Digital Commons Network^™

What Is Hate Speech? A Proposal For An Ordinary And Legal Definition, Hannah Van Dijcke

SJD Dissertations

The term “hate speech” has been stretched in legal and public debates to cover speech ranging from insults to Holocaust denial. This definitional stretching has consequences beyond mere conceptual confusion: it risks obscuring the profound harm that hate speech does, and it facilitates the term’s misuse.

In this dissertation, I aim to precisely define hate speech and its harm, both in an ordinary (colloquial or non-legal) sense and in a legal sense. To do so, I examine real-world examples of speech widely understood to express hate, including texts from the context of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and conduct …

The Trial Of Socrates, Jonathan Van Patten

Faculty Publications

In many important ways, the trial of Socrates was not just the trial of the century, nor even the trial of the millennium. It predated the trial of Jesus, which is important for many other reasons, but Socrates’ contribution to how we think about justice and the rule of law is without equal. This Article explores the ways that this fifth-century B.C. trial, located geographically on the margin of what came to be known as the West, is at the center of what makes us a civilization. It is not simply about the drama, nor the politics of free inquiry, …

Practicing Law From Home During The Pandemic: Findings From The University Of Michigan Law School Alumni Survey, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

The University of Michigan Law School, through its Alumni Survey Project, conducts annual surveys of its graduates regarding their current work and their careers as a whole.  In the surveys conducted in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the Project included questions about the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on various aspects of graduates’ work – their productivity, their co-worker relationships, their client relationships, the balance of their work and family life, and their income – as well as on their work experience overall. 819 graduates who had practiced law fulltime during the pandemic responded to the questions and more than half …

Preemption Without Protection: Reconsidering The Airline Deregulation Act In An Era Of Federal Retreat, Carmela Frontzak

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Privacy Protection: Why Ai Chatbots Demand Coppa Changes, Jacob Yeskis

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Prevention Beyond Deterrence, Benjamin A. Barsky

Emory Law Journal

This Article reconceptualizes preventive justice—the public safety paradigm that seeks to prevent harm before it occurs. Scholars have long documented how cities have advanced this paradigm through largely punitive measures, notably variants of broken windows policing, which posit that aggressive misdemeanor enforcement deters more serious crime. Yet in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, and as underscored recently in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, these measures have faced a legitimacy crisis—prompting calls for nonpunitive responses to nonviolent incidents.

This Article establishes a preventive justice approach that advances health and safety without emphasizing crime deterrence. It draws …

Lunch Shaming And The Right To Privacy, Ira P. Robbins

Emory Law Journal

Lunch shaming is the practice of penalizing students who cannot afford to pay for their meals, resulting in them being denied food, served alternative meals, or publicly identified. The origins of lunch shaming can be traced to the financial pressures faced by school districts that struggle to balance tight budgets with the mandate to provide free or reduced-price meals to eligible students. Despite legislative efforts and advocacy campaigns aimed at mitigating the problems associated with lunch shaming, the practice persists, exacerbated by rising food costs and the expiration of pandemic-era food programs.

Many law journal and other articles have correctly …

Regulating Manipulative Design Is Not Preempted By Cda 230 Or The First Amendment, Brett Frischmann, Peter Ormerod

Emory Law Journal

For over two decades, there has been a heated debate among legal scholars, activists, judges, and others about the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A persistent theme in those debates has been hyperbolic claims about the necessity of immunity from state laws for digital tech platforms and fearmongering that anything less than maximum immunity will destroy the Internet.

This Article argues that states retain considerable discretion to regulate digital platforms’ design and engineering decisions. We argue that manipulation, engineered behavior, and even habituation and normalization of engineered behavior by digital platforms are content-agnostic harms attributable to …

The Evolution Of Trust And Safety, Danielle Keats Citron, Ari Ezra Waldman

Emory Law Journal

This Article tells the inside story of the rise, spread, and evolution of trust and safety. We bring unique perspectives to this story. One of us (Citron) was on the inside, advising many tech companies over the years on how to create healthy digital environments. The other (Waldman) was on the outside, observing, through field research, how tech companies respond to and translate law into their routines, organizational structures, and practices. Together, these perspectives offer scholars and policymakers unmatched opportunities not just to see what is happening but to understand it as well. For decades, U.S. tech companies resisted legal …

Platform Polarization?, Matthew B. Lawrence

Emory Law Journal

This Essay explores what the ongoing politicization of Americans’ relationships to and through the technologies they use to interact online might come to mean for the workings of American government and for the constitutional law questions—especially First Amendment and separation-of-power questions—that depend on those workings. James Madison described the workings of government as a function of the interaction of human nature, law, and social movements (factions). From local newspapers to national magazines to radio to broadcast TV to cable news, experience has taught that a fourth variable—the communications technology through which people interact—is also critically important. In the recent era, …

Dedication, South Dakota Law Review

South Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bundle Of Bytes: The Legal And Ethical Considerations For The Transfer, Ownership, And Disposition Of Digital Assets, Wendy Donelan Madsen

South Dakota Law Review

The right to transfer, own, and dispose of one’s assets after death is one of Americans’ most cherished rights. For most of the last century, Americans primarily held tangible assets, which were sufficiently managed through estate administration laws. Some key rights, such as transferring, owning, and disposing of tangible assets, are well understood by the bundle of sticks analogy common in property law. However, in the twenty-first century, Americans have accumulated significant digital assets that also require transfer, ownership, and disposition. Yet the current laws governing intangible assets do not adequately address these needs. Therefore, the bundle of bytes offers …

Legal Turbulence: Addressing Unresolved Questions In Civil Aviation Through Judicial Adjudication, Arthur Shirichena

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

The increasing complexity of international civil aviation has outpaced the mechanisms currently available for the peaceful resolution of disputes. While aviation has long been governed by treaties such as the Chicago Convention of 1944 and managed through institutions like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), many emerging issues remain unresolved by these frameworks. Questions concerning the interaction between aviation and competition law, the legality of air blockades and no-fly zones, and the definitional ambiguities surrounding dual-use technologies such as weaponized aircraft or unmanned aerial systems have created pressing normative and jurisdictional challenges. This Paper argues that the establishment or empowerment …

The Nfl’S Collision With Antitrust Law: A Strategy For Defending The National Football League’S Joint Agreements With Streaming Providers, Jack Mays

Chapman Law Review

The next frontier of sports broadcasting is here. Media consumption has shifted dramatically in recent years. Streaming services have become the preferred medium for television shows and movies, and sports broadcasts have expanded beyond traditional cable to streaming services. Given this reconfiguration of public behavior, the Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA)—a 1961 exemption to antitrust law—should be construed to allow the National Football League (NFL) to collectively negotiate with streaming providers like Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, and Netflix.

The SBA exempts joint agreements between professional sports leagues and broadcasters from antitrust scrutiny when those agreements involve the “sponsored telecasting” of games. …

Regulatory History And Judicial Review, Todd Phillips, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to simply "incorporate in the rules adopted a concise general statement of their basis and purpose" after they receive comments from the public, and the Supreme Court ruled in Overton Park that courts are to adjudicate whether rules are arbitrary and capricious based on agencies' contemporaneous rationales. Judge-created doctrines incentivize agencies to rely on these "concise" statements to elucidate their rationales, and as a result, rulemaking preambles have ballooned in size as agencies seek to insulate themselves from critical courts.

This article contends that although the APA's statutory requirement is in tension with …

Fda After Loper Bright, Erika Lietzan

Faculty Publications

Loper Bright, which overruled the Chevron decision from 1984, tells us that a court should determine the meaning of all statutory provisions for itself, rather than deferring to the views of the federal agencies that implement those provisions. But the overruling of Chevron may have less of an impact on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than conventional wisdom supposes. Most challenges to FDA action do not concern its statutory interpretations. And the agency prevailed in most cases involving statutory interpretation, before the Chevron doctrine took hold. After 1984, when the doctrine did apply, the agency often lost cases at …

Why Ai May Be Your Best Negotiation And Mediation Coach, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This article explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) tools as negotiation and mediation coaches.  Drawing on research from negotiation, mediation, and consumer behavior, the article explains why bots can sometimes coach more effectively than humans.  In this role, they offer on-demand support that can help users prepare strategically and reflect honestly.  This support is especially valuable when seeking help from a human would feel too risky or awkward.

The article cautions against use of AI for roles requiring emotional intelligence, discretion, or legitimacy, such as negotiators, mediators, or arbitrators.  It distinguishes between AI as a thinking partner and AI …

The International Order, International Law, And The Definition Of Security, Harlan Grant Cohen

Michigan Journal of International Law

As economic security has seemingly moved to the center of American and European foreign policy, both the United States and the European Union have broadened their interpretation of international law rules governing security, coercion, and intervention. But these interpretations are not exactly new, echoing developing state interpretations of international law that developed states had long ago seemingly rejected. How are these once moribund interpretations of security, force, and coercion being brought back to life?

This article argues that these interpretative shifts highlight the role of the international order as an interpretative mechanism within international law. Borrowing from the work of …

De Minimis Confusion, Maximum Risk: Consumer Vulnerability And Trademark Law In Lerner & Rowe V. Brown Engstrand, Gabriella Johnson

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Commission Quorums, Nicholas Bednar, Todd Phillips

Articles

Multimember commissions are a central feature of the modern administrative state. Yet a growing number have lost their legal authority to function—not through statutory repeal or defunding, but because they lack a quorum. In many cases, these quorum losses stem from the President’s assertion of a broad removal power, which causes vacancies in the commission’s membership. Quorum losses lead to agency inaction, prevent the executive branch from ensuring faithful execution of the laws, and threaten the constitutional rights of individuals who appear before adjudicatory commissions.

This Article presents an empirical study of quorum rules in multimember commissions. It traces how …

Fair Use In The Supreme Court: A Peek Behind The Scenes, Jonathan Band

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Between 1975 and 1994, the Supreme Court considered five cases that involved fair use: Williams & Wilkins v. United States; Sony v. Universal City Studios; Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises; Stewart v. Abend; and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose. The papers of the Supreme Court Justices that decided these cases show the Court as a profoundly human institution with the Justices often struggling to fashion opinions that could gain the support of a majority. The Justices clearly cared about the copyright merits, but they were also willing to compromise to achieve a certain result. In several …

Legal Professional Identity Development: An Exploration Of The Social And Emotional Processes By Which Law Students Transition From Novices To Professionals, David Hall Abney Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

This dissertation seeks to heed the call for expansion of instructional communication research (ICR) beyond the undergraduate classroom and undergraduate learning objectives by exploring older learners and higher-order affective learning objectives. Legal professional identity development (LPID) is a discipline-specific type of higher-order affective learning that is conceptualized as a continuous nonlinear process that begins in law school and extends throughout a lawyer’s career, involving the internalization of the legal profession’s core values and norms and their integration with an evolving identity. Using a pragmatic ICR approach and a mixed-methods design, Phase 1 employed individual interviews and focus groups to investigate …

Trust Is Difficult To Gain, Yet Easily Broken: The Impact Of Negative Police Encounters On Police–Community Relations, Brooke J. Pirozek

Honors College Theses

Trust between law enforcement agencies and their respective communities is arguably one of the most contentious issues within contemporary criminal justice research in the United States. This is because, despite the fact that law enforcement institutions rely significantly on the public's assistance and cooperation in fighting crime and enforcing social order, there still exist negative relations between law enforcement and their communities, mainly attributed to feelings of unfair treatment, abuse of power, and a lack of accountability. This study seeks to understand the role of negative police encounters in shaping community trust and perceptions of police legitimacy, with a special …

An International Framework For Marriage Promotion, Jessica Tueller

Faculty Articles

Governments across the globe lately have been raising the alarm about declining marriage rates and adopting a wide variety of measures to increase these rates. This article presents a framework, distilled from human rights law, for assessing whether such measures are in keeping with States’ international obligations to eliminate all forms of coercion and discrimination in their policies and practices concerning diverse family structure and composition. The framework draws clear boundaries between measures that are permissible under human rights law and measures that are prohibited by human rights law. It also provides a tool for evaluating marriage-promotion measures that, although …

In Service Of The State: Foreign Financing, Infrastructure, And Imperialism In Tsarist Russia, Christopher A. Hartwell, Paul Vaaler, Boris Vinogradov

Articles

Russia’s imperialism in the nineteenth century has been far less scrutinized than other episodes of great power colonization, but the Tsar’s expansion into the Caucasus was indeed an ongoing imperial project. The movement of Russian troops and settlers was only feasible with the creation of a large railway network, an undertaking for which the Tsarist regime lacked adequate funding. In response, the regime developed a system of state guarantees and incentives to attract foreign investors looking for higher returns and willing to finance railways serving the imperial project. We illustrate this point with a case study of Paris-based Crédit Lyonnais …

2026-2027, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Student Handbooks

No abstract provided.

Legislatively Erased: The Failure Of Privacy Legislation To Protect People Connected To The Criminal Legal System, Chaz Arnett, Kate Weisburd

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

An Empirical Examination Of Law Student Attitudes Toward Legal Writing With Generative Ai, Abigail L. Perdue

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Amid mounting predictions that generative artificial intelligence (AI) will substantially disrupt legal education, legal writing professors grapple with how and when to integrate generative AI into the classroom. While some believe that it should be woven into existing courses and integrated across the curriculum, even in the first year, others contend that it is better reserved for discussion in upper-level courses dedicated to AI-assistance. Yet it remains unclear which approach will best prepare graduates for the modern practice of law. Indeed, some scholars caution that permitting law students to use generative AI to complete their legal writing coursework, particularly in …

United States Internal Displacement Policy In The Era Of Climate Change, Bashar Zaheer

Saint Louis University Law Journal

At the outset of 2025, the United States was greeted with a series of unprecedented wildfires sweeping through Los Angeles, causing immense damage to property and loss of lives, while thousands were forced to evacuate their homes. This came just months after flooding from Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina and surrounding States, causing at least 130 deaths and rendering many residences uninhabitable. Despite this deepening crisis, the identification and protection of the rights of climate refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (“IDPs”) remains a burgeoning topic internationally, and even more so in the domestic context of the United States. As described …