Digital Commons Network^™

Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence, Luke Stark, Jevan Hutson

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. This Article—which contributes to critical data studies, consumer protection law, biometric privacy law, and antidiscrimination law—endeavors to conceptualize and problematize physiognomic artificial intelligence (“AI”) and offer policy recommendations for state and federal lawmakers to forestall its proliferation.

Physiognomic AI, as this Article contends, is the practice of using computer software and related systems to infer or create hierarchies of an individual’s body composition, protected class status, perceived character, capabilities, and future social outcomes based on their physical …

Constitutional Authority, Common Resources, And The Climate, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

This work sets out to re-examine and challenge the history of the property clause with an eye towards increased congressional reliance on it in the face of daunting threats to our natural environment. No one could seriously question the primary motivations of the Framers, but that does not foreclose the importance of searching for secondary motivations that deepen our understanding of arguably the Constitution’s most explicitly environmental provision. Eugene Gaetke’s work in the 1980’s and Peter Appel’s work twenty years later laid the groundwork for the argument here by pushing back on the originalist argument for a narrow interpretation of …

The Green Police In The Golden State: An Analysis Of The Criminal Enforcement Of Environmental Law In The State Of California, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

UC Law Environmental Journal

The use of criminal enforcement tools is necessary for deterring and punishing environmental offenses involving significant harm or culpable conduct. Yet we have very limited empirical knowledge of how the criminal enforcement of environmental laws has functioned historically in the Golden State. Through content analysis of prosecution summaries for every federal criminal investigation undertaken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the State of California that led to criminal prosecution, 1983-2019, we are able to provide a comprehensive account of what laws are violated, how prosecutors charge environmental criminals, and how these criminals are sentenced, illustrating broader themes in …

Civil Procedure As The Regulation Of Externalities: Toward A New Theory Of Civil Litigation, Ronen Avraham, William Hubbard

Articles

No abstract provided.

Escape Room: Implicit Takings After Cedar Point Nursery, Lee Fennell

Articles

No abstract provided.

Police Agencies On Facebook Overreport On Black Suspects, Ben Grunwald, Julian Nyarko, John Rappaport

Articles

A large and growing share of the American public turns to Facebook for news. On this platform, reports about crime increasingly come directly from law enforcement agencies, raising questions about content curation. We gathered all posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by US law enforcement agencies, focusing on reporting about crime and race. We found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25 percentage points relative to local arrest rates. This overexposure occurs across crime types and geographic regions and increases with the proportion of both Republican voters and non-Black residents. Widespread exposure to …

Ideation And Innovation In Constitutional Rights, Tom Ginsburg

Articles

This article explores the development of ideas in constitutional design. The point of departure is a perspective of constitutions-as-products, and thus, an examination of the invention, innovation, and an uptake of these products. The article conceptualizes constitutional innovation and distinguishes its manifestations with respect to constitutional products, the process of constitution-making, and in supporting institutions. The last two elements, in line with Schumpeter’s approach to innovation, would seem especially important to constitutional development. The article provides several examples from the area of human rights and argues that innovations tend to be found in situations in which there is strong aversion …

Streaming Property, Lee Anne Fennell

Articles

People acquire property rights in objects and real estate in order to capture the stream of services that these assets can provide over time. The thing or parcel itself is merely a delivery mechanism, a way of packaging and protecting rights to that value stream. And, significantly, these assets cannot stream services to anyone without a set of facilitating conditions and complementary goods, such as public infrastructure, that do not lie within the asset owner’s individual control. This Essay argues that we can gain fresh traction on inequality by recasting property as service streams rather than as owned things. Doing …

Fifty Years Of Patent Remedies Case Law: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Thomas F. Cotter

Articles

Over the past fifty years, courts have developed a body of case law on patent remedies that is, in many respects, solidly grounded in economic reasoning. Among the high points are the courts’ embrace, in various contexts, of the simple principle that patent damages should restore patent owners to the position they would have occupied, but for the infringement—and of an important corollary to that principle, namely the importance to damages calculations of the “noninfringing alternatives” concept. By contrast, certain other developments—including the confusing standards for determining when it is appropriate to use the “entire market value” of a product …

The Many Faces Of Modern Legal Realism, Brian Bix

Articles

This work offers an overview of the consequences and implications of the work of the American Legal Realists. First, the article considers Brian Leiter’s naturalist understanding of the realist project and how he uses it as an occasion to argue for a generally naturalist approach to legal philosophy. Second, Frederick Schauer transforms a legal realist-like focus on the concerns of average citizens for legal enforcement to advocate for the view that coercion is central to understanding law. Third, self-styled New Legal Realists try to merge a realist-inspired search for the effects of legal rules with a more traditional respect for …

The Clean Water Act And The Ocean: An Unfulfilled Promise, Robin Kundis Craig

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Opioid Accountability, Daniel G. Aaron

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The opioid crisis has steadily killed Americans for twenty years. In total, we have lost 450,000 American lives since the 1990s, and countless more suffer from chronic addiction.

After years of piecemeal efforts to address this massive loss of life and health, the opioid litigation, largely centralized in Ohio federal district court, has brought significant hope for change. But there is a notable divide between the popular sense of the litigation and its reality. A full 57% of Americans believe that opioid companies should be held accountable for precipitating a public health crisis. However, the litigation has been dedicated to …

Loneliness In Covid-19, Life, And Law, Olivia Ash, Peter H. Huang

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

Coerced Testimony Of A Witness, As Opposed To The Fabrication Of Evidence, Should Not Be Used As A Basis To Satisfy A § 1983 Claim For Alleged Due Process Violations In An Underlying Criminal Matter, 55 Uic L. Rev. 40 (2022), Jonathan Federman, Kyle Fleck

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

It Was Never About A Cake: Masterpiece Cakeshop And The Crusade To Weaponize Religious Freedom, Andrew L. Seidel

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

Coming Full Circle On Human Rights In The Global Economy: International Economic Law Tools To Realize The Right To Development, Diane A. Desierto

Loyola University Chicago International Law Review

This article argues that the discipline and profession of international economic law has undergone a significant architectural change to focus on human rights law as both the premise and promise of the international economic system. Contrary to prevailing currents that focus on the irrelevance of the global economic system to realize human rights, this article argues that international economic law tools have already been converging within the last decade to authentically realize the Right to Development of individuals, groups, and populations. The Draft Convention on the Right to Development defines the right as the enjoyment, participation, and contribution of individuals, …

Pretrial Disparity And The Consequences Of Money Bail, Miguel F.P. De Figueiredo, Dane Thorley

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shareholder Engagement In The United States, Vikramaditya S. Khanna

Book Chapters

Shareholder voting and engagement in the US have undergone substantial changes over the last 50 years. They have moved from being relatively sleepy issues to those that trigger insomnia in even the most hardened executives. The changes in the ownership structure of US publicly traded firms are probably the most important reason for the shift, but so too are rule changes that have facilitated greater shareholder activism. This chapter explores these developments while describing the rules of the road for shareholder voting in the US by focusing on Delaware jurisprudence and changes in US federal securities regulations. It also examines …

International Law Rules On Treaty Interpretation, Steven R. Ratner

Book Chapters

International law is central to the interpretation of both of the Brexit-related treaties. The TCA explicitly requires the parties and any dispute settlement body to interpret it according to the rules of interpretation of public international law, notably the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). The WA, and thus the Protocol, by specifying that any of its provisions concerning Union law or concepts must be interpreted in accordance with EU law (including the case law of the CJEU), implies that its many provisions not concerning EU law will need to be interpreted by the default rules of …

The Fathers' Veto And Fatherhood As Property, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

Over the last twenty-five years, state legislators have been quietly adding civil remedy provisions to antiabortion legislation to supplement, and in the case of Texas’s Senate Bill 8, to completely replace the traditional criminal and administrative enforcement mechanisms of restrictive abortion legislation. Laws currently in effect in at least eight states permit fathers to sue abortion providers for civil damages for wrongful death and emotional distress for alleged harms that result from the abortion procedure. Several state legislatures have introduced laws—although to date all have been enjoined or are being challenged—that require women seeking an abortion to get signed consent …

Griswold For Google: Algorithmic Determinism And Decisional Privacy, Joshua Fairfield, Nathaniel Reynolds

Scholarly Articles

As surveillance capitalism continues to collect data and automate decisions, those on the receiving end of such actions are often rendered speechless. We are less left in awe of the great force of these technologies than we lack the language that could properly define and defend against their onslaught. Often, we feel powerless as our data is extracted then aimed at us to manipulate our own choices, and yet the conversation around these practices seems stultified. Algorithms have shifted the technological landscape by co-opting human decision-making and in the process co-opted the very tool that we use to respond to …

The Public Trust Doctrine, Property, And Society, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

The public trust doctrine creates a set of sovereign rights and responsibilities with regard to certain resource commons, obligating the state to manage them in trust for the public. In the last century, the doctrine has gradually transformed from an affirmation of sovereign authority over trust resources to a recognition of sovereign responsibility to protect them for present and future generations. Especially in the United States, it has evolved through common, constitutional, and statutory law to protect a broader variety of resources and associated values, including ecological, recreational, and scenic values. Today, the doctrine is frequently invoked in natural resource …

Indicators Of Deception: Science Or Non-Science, Kristina Vasquez

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Deception detection is used by many law enforcement professionals who work in interviews and interrogations. The ability to detect deception or having knowledge on the signs of deception is very important in not only law enforcement, but in other careers and everyday life. The question remains: is deception detection a science or not a science? There are three areas where someone can learn how to detect deception and those are verbal communication, non-verbal communication, and paralanguage. The use of verbal communication looks at what the person is saying with their words. The use of non-verbal communication looks at what someone …

The Legal Role In Building Sustainable Public Health (Symposium Transcript), Joanna K. Sax

Faculty Scholarship

The article presents a discussion of food as a public health issue, beginning with why science matters and utilizing science to solve food as a public health issue, especially as it relates to sustainability and climate change. Consumer misperceptions of the risk created by new scientific technologies (e.g., GMOs), or even older scientific technologies, may thwart use of such technologies to solve sustainability problems. The talk addresses why consumers might inappropriately assign risk to certain scientific applications and ways that we might want to think about resolving that issue or closing the divide between consumer misperception of risk and evidence-based …

Sprinting A Marathon: Next Steps For Gender Equity In Criminal Law Employment, Maryam Ahranjani

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Brown Buffalo's Observations On Color (Blindness), Legal History, And Racial Justice In The Rocky Mountain West, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Civil Rights Law Equity: An Introduction To A Theory Of What Civil Rights Has Become, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

This Article argues that civil rights law is better understood as civil rights equity. It contends that the four-decade-long project of restricting civil rights litigation has shaped civil rights jurisprudence into a contemporary version of traditional equity. For years commentators have noted the low success rates of civil rights suits and debated the propriety of increasingly restrictive procedural and substantive doctrines. Activists have lost faith in civil rights litigation as an effective tool for social change, instead seeking change in administrative forums, or by asserting political pressure through social media and activism to compel policy change. As for civil rights …

Racial Contagion: Anti-Asian Nationalism, The State Of Emergency, And Exclusion, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Surveilling Potential Uses And Abuses Of Artificial Intelligence In Correctional Spaces, Justin Iverson

Scholarly Works

In section II, this paper will begin with an analysis of the development of AI, noting famous examples and establishing a baseline definition as a lens for the rest of this discussion. This paper will assess aspects of AI and machine learning to the extent it furthers our understanding of AI’s ability to collect data and make decisions. Some popular culture references will be brought into focus here to recognize storytelling’s ability to inspire and influence real-world scientific pursuits. Of preliminary importance, the AI we have both dreamed of and feared are certainly kept in mind as technology advances through …