In November 2022, the Lowenstein Project at Yale Law School—the student-led human rights group founded in 1981 under the Schell Center for International Human Rights—reached out to Mauritz Kop for his expertise on quantum technology and human rights. The team was working on a background policy memorandum, in association with the Seoul National University Artificial Intelligence Policy Initiative and the Korean Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, to support a proposed new U.N. Special Rapporteurship on human rights in the development of new technologies. Their question was practical and revealing: how does a layperson "get smart" on quantum?
Lawyers seeking to make a hard field legible
The outreach was, in the project's own words, "primarily focused on the research process, especially from a lay perspective." The questions concerned method, not conclusions—where to begin, how to sequence the material, which kinds of technical understanding human rights applications actually require, and whom else to consult. Kop shared his insights into that process. He did not draft the memorandum and the engagement should not be overstated: it was a scholar helping advocates reach the threshold of understanding from which rights questions can be posed precisely rather than rhetorically.
Why the physics has to come first
Quantum is harder to make legible than artificial intelligence or social media, and easy to discuss in metaphors that mislead. Getting smart on it means grasping superposition, entanglement, and measurement—features with no classical analogue—well enough that rights claims become testable rather than atmospheric. A concrete worry about a future quantum computer breaking today's public-key encryption is a disciplined claim; generalized anxiety about "quantum" doing something powerful and unspecified is not. The difference is exactly what a layperson must cross to draft credible norms.
Quantum literacy as a precondition for rights protection
The episode is small but structural. The U.N. human rights system can only fashion meaningful safeguards for a technology its drafters understand; an instrument written from metaphor risks protecting the wrong things, or nothing. That is why responsible quantum governance has to be interdisciplinary from the start, with lawyers, ethicists, and physicists working together—a case Kop and colleagues have made across the responsible-quantum-technology literature, including the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation. The Lowenstein outreach is that argument running in reverse: advocates recognizing that they had to learn the technology before they could protect against it.
A small request, a durable lesson
To be precise about the record: Kop answered the project's research-process questions; he was not an author of the memorandum, and whether a new Special Rapporteurship is ultimately established is a matter for the Human Rights Council. The durable point is narrower and more interesting—that human rights advocates building a case at the United Nations turned to a quantum scholar to make the field legible first. Quantum literacy is becoming a precondition for rights-protective governance, not an optional supplement to it.
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