectional lens when thinking about technological development,” she said. “As our lives become increasingly intertwined with technology, it is more important than ever to think about potential disparate impacts, particularly for historically marginalized communities.”