2023 Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture - 16.11.23

Event details

'Deception by Design'
Presented by Prof. Lauren E. Willis
Centennial Chair in Consumer Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

The 2023 Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture

In this lecture, Professor Lauren E. Willis will review these developments and propose a regulatory model devised to incentivise businesses to engage in fair marketing by design.

Businesses are increasingly able to disseminate rapidly proliferating permutations of digital marketing materials, sales interfaces and scripts, and products themselves, each of which can be aimed at particular consumers in real time and space. When the algorithms that design these are optimised only for profit and deception is profitable, consumers will be deceived. Yet as dark patterns and other forms of digital deception are becoming inevitable, they also are racing toward immunity from liability. Common legal methods for assessing whether conduct is misleading or deceptive are either inapplicable or impracticable when applied to vast numbers of machine-produced micro-targeted designs.

Prof. Lauren E. Willis

Lauren E. Willis is Professor of Law and Centennial Chair in Consumer Law at LMU Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. She is a leading critic of the use of financial education, disclosures, and “nudges” for regulating consumer transactions. She has developed a ground-breaking outcomes-based approach to consumer law that unites the interests of firms with consumers and retail investors and enables regulators to keep pace with rapid marketplace change. Most recently, she has identified how law must evolve to address a new threat to fair competition and consumer protection - business use of artificial intelligence to design and target online communications and interfaces.

Before academia, Professor Willis worked in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. She co-founded the Consumer Law Scholars Conference and was an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Consumer Contracts Restatement project.

The Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture series

In 1958, Ethel Thorpe Southey, better known as Nancy Southey, made a gift to the University of Melbourne to endow a law lectureship in memory of her husband Allen Hope Southey, who had graduated as a Master of Laws in the University in 1917 and died in 1929 at the age of 35. Thirty years later, the Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture again enjoyed the support of the Southey family as they made further donations to build on Nancy Southey’s initiative. Forty years later, Mr and Mrs Southey’s son, Sir Robert Southey, made a generous gift in his will to the lectureship fund his mother had established. In 2008, 50 years later, the five sons of Sir Robert Southey continued the family’s support of the Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture at Melbourne Law School.