Law Commons^™

Orthogonalizing Inputs, Talia B. Gillis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines an approach to algorithmic discrimination that seeks to blind predictions to protected characteristics by orthogonalizing inputs. The approach uses protected characteristics (such as race or sex) during the training phase of a model but masks these during deployment. The approach posits that including these characteristics in training prevents correlated features from acting as proxies, while assigning uniform values to them at deployment ensures decisions do not vary by group status.

Using a prediction exercise of loan defaults basedon mortgage HMDA data and German credit data, the paper highlights the limitations of this orthogonalization strategy. Applying a lasso …

Europe's Digital Constitution, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uncovers the fundamental values underlying the European Union’s expansive set of digital regulations, which in aggregate can be viewed as Europe’s “digital constitution.” This constitution engrains Europe’s human-centric, rights-preserving, democracy-enhancing, and redistributive vision for the digital economy into binding law. This vision stands in stark contrast to the United States, which has traditionally placed its faith in markets and tech companies’ self-regulation. As a result, American tech companies today are regulated primarily by Brussels and not by Washington. By highlighting the distinctiveness and the global reach of the European digital constitution, this Article challenges the common narrative that …

Our Avatars, Ourselves, Mala Chatterjee

Faculty Scholarship

On 2013 an episode of the British TV show Black Minvrimagined a harrowing possibility: that technology might allow us to recreate the dead. A young woman named Martha loses her partner in a sudden accident and copes with the loss-or perhaps refuses to cope with itwith the assistance of an unnerving artificial intelligence, trained on her partner's data footprint, that can speak, act, and appear exactly as he did. It's not long before Martha becomes obsessed with the emulation, gathering every remnant of her partner's life to incorporate into the model and spending hours on the phone conversing with his …

Constructing Countervailing Power: Law And Organizing In An Era Of Political Inequality, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. The piece draws on the social-movements literature, and the successes and failures of labor law, to show how law can supplement the deficient regimes of campaign finance and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy. As such, the Article offers a new direction forward for the public-law literature on political power and …

How The Administrative State Got To This Challenging Place, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Written for a dispersed agrarian population using hand tools in a local economy, our Constitution now controls an American government orders of magnitude larger that has had to respond to profound changes in transportation, communication, technology, economy, and scientific understanding. How did our government get to this place? The agencies Congress has created to meet these changes now face profound new challenges: transition from the paper to the digital age; the increasing centralization in an opaque, political presidency of decisions that Congress has assigned to diverse, relatively expert and transparent bodies; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within …

Fedaccounts: Digital Dollars, John Crawford, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks

Faculty Scholarship

We are entering a new monetary era. Central banks around the world – spurred by the development of privately controlled digital currencies as well as competition from other central banks – have been studying, building, and, in some cases, issuing central bank digital currency (“CBDC”).

Although digital fiat currency is one of the hottest topics in macroeconomics and central banking today, the discussion has largely overlooked the most straightforward and appealing strategy for implementing a U.S. dollar-based CBDC: expanding access to bank accounts that the Federal Reserve already offers to a small, favored set of clients. These accounts consist of …

Nascent Competitors, C. Scott Hemphill, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

A nascent competitor is a firm whose prospective innovation represents a serious threat to an incumbent. Protecting such competition is a critical mission for antitrust law, given the outsized role of unproven outsiders as innovators and the uniquely potent threat they often pose to powerful entrenched firms. In this Article, we identify nascent competition as a distinct analytical category and outline a program of antitrust enforcement to protect it. We make the case for enforcement even where the ultimate competitive significance of the target is uncertain, and explain why a contrary view is mistaken as a matter of policy and …

People Not Machines: Authorship And What It Means In International Copyright Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter recapitulates Professor Ricketson’s analysis in his 1992 Manges Lecture at Columbia Law School, presciently titled 'People or Machines: The Berne Convention and the Changing Concept of Authorship'. As Ricketson systematically developed the inquiry, it became clear that ‘People or Machines’ in fact meant ‘People Not Machines’. This chapter considers whether, more than twenty-five years later, subsequent technological developments warrant reconsideration of the human authorship premise underlying the Berne Convention. If that premise holds firm, the next question is whether non-human-generated outputs require some form of intellectual property protection. Any such regime, it should be noted, would fall outside …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

The Promise And Limits Of Cyber Power In International Law: Remarks, Monica Hakimi, Ann Väljataga, Zhixiong Huang, Charles Allen, Sue Robertson, Doug Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Hi, everyone. I am Monica Hakimi from the University of Michigan Law School, and I would like to welcome you to our panel on cyber power and its limits. The topic almost does not need an introduction. We all know just from reading the news that our collective dependence on cyberspace is also a huge vulnerability, and state and non-state actors exploit this vulnerability to do one another harm. They use cyber technologies not just to spy on one another, but also, for example, to interfere in national elections, to steal trade secrets or other valuable information, to disrupt the …

Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …

Embedding Content Or Interring Copyright: Does The Internet Need The "Server Rule"?, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

The “server rule” holds that online displays or performances of copyrighted content accomplished through “in-line” or “framing” hyperlinks do not trigger the exclusive rights of public display or performance unless the linker also possesses a copy of the underlying work. As a result, the rule shields a vast array of online activities from claims of direct copyright infringement, effectively exempting those activities from the reach of the Copyright Act. While the server rule has enjoyed relatively consistent adherence since its adoption in 2007, some courts have recently suggested a departure from that precedent, noting the doctrinal and statutory inconsistencies underlying …

Authors And Machines, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

Machines, by providing the means of mass production of works of authorship, engendered copyright law. Throughout history, the emergence of new technologies tested the concept of authorship, and courts in response endeavored to clarify copyright’s foundational principles. Today, developments in computer science have created a new form of machine, the “artificially intelligent” (AI) system apparently endowed with “computational creativity.” AI systems introduce challenging variations on the perennial question of what makes one an “author” in copyright law: Is the creator of a generative program automatically the author of the works her process begets, even if she cannot anticipate the contents …

Will Artificial Intelligence Eat The Law? The Rise Of Hybrid Social-Ordering Systems, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Software has partially or fully displaced many former human activities, such as catching speeders or flying airplanes, and proven itself able to surpass humans in certain contests, like Chess and Jeopardy. What are the prospects for the displacement of human courts as the centerpiece of legal decision-making? Based on the case study of hate speech control on major tech platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, this Essay suggests displacement of human courts remains a distant prospect, but suggests that hybrid machine – human systems are the predictable future of legal adjudication, and that there lies some hope in that combination, …

Law's Halo And The Moral Machine, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelli­gence – and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced by the presence of the law.

Minds, Machines, And The Law: The Case Of Volition In Copyright Law, Mala Chatterjee, Jeanne C. Fromer

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing prevalence of ever-sophisticated technology permits machines to stand in for or augment humans in a growing number of contexts. The questions of whether, when, and how the so-called actions of machines can and should result in legal liability thus will also become more practically pressing. One important set of questions that the law will inevitably need to confront is whether machines can have mental states, or — at least — something sufficiently like mental states for the purposes of the law. This is because a number of areas of law have explicit or implicit mental state requirements for …

Liability Design For Autonomous Vehicles And Human-Driven Vehicles: A Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Approach, Xuan Di, Xu Chen, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are inevitably entering our lives with potential benefits for improved traffic safety, mobility, and accessibility. However, AVs’ benefits also introduce a serious potential challenge, in the form of complex interactions with human-driven vehicles (HVs). The emergence of AVs introduces uncertainty in the behavior of human actors and in the impact of the AV manufacturer on autonomous driving design. This paper thus aims to investigate how AVs affect road safety and to design socially optimal liability rules in comparative negligence for AVs and human drivers. A unified game is developed, including a Nash game between human drivers, a …

Explanation < Justification: Gdpr And The Perils Of Privacy, Talia B. Gillis, Josh Simons

Faculty Scholarship

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most comprehensive legislation yet enacted to govern algorithmic decision-making. Its reception has been dominated by a debate about whether it contains an individual right to an explanation of algorithmic decision-making. We argue that this debate is misguided in both the concepts it invokes and in its broader vision of accountability in modern democracies. It is justification that should guide approaches to governing algorithmic decision-making, not simply explanation. The form of justification – who is justifying what to whom – should determine the appropriate form of explanation. This suggests a sharper …

The Keys To The Kingdom: Judges, Pre-Hearing Procedure, And Access To Justice, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Judges see themselves as – and many reforming voices urge them to be – facilitators of access to justice for pro se parties in our state civil and administrative courts. Judges’ roles in pro se access to justice are inextricably linked with procedures and substantive law, yet our understanding of this relationship is limited. Do we change the rules, judicial behavior, or both to help self-represented parties? We have begun to examine this nuanced question in the courtroom, but we have not examined it in a potentially more promising context: pre-hearing motions made outside the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, judges …

Righting Research Wrongs: An Empirical Study Of How U.S. Institutions Resolve Grievances Involving Human Subjects, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

Tens of millions of people enroll in research studies in the United States every year, making human subjects research a multi-billion-dollar industry in the U.S. alone. Research carries risks: although many harms are inevitable, some also arise from errors or mistreatment by researchers, and the history of research ethics is in many ways a history of scandal. Despite regulatory efforts to remedy these abuses, injured subjects nonetheless have little recourse to U.S. courts. In the absence of tort remedies for research-related injuries, the only venue for resolving such disputes is through alternative dispute resolution (ADR) – or more commonly, internal …

Is The First Amendment Obsolete?, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The First Amendment was brought to life in a period, the twentieth century, when the political speech environment was markedly different than today’s. With respect to any given issue, speech was scarce and limited to a few newspapers, pamphlets or magazines. The law was embedded, therefore, with the presumption that the greatest threat to free speech was direct punishment of speakers by government.

Today, in the internet and social media age, it is no longer speech that is scarce – rather, it is the attention of listeners. And those who seek to control speech use new methods that rely on …

Liability For Providing Hyperlinks To Copyright-Infringing Content: International And Comparative Law Perspectives, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

Hyperlinking, at once an essential means of navigating the Internet, but also a frequent means to enable infringement of copyright, challenges courts to articulate the legal norms that underpin domestic and international copyright law, in order to ensure effective enforcement of exclusive rights on the one hand, while preserving open communication on the Internet on the other. Several recent cases, primarily in the European Union, demonstrate the difficulties of enforcing the right of communication to the public (or, in U.S. copyright parlance, the right of public performance by transmission) against those who provide hyperlinks that effectively deliver infringing content to …

The Wealth Gap And The Racial Disparities In The Startup Ecosystem, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

Although much attention has been given to structural inequality as it manifests in the criminal justice context, little has been said about economic inequality as it relates to the startup ecosystem. This Article details how the historic creation of the wealth gap affects entrepreneurship, highlighting how the wealth gap adversely impacts entrepreneurs of color. Entrepreneurship is a compelling solution to wealth inequality, but wealth inequality can be an impediment to success in entrepreneurship. This Article explains how the United States’ history of bolstering wealth creation for some, while inhibiting wealth creation for people of color, matters for understanding the startup …

Reliable Perfection Of Security Interests In Crypto-Currency, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

As you all know, the organizers of this event chose a topic of burning interest when they selected crypto-currency as the focus of this year’s panel. Fortunately, unlike most of the similar events at which the author has been asked to speak, we have not been asked to talk about Bitcoin as the currency of the future; my doubts about the ability of Bitcoin to succeed as a currency of routine use – as opposed to a speculative investment vehicle – dampen my interest in talking repeatedly about that subject. The task they have set for the speakers is one …

Sources Of Tech Platform Power, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

A handful of tech platforms mediate a large and growing share of our commerce and communications. Over the last year, the public has come to realize that the power these firms wield may pose significant hazards. Elected leaders ranging from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) have expressed alarm at the level of control that firms like Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Facebook enjoy. In a recent poll, a majority of Americans voiced concern that the government wouldn’t do enough to regulate U.S. tech companies. As the editor of BuzzFeed observed, a “major trend in American …

Causing Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches to an original work of expression the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible medium. Yet modern copyright law contains no viable mechanism by which to examine whether someone is causally responsible for the creation and fixation of the work. Whenever the issue of causation arises, copyright law relies on its preexisting doctrinal devices to resolve the issue, in the process cloaking its intuitions about causation in altogether extraneous considerations. This Article argues that copyright law embodies an unstated yet distinct theory of authorial causation, which connects the element of human agency to a work …

Is The Future Of Law A Driverless Car? Assessing How The Data Analytics Revolution Will Transform Legal Practice, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies (“data analytics”) are quickly transforming research and practice in law, raising questions of whether the law can survive as a vibrant profession for natural persons to enter. In this article, I argue that data analytics approaches are overwhelmingly likely to continue to penetrate law, even in domains that have heretofore been dominated by human decision makers. As a vehicle for demonstrating this claim, I describe an extended example of using machine learning to identify and categorize fiduciary duty waiver provisions in publicly disclosed corporate documents. Notwithstanding the power of machine learning techniques, however, I …

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other …

Legal Pathways For A Massive Increase In Utility-Scale Renewable Generation Capacity, Michael Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Decarbonizing the U.S. energy system will require a program of building onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale solar, and associated transmission that will exceed what has been done before in the United States by many times, every year out to 2050. These facilities, together with rooftop photovoltaics and other distributed generation, are required to replace most fossil fuel generation and to help furnish the added electricity that will be needed as many uses currently employing fossil fuels (especially passenger transportation and space and water heating) are electrified. This Article, excerpted from Michael B. Gerrard & John Dernbach, eds., Legal Pathways to …

How Should Justice Policy Treat Young Offenders?: A Knowledge Brief Of The Macarthur Foundation Research Network On Law And Neuroscience, Bj Casey, Richard J. Bonnie, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer E. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner

Faculty Scholarship

The justice system in the United States has long recognized that juvenile offenders are not the same as adults, and has tried to incorporate those differences into law and policy. But only in recent decades have behavioral scientists and neuroscientists, along with policymakers, looked rigorously at developmental differences, seeking answers to two overarching questions: Are young offenders, purely by virtue of their immaturity, different from older individuals who commit crimes? And, if they are, how should justice policy take this into account?

A growing body of research on adolescent development now confirms that teenagers are indeed inherently different from adults, …