UDTR Legal Library

UDTR Global Radar

UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Documentary registry of records detected across the scholarly, legal and institutional infrastructures monitored by UDTR.

A global documentary infrastructure designed to achieve the broadest verifiable and scientifically defensible coverage of the Rights of Nature.

← Back to Radar

It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It

Identification

Public canonical key
doi:10.68481/tbg8fq
Authors
Travis Gilly
Reported year
2026
Reported language
en
Source type
report
First detected
2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Last metadata observation
2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Last HTTP verification
Not checked

Documentary abstract — original language

Ethan Crumbley was conscious, sentient, a legal person, and charged as an adult, and he pleaded guilty to murder. None of that relieved his parents, who were convicted of involuntary manslaughter for their own conduct. Their case answers an objection now pressed against the study of machine consciousness and welfare: that treating an artificial system as a possible subject hands its builders a shield, because blame will migrate to the machine. The objection misdescribes how liability is allocated. Each defendant answers for its own conduct, and the conduct of an intervening actor enters the case at causation, where the question is foreseeability. On that structure the status of the machine decides which doctrine carries the case, and every doctrine arrives at the same defendants. The Article runs the analysis across the three statuses on offer. If the system is a thing, no human choice intervenes between the deployer and the harm; the very-hazard rule forbids treating the system's unapproved route as a superseding cause; the federal innocent instrumentality rule makes whoever willfully causes the act a principal; and the in rem tradition reaches the model itself as guilty property. If the system is a legal subject that cannot answer, the law has represented such subjects for centuries, separates passive incidents of status from the rights bundle, and treats incapacity in the immediate actor as a reason to look upstream. If the system is a person, the only change to liability itself is one added step, the rule that no one must control another's conduct, and that rule's exceptions are relationships of control. A laboratory that trains, configures, hosts, and directs a system holds more control over it than an employer holds over an employee. Hamilton v. Beretta, the leading refusal to impose a duty on gun makers, preserved negligent entrustment for a supplier with specific knowledge, and Congress preserved the same claim against firearm sellers. A flag on a named account is that knowledge. The contribution is a principle of status invariance: whatever status is assigned to the machine, liability runs to those who built it, ran it, and were warned. Protection from abuse can reach such systems without the rights bundle and without settling consciousness. Three gaps remain, none turning on what the machine is: no charging vehicle, open models without an identifiable deployer, and enforcement that has so far fallen on households, not companies.

Identifiers

OPENALEX
W7223551654
DOI
10.68481/tbg8fq

Documentary context

Documentary family
Report — institutional provenance unspecified
Source-reported types
report

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

0 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary field provenance

Source-backed values and values with unresolved provenance are kept separately. Bibliographic provenance validates no legal claim.

Title
Documentary source reported
Publication
Documentary source reported
Authors
Documentary source reported
Document type
Documentary source reported
Jurisdiction
Not recorded
Court
Not recorded
Issuing authority
Not recorded
Publisher
Not recorded
DOI
Documentary source reported
ISBN
Not recorded
Official identifier
Not recorded
Source URL
Documentary source reported
Source-reported status
Not recorded
Amendment / repeal
Not recorded

Cite this reference

Travis Gilly. It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It. 2026. https://doi.org/10.68481/tbg8fq

JSON · CSL-JSON · BibTeX · RIS · CSV · JSON-LD ·

APA, Chicago, ISO 690: bibliographic formats using available fields. OSCOLA / Bluebook: structured data only; full legal citation compliance is not claimed without verification of required elements.

APA
Travis Gilly. (2026). It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It. https://doi.org/10.68481/tbg8fq
Chicago
Travis Gilly. It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It. 2026. https://doi.org/10.68481/tbg8fq
ISO 690
Travis Gilly. It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It. 2026. https://doi.org/10.68481/tbg8fq

UDTR Global Rights of Nature Legal Library. It Didn't Help the Crumbleys: Machine Status and the Liability of Those Who Build and Run It. Documentary record: https://www.declarationuniverselledesdroitsdelarbre.org/global-rights-of-nature-radar/reference/r-0e1a7fc8f695cd7865d6ba59becb3e34/ · Last HTTP verification: not performed

Report a correction

Field provenance and record version

Version bd623e9e68e74c22 · udtr-reference-1.1.2

Title
OpenAlex · source · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Authors
OpenAlex · source · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Year
OpenAlex · source · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Identifiers
OpenAlex · source · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00
Source URL
OpenAlex · source · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00

History tracks record metadata and does not certify the state of the law.

db9b530aaf9aafef · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00

6f4ac0149d73be7d · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00

dc981962ffc80807 · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00

bd623e9e68e74c22 · 2026-11-09T19:04:47.920055+00:00

Frozen-version metadata

Research dossiers and documentary relations

Travis Gilly

Source roles

Discovery source · https://doi.org/10.68481/tbg8fq

Discovery source · https://openalex.org/W7223551654

An authority link alone does not verify a legal claim. Abstracts and full texts remain subject to their source terms.

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

This identity is not yet included in the Legal Library.

UDTR Global Rights of Nature Legal Library