Law Commons^™

The First Amendment And Online Access To Information About Abortion: The Constitutional And Technological Problems With Censorship, John Villasenor

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

To what extent could an abortion-restrictive state impede access to online information about abortion? After Dobbs, this question is no longer theoretical. This essay engages with this issue from both a legal and technological perspective, analyzing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as the technological implications of state-level online censorship. It concludes that the weight of Supreme Court precedent indicates that state attempts to censor information regarding out-of-state abortion services would violate the First Amendment. That said, the essay also recognizes that as Dobbs itself upended precedent, it is unclear what Supreme Court would do when ruling on questions regarding …

Using Artificial Intelligence In The Law Review Submissions Process, Brenda M. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The use of artificial intelligence to help editors examine law review submissions may provide a way to improve an overburdened system. This Article is the first to explore the promise and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence in the law review submissions process. Technology-assisted review of submissions offers many possible benefits. It can simplify preemption checks, prevent plagiarism, detect failure to comply with formatting requirements, and identify missing citations. These efficiencies may allow editors to address serious flaws in the current selection process, including the use of heuristics that may result in discriminatory outcomes and dependence on lower-ranked journals to conduct …

Bridging The Computer Science – Law Divide, Azer Bestavros, Stacey Dogan, Paul Ohm, Andrew Sellars

Faculty Scholarship

Many pressing societal questions can be answered only by bringing experts from different disciplines together. Questions around misinformation and disinformation, platform power, surveillance capitalism, information privacy, and algorithmic bias, among many others, reside at the intersection of computer science and law. We need to develop institutions that bring together computer scientists and legal scholars to work together on issues like these, and to train new innovators, thought leaders, counselors, and policymakers with hybrid training in both disciplines. In Universities, the disciplines of Computer Science (CS) and Law are separated by many wide chasms. Differences in standards, language, methods, and culture …

Social Media Harms And The Common Law, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article finds fault with the judiciaries' failure to create a set of common law norms for social media wrongs. In cases concerning social media harms, the Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently adhered to traditional pre-social media principles, failing to use the power of the common law to create a kind of Internet Justice.

Part I of this article reviews social media history and explores how judicial decisions created a fertile bed for social media harm to blossom. Part II illustrates social media harms across several doctrinal disciplines and highlights judicial reluctance to embrace the realities of social …

The Increased Use And Permanency Of Technology: How Those Changes Impact Attorneys’ Professional Responsibility And Ethical Obligations To Clients And Recommendations For Improvement, Scott B. Piekarsky

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deepfakes, Shallowfakes, And The Need For A Private Right Of Action, Eric Kocsis

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

For nearly as long as there have been photographs and videos, people have been editing and manipulating them to make them appear to be something they are not. Usually edited or manipulated photographs are relatively easy to detect, but those days are numbered. Technology has no morality; as it advances, so do the ways it can be misused. The lack of morality is no clearer than with deepfake technology.

People create deepfakes by inputting data sets, most often pictures or videos into a computer. A series of neural networks attempt to mimic the original data set until they are nearly …

Legislating Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.

In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …