"However, remote surgery seems to fall into a legal gray area. The FDA has approved the devices, but many doctors—including several interviewed for this piece—aren't clear on the regulations for the surgical procedures themselves, or the laws surrounding liability should the procedure go wrong. That's because many of those laws don't yet exist, says Bryant Walker Smith, a law and engineering professor at the University of South Carolina. It's a lot like the legal situation surrounding self-driving cars: regulatory bodies tend to implement rules only as issues come up. While that's fine for manufacturers hurrying to put surgical robots on the market, it also means that patients might be at higher risk when they go under the (robotic) knife."
The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.