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Artificial Fiduciaries, Zhaoyi Li

Washington and Lee Law Review

The rapid development of technology in the last decade has affected all levels of society. Corporate governance has not been immune to these changes. In the future, Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) fiduciaries may be technologically capable of serving as independent corporate directors. This could be an effective way to address the challenge of the absence of truly independent directors in the traditional governance framework. Artificial fiduciaries could also offer a way to mitigate agency costs and improve overall corporate governance. However, traditional corporate law lacks solutions for coping with the integration of AI into corporate governance.

Currently, there is little scholarship …

Interpreting Religious Doctrine: The Third Rail That Wags The Dog In Religion Clause Jurisprudence, Samuel J. Levine

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article is part of a broader project exploring and assessing the United States Supreme Court’s hands-off approach to interpreting religious doctrine. The mixed metaphor that constitutes the title of this Article incorporates various aspects of the project’s interrelated themes and claims. First, as a descriptive matter, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and increasingly refused to adjudicate issues that require the interpretation, evaluation, and resolution of substantive areas of religious practice and belief. Thus, like the third rail of train tracks, interpreting religious doctrine is deemed off-limits and better left untouched. Indeed, the Court’s justifications for the hands-off approach rely …

The Initial Response Of Biodiversity Conventions To The Covid-19 Pandemic, Royal C. Gardner, Lauren Beames, Katherine Pratt

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the operations of global biodiversity conventions, requiring virtual meetings in place of in-person events. Yet the pandemic also highlighted the importance of biodiversity conservation as a mechanism to reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases, as the October 2020 report issued by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (“IPBES”) emphasized. Now that in-person, international meetings have resumed, this Article examines the extent to which four biodiversity conventions—the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds, the Ramsar Convention, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and the Convention on Biological Diversity—considered the nexus …

Expanding Emissions Markets To Reduce Agricultural Nitrogen Run-Off, Samantha Tweet, Amy Hardberger

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Synthetic fertilizers have been critical in averting global food shortages; however, synthetic fertilizers and their production have led to numerous environmental harms, including greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and soil degradation.

Scientists are working on a new technology that will create a more efficient and less impactful fertilizer process, but the legal mechanisms to encourage widespread adoption and subsequent environmental benefits fall short. In the absence of regulation, market tools can encourage behavior change. If the pollution reduction by exchanging fertilizer is turned into a tradable asset, agricultural users can benefit financially, which lowers potential barriers to participation in a …

Patent Your Passenger Pigeons: De-Extinction Technologies & Ramifications Of The Product Of Nature Doctrine, Tyler Brooks

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Part I of this Note will provide a brief overview of the current methods and scientific breakthroughs that are actively being pursued by private actors (particularly the bioengineering company Colossal Biosciences) to make de-extinct creatures, establishing the crucial point that any technique used to create such an animal will inherently fall short of being able to replicate an extinct species with any one hundred percent accuracy. This section will then briefly speak as to why private actors are looking to invest in de-extinction technologies in the first place, setting out how de-extinction technologies might one day prove incredibly profitable for …

Does History Repeat Itself? Analyzing Montana's 2023 Draft Wolf Management Plan In Light Of Historical Misconceptions Of Wolves, Katelyn Jones

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Note intends to argue that Montana’s Draft Wolf Management Plan, when compared to other states’ plans, particularly Wisconsin’s, is inadequate because it contains many indicators of the antiquated societal bias that has plagued the wolf’s reputation for centuries. Part I begins with a historical overview of wolf hysteria and controversy beginning in Europe and extending to colonial America. Included in Part I is a specific focus on the treatment of wolves in Yellowstone and Montana during the early 1900s. Part I ends with an overview of the reintroduction of wolves into the [Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem] GYE and the success …

Intoxicated Scootering: Rethinking Electric Scooter Liability In Washington, David Goodwin

Washington Law Review

The widespread acceptance of electric scooters has transformed the landscape of urban transportation. Yet, the emerging phenomenon of intoxicated scootering poses unanswered questions of liability and accountability. New research indicates that a third of traumatic electric scooter injuries are associated with intoxicated scootering. This statistic is particularly alarming given that there are over fifty million scooter trips per year in the United States.

In Washington State, the State Legislature has not enacted a state-wide policy against intoxicated scootering. Instead, the Legislature delegates the authority to regulate the operation of electric scooters to local governments. Due to the ambiguity of whether …

White Monsters: Understanding Whiteness As Social And Legal Monstrosity, Steven Sacco

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that whiteness operates as a socially and legally constructed monstrosity, perpetuating systemic inequality and destructive power through both intentional and nonintentional mechanisms. By employing monster theory, the analysis reveals how whiteness adapts and evolves to maintain its dominance, often through legal frameworks that obscure its harmful effects. The Supreme Court's decision in Plyler v. Doe, while advancing justice in some aspects, also exemplifies how the law can perpetuate inequality by overlooking historical and social contexts.

Renewing Our Vows: The Lawyer's Oath And Our Pledge To Democracy, Colin M. Black

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

For centuries, lawyers have sworn to an oath as a prerequisite to admission. The oath, barely evolved from their historical roots, represents the guiding commitment lawyers make to democratic principles of honesty, integrity, fairness, and the rule of law. This commitment is in exchange for the power and privilege of belonging to the legal profession. However, the ethical landscape for legal practitioners has evolved, particularly in response to the alarming events of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. These events revealed significant lapses in the judgment and conduct among some lawyers, exposing the need for a recommitment to the democratic principles …

How The Settler State Continues To Dispossess: Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement On The Critical Minerals Frontier, Dayna Nadine Scott

All Papers

The scramble for critical minerals to fuel the energy transition is driving new extractive frontiers across the globe. In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amidst a growing polarization in positions of Indigenous leadership. There is both a surging resistance to, and a resigned acceptance of, critical minerals mining by First Nations. Drawing on years of community-engaged research, I detail here the contemporary state tactics of infrastructural (dis)entitlement; infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is …

A Right To Be Left Dead, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

Technology forces us to contemplate a counterpart to the right of privacy—Brandeis and Warren’s “right to be let alone”—for the age of artificial intelligence: the right to be left dead. Traditionally, it has been presumed that even if Brandeis and Warren’s right constitutes “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” it does not apply to the dead. The question is whether we need a new approach at a time when technology can reanimate anyone and make them behave in a manner indistinguishable from their living presence. This Article interrogates the need for a right …

Multi-Generation Queer Families: Foregrounding The Lgbtqia+ Children Of Lgbtqia+ People, Bella Mancini Pori, Edward Stein

Articles

In the last several years, state legislatures have passed a disturbing array of anti-queer laws that target queer (especially trans) children. The basic fear animating these laws is that exposure to LGBTQ people or LGBTQ supportive ideas will somehow turn straight children queer. LGBTQ activists have responded to the concern that exposure to queer people or ideas will make children queer by arguing that sexual orientations are innate or immutable. This immutability argument is problematic, first, because it avoids confronting the normative judgment at the heart of the fear of a queer child by failing to say that there is …

Shocking Sentences, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

Harsh recidivist sentencing penalties, like three-strikes laws, have been criticized heavily among both academics and practitioners on a number of different grounds. Most arguments focus on how sentences arising from these penalties are disproportionate—that there is no sensible relationship between the wrong committed and the sentence imposed. Those critiques are valid, but there’s another important problem with recidivist sentencing penalties that has been overlooked: they lead to sentences that are totally unexpected—indeed, shocking—to the defendants who face them. Many recidivist sentencing penalties cause large leaps in sentencing exposure that amount to exponential growth when compared with a defendant’s prior sentences. …

Privacy Law’S Role In An Information Economy, Sari Mazzurco

Cardozo Law Review

What do we lose when we lose our privacy? A slew of recently enacted state laws suggest that the loss of privacy is merely a loss of individual choice in the market exchange of services for personal information. This Article argues that a loss of privacy risks something greater: the collapse of complex and fluid social identity. Without privacy, individuals cannot nurture their own senses of self because they are no longer free to try on different social roles across diverse relationships. Pervasive, private data collection threatens multifaceted selfhood by eliminating the boundaries that make social roles distinct and hindering …

A Rule Without A Reason: Determining The Capacity For Negligence Of A Person With Mental Illness, Alex Geisinger, David Dematteo, Kellie Wiltsie, Chelsea Jackson

William & Mary Law Review

Since the pandemic, the impacts of structural bias on racial minorities and other groups have become an even more compelling concern for legal commentators. One group that has received some attention in the effort to confront bias is the mentally ill. This attention has coincided with a rise in the willingness of individuals to talk about, and destigmatize, mental health issues in society. Yet, despite these efforts, along with a long and well-established body of scholarship that criticizes its treatment of mental illness, the civil law—particularly the law of tort—continues its entrenched refusal to consider mental illness when determining the …

The Scientific Border: Dna Testing For Family Reunification, Alexa Greco

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

No abstract provided.

Antitrust After The Coming Wave, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

A coming wave of general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence ("AI"), robotics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, energy expansion, and nanotechnology, is likely to fundamentally reshape the economy and erode the assumptions on which the antitrust order is predicated. First, AI-driven systems will vastly improve firms' ability to detect (and even program) consumer preferences without the benefit of price signals, which will undermine the traditional information-producing benefit of competitive markets. Similarly, these systems will be able to determine comparative producer efficiency without relying on competitive signals. Second, AI systems will invert the salient characteristics of human managers, whose intentions are opaque but …

Painting A Clearer Picture: Introducing New Federal Rule Of Evidence 107 Regulating Illustrative Aids, Daniel J. Capra, Liesa L. Richter

Vanderbilt Law Review

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—and charts, drawings, diagrams, computer animations, and even tangible items are utilized at trial in virtually every case tried in the federal and state court systems. Litigants have come to depend heavily upon such aids to engage visual learners in the jury box and to present a compelling narrative. And the creative use of trial aids has only increased with the rapid technological advancements of recent decades. The ubiquity of such aids notwithstanding, there is no written standard governing their use, no agreed-upon lexicon for describing them, and no set of uniform …

Classifying Open Access Business Models, Tasha Mellins-Cohen

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The proliferation of open access (OA) business models has been rapid, presenting challenges for stakeholders in communicating and working effectively with one another. This article aims to clarify terminologies and address the inconsistencies and gaps in previous attempts to categorize OA models, supporting informed decision-making. It presents five core types, each with distinct characteristics and implications for funding, equity, and implementation. Operating at the level of individual pieces of content, transactional models expose authors to the financial implications of their decisions to make content OA; they often must pay out of their own funds. Driven by negotiations between libraries or …

Selected Aspects Of The Organization Of Tourism And Recreation In Natural Areas With Different Status Of Legal Protection, Marcin Pasek, Dominik Borek

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

An important place in the strategy of promoting health of modern societies, especially in the post-pandemic world, is played by orienting recommendations on how to spend free time towards tourism and recreation in the natural environment. The utilitarian nature of this type of activity is associated with the need to respect legal provisions, relating to the use of statutory forms of nature conservation, as well as non-statutory protection areas. The aim of the study is to characterize the tourist-recreational use in both of the abovementioned types of ecological habitats, and to indicate the similarities and differences in the conditions of …

Blurring Boundaries: A Proposed Research Agenda For Ethical, Legal, Social, And Historical Studies At The Intersection Of Infectious And Genetic Disease, Seethal Jose, Juli Bollinger, Gail Geller, Jeremy Greene, Leslie Meltzer Henry, Brian Hutler, Eric Thomas Juengst, Jeffrey Kahn, Anna Mastroianni, Graham Mooney

Articles

Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

The Framework Is The Message: Legal And Ethical Implications Of Chatgpt, Amanda Turnbull

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The rapid rise of generative AI represents a palpable paradigm shift: models like GPT-3 (and its subsequent iterations), DALL-E, and AlphaCode are becoming foundation models for many other AI-based applications. Foundation models may be used for many different tasks with minimal modification and are positioned to replace task-specific models of AI. This holds tremendous promise in society such as advancing scientific research, rethinking education and training, and creating new types of art and expression. At the same time, however, generative AI has its dark side such as accuracy risk, the threat of large-scale unemployment, potential security vulnerabilities, and AI misbehaviour …

The Advocate (Fall 2024), Lewis & Clark Law School

The Advocate

No abstract provided.

Richmond Law Magazine: Autumn 2024

Richmond Law Magazine

Conviction is not the end

Law's newest laboratory

Take good care

The Origins Of The Major Questions Doctrine, Rachel Rothschild

Articles

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has invoked the newly named “major questions doctrine” to strike down agency regulations that protect public health and the environment. Several Justices have argued that while the name “major questions” may be new, these decisions are simply the latest iteration in a longstanding effort of the courts to curtail the explosive growth of the administrative state since 1970. The first paradigmatic example of this line of cases is the 1980 “Benzene” case, in which the Supreme Court set aside the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s new workplace standards for the …

Dignifying Queerness, Ryan Thoreson

Cardozo Law Review

In recent years, courts that have affirmed the right of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people to engage in same-sex activity have often invoked the value of dignity. They have done so in spite of the fact that same-sex activity, and many other kinds of sex, have historically been deemed undignified and subject to criminal prohibition. This Article examines a rapidly growing body of comparative jurisprudence to examine how dignity has become an unlikely cornerstone of efforts to decriminalize same-sex conduct. By invoking dignity, courts have persuasively struck down some of the most immediate and egregious restrictions on sexual …

Illegal, Unreported And Unregulated (Iuu) Fishing As Pathways To Human Trafficking: Navigating The Trafficked State Of Migrant Filipino Fishermen In J.W. Henley’S Migrante, Mary Harmony I. Guevarra

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This study focuses on how J.W. Henley’s Migrante (2020) illustrates the synchroneity of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing to the human trafficking dynamics at sea, in which the maturation and onset of its male protagonist’s psychological and physiological damages confirm his trafficked state. This paper offers further scrutiny on the gendered footing of human trafficking and opens a reframing of its discourse. Migrante tells the painful story of Rizal, who finds employment in a fishing vessel on the shores of Su’ao, Taiwan; as his crew go about their routine at sea which is interspersed with illegal trades in the …

Law School Announcements 2024-2025, Law School Announcements Editors

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Theistic Illiberal Constitutionalism: A Review Of Adrian Vermeule’S Common Good Constitutionalism, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism drew a remarkable amount of attention from constitutional law scholars when it was published in 2020. About eighteen months later, Vermeule published a piece complaining that the critics had missed the point, that they had ignored the natural law jurisprudence that grounds the work. He was correct. This Review addresses Vermeule’s natural law jurisprudence, emphasizing the fact that it is a religious natural law jurisprudence. His arguments are in the tradition of ScholasticismAristotelian logic incorporated into Christian theology by St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism is a remarkably weak foundation for constitutional jurisprudence. It is a vast …

Coral Reef Protection Is Fundamental To Human Rights, Emma F. Camp, Irus Braverman, Genevieve Wilkinson, Christian R. Voolstra

Journal Articles

The intensifying loss of coral reefs from global climate change and local stressors has seen international commitments targeted at conservation and repair, for example the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Fulfilling these targets requires decisions to be made on where, when, and how to act, ultimately dictating where limited resources will be deployed. Every choice on action or inaction toward our ocean has direct and indivisible consequences not only for the health of marine ecosystems but also for the health of humans, particularly those who directly depend on marine habitats, both culturally and economically. The well-being of the environment, humans, and …