Law Commons^™

Future-Proofing U.S. Laws For War Crimes Investigations In The Digital Era, Rebecca Hamilton

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Advances in information technology have irrevocably changed the nature of war crimes investigations. The pursuit of accountability for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community now invariably requires access to digital evidence. The global reach of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter means that much of that digital evidence is held by U.S. social media companies, and access to it is subject to the U.S. Stored Communications Act.

This is the first Article to look at the legal landscape facing international investigators seeking access to digital evidence regarding genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. It …

The Evidentiary Implications Of Interpreting Black-Box Algorithms, Varun Bhatnagar

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Biased black-box algorithms have drawn increasing levels of scrutiny from the public. This is especially true for those black-box algorithms with the potential to negatively affect protected or vulnerable populations.1 One type of these black-box algorithms, a neural network, is both opaque and capable of high accuracy. However, neural networks do not provide insights into the relative importance, underlying relationships, structures of the predictors or covariates with the modelled outcomes.2 There are methods to combat a neural network’s lack of transparency: globally or locally interpretable post-hoc explanatory models.3 However, the threat of such measures usually does not bar an actor …

Digital Habit Evidence, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article explores how “habit evidence” will become a catalyst for a new form of digital proof based on the explosive growth of smart homes, smart cars, smart devices, and the Internet of Things. Habit evidence is the rule that certain sorts of semiautomatic, regularized responses to particular stimuli are trustworthy and thus admissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence (“FRE”) 406 “Habit; Routine Practice” and state equivalents.

While well established since the common law, “habit” has made only an inconsistent appearance in reported cases and has been underutilized in trial practice. But intriguingly, once applied to the world of …

The Intersections Among Science, Technology, Policy And Law: In Between Truth And Justice, Paolo Davide Farah, Justo Corti Varela

Book Chapters

Different visions on the interaction between science, technology, policy and law have been presented. As common axe, we can detect the continuous search for truth and justice. Science and Law as social constructs, the distinction between truths and opinions through procedural method based on evidence and rationality, or how natural science “things” became facts, and consequently “truth”, are examples of this search. The evidence-gathering process that integrates scientific evidence into trial (sometimes by procedure and other times by a more substantive approach) is another possible approach. Of course, that the game of mutual influence among the four elements creates contradictions …