Repair By Design: Using Civil Rights Law, Consumer Protection, Algorithmic Accountability, And Access To Justice To Address Structural Economic Inequities

Artificial intelligence systems now function as allocative economic infrastructure, determining access to credit, employment, housing, and public benefits at scale. This paper argues that they must be governed accordingly through "repair by design" instead of harm-based remediation. This paper examines how artificial intelligence is reconfiguring contemporary economic and consumer systems by structuring access to credit, employment, housing, and public benefits through computational decision-making infrastructures. It argues that existing civil rights and consumer protection frameworks remain oriented toward individualized, retrospective enforcement and are therefore insufficient to address inequality generated through system-level design, data architecture, and algorithmic optimization. The analysis develops a theory of algorithmic economic repair, advancing the claim that civil rights law, consumer protection doctrine, algorithmic accountability frameworks, and access-to-justice mechanisms operate most effectively when understood as an integrated governance architecture for regulating economic participation. In this framework, artificial intelligence systems function both as regulated subjects and as allocative infrastructures that determine the distribution of wealth and opportunity at scale. Discrimination is conceptualized as structural and economic in nature, operating through barriers to capital creation, limited access to resources, and restricted pathways to long-term mobility that are now reproduced through computational systems. It further argues that effective governance requires a shift from harm-based remediation toward design-centered regulation, including auditability, institutional oversight, and measurable equity outcomes. The study closes by considering the transnational implications of AI governance, emphasizing that algorithmic systems circulate between jurisdictions and reproduce structural inequality globally. It concludes that "repair by design" is a governance requirement in digitally structured economies, requiring enforceable civil rights principles, accountable computational design, and access-to-justice systems capable of producing measurable economic repair. Also available on SSRN, Abstract ID No. 7159000.