UCLA School of Law

We examine how moratoria can help manage high-stakes societal challenges at the boundaries of domestic and international law and policy, science, and technology. Moratoria are proposed as responses to a vast range of domestic and international issues, including the three highest-stakes current socio-technical disruptions: human germline editing; artificial intelligence; and intentional modification of the global environment (geoengineering). Despite extensive experience and many scholarly accounts of one or a few cases, basic questions about moratoria are weakly understood: Under what conditions can moratoria help manage such disruptive issues? What specific uses can they serve? How can they be designed and managed to most effectively realize their contributions? We aim to inform the use of moratoria in the effective and equitable management of major current and coming socio-technical disruptions. Given limited current understanding, this first pa-per builds on historical experience, examining fifteen cases of moratoria on a wide range of inter-national, scientific, and technical issues. From these we build a conceptual framework for the de-sign and use of moratoria, starting with a taxonomy of three ideal types based on the main aims of actors adopting them: risk-management, bargaining, and principled-conflict moratoria. Risk-man-agement moratoria suspend activities that pose uncertain, potentially severe, widely shared risks, to allow time for research, risk assessment, and development of responses. Bargaining moratoria suspend provocative or escalatory actions that threaten the achievement of potential joint gains, to allow time to negotiate management of the relevant issue or resource and allocation of the available gains. Principled conflict moratoria are interim benchmarks in the control of activities that raise categorical objections, independent of risk or bargaining concerns. These mostly occur as mixed cases, in which categorical opponents join with other actors whose opposition is based on risk or bargaining concerns and thus conditional, not categorical. In these cases, categorical opposition can be understood as risk concern with extreme precaution (including precaution toward indirect risks arising from potential future decisions or changes in behavior or attitudes), or as bargaining concern with extreme preferences and willingness to use aggressive tactics. In such mixed cases, the presence of categorical opposition generates predictable conflicts over moratorium design, in-cluding the scope of actions and actors covered and the conditions to end the moratorium. Even when categorical opposition prevents moratoria from realizing their narrow risk or bargaining aims, they may still help by merely delaying resolution of the contested activities, thus allowing reactions to the moratorium or other events to attenuate or deflect the initial conflicts, allowing time for perceptions and institutions to adjust, or spurring novel responses that raise less concern. A second companion paper extends the framework to apply it to potential contributions of mora-toria to gene editing, AI, and geoengineering.