Law Commons^™

(Un)Corporate Crypto-Governance, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Public blockchain protocols face a serious governance crisis. Thus far, blockchain protocols have followed the path of early Internet governance. If the architects of blockchain protocols are not careful, they may suffer a similar fate — increasing governmental control, greater centralization, and decreasing privacy. As blockchain architects begin to consider better governance structures, there is a legal movement underway to impose a fiduciary framework upon open source software developers. If the movement succeeds, the consequences for open source software development could be dire. If arbitrarily imposed upon blockchain communities without consideration of variances among communities or the reality of how …

Substantiating Big Data In Health Care, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Predictive analytics and "big data" are emerging as important new tools for diagnosing and treating patients. But as data collection becomes more pervasive, and as machine learning and analytical methods become more sophisticated, the companies that traffic in health-related big data will face competitive pressures to make more aggressive claims regarding what their programs can predict. Already, patients, practitioners, and payors are inundated with claims that software programs, "apps," and other forms of predictive analytics can help solve some of the health care system's most pressing problems. This article considers the evidence and substantiation that we should require of these …

State Labs Of Federalism And Law Enforcement 'Drone' Use, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article reviews and assesses current state legislation regulating law enforcement use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The legislation runs the gamut of permissive to restrictive and even utilizes different terms for the same object of regulation, UAS. These laws are the confused and at times even contradictory extension of societal views about UAS. The article reviews the U.S. Supreme Court’s manned aircraft trilogy of cases, California v. Ciraolo, Florida v. Riley, and Dow Chemical v. U.S. and two significant technology based decisions, Kyllo v. U.S. and U.S. v. Jones, and applies them to current state efforts to regulate law …

A Private Underworld: The Naked Body In Law And Society, Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In general, the literature on privacy stresses, quite naturally, our right to keep things private, or to make our own decisions. The individual, the citizen, is the center of gravity. There is a great deal of material on the limits of privacy, on threats to privacy, and the like. In this Article, the authors want to discuss what one might call mandatory privacy: those aspects of life that we are required to keep secret, hidden, or private, the things that we must keep private, whether we want to or not. This is a subject that has been mostly, though not …

Where The Fcra Meets The Fdcpa: The Impact Of Unfair Collection Practices On The Credit Report, Mary B. Spector

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article explores the impact that contemporary practices in consumer debt collection litigation may have on credit reporting and scoring. In doing so, it pays particular attention to available data regarding the use of unfair collection practices in such litigation, and considers whether consumer reports of such litigation unfairly burden consumers’ ability to obtain housing, employment, insurance, or credit. It highlights some of the obstacles consumers face at the intersection of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and considers alternative proposals to provide fair and accurate information relating to consumer debts while also preventing …

Wto-Compliant Protection Of Fundamental Rights: Lessons From The Eu Privacy Directive, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Nation states often create legislative schemes regulating services industries in order to protect fundamental rights such as human life, economic security, or human security. World Trade Organization members are constrained in their creation of such regulatory schemes by their obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (‘GATS’). WTO members raised concerns about such constraints even before the creation of GATS. As a result, GATS contains clauses specifically designed to allow members enough regulatory latitude to protect important domestic social interests, such as fundamental rights, while simultaneously liberalising trade in services. WTO jurisprudence interpreting these clauses, however, has called …

The U.S. Discovery-Eu Privacy Directive Conflict: Constructing A Three-Tiered Compliance Strategy, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This note examines the conflicts of laws issue faced by trans-border civil litigants attempting to comply with both the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the requirements of the EU Privacy Directive. This note first sifts through the quagmire of regulations, and then attempts to help trans-border litigants view the U.S. discovery-EU data protection conflict through a transnational legal lens, and concludes by constructing a three-tiered strategy for compliance that respects U.S., EU and international law.

Is Lawrence Libertarian?, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas is no doubt a shock to those pursuing an antihomosexual agenda. To most Americans, however, the decision is less an ipse dixit announcing radical social change than it is a belated recognition of what they had already learned about the humanity and dignity of gay people. Rather than radically changing constitutional principle, the Court has corrected its own erroneous understanding of the facts that underlay its application of constitutional principle in the past. Rather than leading the nation, the Court has caught up to it.

Part I of this essay lays out …

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in the public's knowledge of the case Lawrence v. Texas. Much of the rich post-arrest history of the case has been ignored. But for the courage, insight, and initiative of three men in particular, the arrest might have been another forgotten episode in what the author calls the under history of the Texas sodomy law, the history not told in appellate opinions or in most other accounts.

Section II reviews the "somewhat known" past, tracing the evolution of the Texas sodomy law from a statute so facially …

Introduction: Keeping Secrets, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

It has become a commonplace to say that September 11 changed everything. What the writer or speaker usually means by this is that Americans have re-calibrated their views on the relative importance of individual civil liberties and the common good. Like many other national traumas, September 11 may in historical hindsight be seen as a jolt that perhaps necessarily-but at any rate, temporarily-induced a retrenchment on rights.

But if the September-11-changed-everything idea overstates the significance of the event, it also understates the extent to which, at least in the area of privacy, some re-calibration of the balance between liberty and …

Going Private: Technology, Due Process, And Internet Dispute Resolution, Elizabeth G. Thornburg

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Despite cliches about Internet speed, disputes that arise on and about the Internet can be time-consuming to resolve, legally murky, and factually complex. In response, Internet players with market power are opting out: mandatory arbitration is replacing both substantive law and court procedure, and technological remedies are providing self-help without any dispute resolution at all. These alternative procedures tend to move faster than courts and to cost their corporate creators less than lawsuits. They are also structured to maximize the success of the powerful. But faster is not always better. Cheap is not always fair or accurate. Market power is …

The Legacy Of Griswold, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Griswold case, you cannot believe how much time we have spent on that nutty case, and how much mileage the opponents of Bork got out of it. This was the key. This must have been the one that kept them up late. This was the green eyeshade special here. The Griswold case. A goofy kind of thing.**

Now we go back to the general right of privacy, upon which Roe v. Wade is based coming out of Griswold, and you had two, one Justice Goldberg out of the ninth amendment and the other one from Justice Douglas, which is …