Digital Commons Network^™

Ip Law: Ai And Cracks In The Foundation Of Ip, Robin C. Feldman

The Judges' Book

Our implicit image of progress, and the standards we use to calibrate the value of human contributions to that progress, are quietly at risk from the onslaught of AI. AI has the potential to significantly shrink the pool of information and creative work protected by IP, particularly shrinking the protectable space for the work of human contributors.

The changes wrought by AI raise existential questions for society’s conception of human invention. I use the term “existential” here not in the modern sense of threatening something’s existence, but rather in the broad sense of philosophical existentialism, as being concerned with exploring …

Samuel Anthony Rumore, Jr. Collection, University Of Alabama School Of Law

Manuscript Collections

The Samuel Anthony Rumore Collection consists of research materials and drafts of Rumore's project "Building Alabama Courthouses," photographs of Alabama county courthouses and federal buildings, materials from Rumore's tenure as president of the Library School Association, and correspondence with UA's School of Library and Information Studies.

Designed Lands©Apes—Ar©Hitecture, Sculpture, Visual Art, Shape, Pi©Torial Work, Or . . . Nothing At All?, Richard H. Chused

Articles & Chapters

This article arises from the saga of the construction and eventual destruction of a landmark landscape architectural work by the well-known artist Mary Miss that was constructed adjacent to the Des Moines Art Center called Greenwood Pond: Double Site. The project’s demise is emblematic of the remarkably ambiguous copyright problems that surround such artistic creations. They do not neatly fit into any category of copyrightable works. Though they may contain sculptural works, their overall designs are rarely totally sculptural. While architects typically draw plans and “sculpt” a landscaped space, the results usually are not “buildings,’ as required by the definition …

Statutory Interpretation In The Oklahoma Supreme Court: Making The Case For Modified Textualism, Mahak H. Merchant

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should Statutory Interpretation And Contract Interpretation Be Harmonized?, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops four case studies about how states have harmonized or separated their statutory interpretation regimes and their contract interpretation regimes.  After exploring the choices of Texas, Alaska, New York, and Alabama—all of which take different approaches to their lumping or splitting—the paper seeks to make state courts more aware of what their options are; to help states think about whether their commitments to formalism or contextualism make sense to apply in both domains; and to help them evaluate their meta-choices about whether to bring their interpretive regimes closer together or further apart.

Risky Business, Atinuke O. Adediran

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate law scholarship and doctrine have largely operated on the assumption that corporate shareholders are interested in financial goals, while corporate stakeholders—such as employees, consumers, and local communities—are interested in social and environmental goals, like diversity and inclusion and climate change. Because of this assumption, the law largely requires a corporation to disclose information it considers to be “financially material” to shareholders—that is significant enough to impact the company’s financial position—including factors it considers to be financially risky.

Financial materiality is so embedded in corporate law doctrine that even if an issue is about social and environmental concerns, financial materiality …

Outside Counsel Guidelines: Power, Ideology, And The Evolution Of The Corporate Bar, Bruce A. Green, Eli Wald

Faculty Scholarship

Outside Counsel Guidelines (“OCGs”), terms of the lawyer–client relationship imposed by corporations, are a significant development in the practice of law by large corporate law firms (“BigLaw”). Among the most controversial OCGs are those that expand on law firms’ fiduciary obligations, thereby restricting their future clientele. The organized bar maintains that rules of professional conduct should restrict lawyers’ acquiescence to these OCGs because they limit clients’ access to legal services and undermine lawyers’ independence without advancing corporate clients’ legitimate interests.

This Article shows why the bar’s effort has (very recently) deservedly failed: corporate clients have a legitimate interest in demanding …

Pragmatic Conceptualism, Public Nuisance, And The American Opioid Litigation, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Faculty Scholarship

Public nuisance as a part of American tort law has been as high profile in the first decades of this century as products liability law was in the last several decades of the 20th century.  The American opioid litigation over the past decades is a spectacular example, filling headlines and generating billions of dollars of settlements.  There is a plausible argument, however, that the doctrinal core of the opioid litigation is meritless because there simply is no “interference with public right” as required by public nuisance law.  The first aim of the article is to articulate and assess that argument. …

Chat M.D., Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Large language models (LLMs) such as Claude and ChatGPT are the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems ever created, and they are being used to diagnose and treat patients. But LLMs have been shown to be unreliable, unpredictable, and unsafe on occasion. New AI guidelines recommend hundreds of standards, such as ‘transparency’, ‘trustworthiness’, and ‘safety’. But there is deep uncertainty whether these are sufficient. The literature focuses mostly on which standards best suit AI models, not on how to transmute standards into law. This article does that by considering AI guidelines as a starting point, then evaluating whether existing frameworks …

Meat Is Dead, Melissa D. Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

The legal and cultural landscape surrounding meat in the United States is evolving as plant-based alternatives, GMO farm animals, and cell-cultivated meat move from test tube to table. While global demand for meat rises amid environmental, ethical, and resource challenges, cell-cultivated meat emerges as a scientifically viable alternative, offering identical nutritional value without the drawbacks of conventional livestock production. Despite federal regulatory approval from USDA and FDA, multiple states have enacted unusually restrictive laws—including bans— targeting cell-cultivated meat. These are motivated largely by economic protectionism, but also deeper cultural anxieties tied to tradition and identity. This Article argues that food …

Excluded At The Root: Health Insurance Discrimination Against Hair Loss Conditions, Stacey A. Tovino, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Unconstitutional Attempt To Criminalize Naming Ice Agents, Noah C. Chauvin

Faculty Articles

Some members of Congress propose to make it a crime to publish the name of a federal official with the intent of obstructing that official’s law or immigration enforcement duties. This Essay considers whether the lawmakers’ bill, the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, is consistent with the First Amendment. It is not.

Marital Status And Human Rights, Jessica Tueller

Faculty Articles

Although human rights law has established a clear prohibition on discrimination based on marital status, this prohibition is vastly underutilized. This Article argues that increased attention to human rights law's prohibition on marital status discrimination, accompanied by clearer, more consistent, and more robust analysis of this phenomenon, is needed to ensure that everyone whether they choose to remain unmarried or to marry, whether they file for divorce or are widowed-continues to have and enjoy the same human rights and fundamental freedoms as any other person throughout their lifetime. This Article specifically recommends a focus on harmful marital status stereotypes that …

Generative Ai And The Purpose Of Legal Scholarship, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

What does generative artificial intelligence mean for the future of legal scholarship? The topic has been the talk of the town around academic watercoolers. Some legal scholars have tried their hand at producing legal scholarship using generative Al. The accompanying commentary is varied, but advocates for the technology suggest that generative Al may become a common tool for legal scholars, leaving those who refuse to adapt at a severe disadvantage.

In this article, I contemplate a world in which legal scholars routinely use generative Al to produce academic writing. I argue that an instrumental view of legal scholarship's value-a view …

Cultivating Free Speech Culture, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Defending dissent to safeguard speech and political opposition is a challenging and necessary task for a self-governing democracy. Moreover, it is a collective task. Succeeding in this endeavor sometimes requires defending speech with which one disagrees, especially in a nation as pluralistic as the United States. Although imperfect and inconsistent, there are numerous examples where strange bedfellows join together to achieve this goal. While First Amendment law helps us reach the goal, law alone is not enough. We also need a cultural commitment to defending dissent. This Essay argues that cultivating a culture that values robust free speech protection is …

Health Truth To Power: Professional Collaboration To Bolster Trust Against Misinformation, William M. Sage, Keegan D. Warren

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about health, leaving aside more general challenges to shared civic information today. The Article begins by surveying the principal challenges for health information in post-pandemic, arguably post-truth America, and then describes briefly the sources and limits of medical professional authority. Noting the double-edged sword of free speech guarantees under the U.S. Constitution, the Article continues by commenting on speaking truth to government, to industry, and to the crowd. Next, the Article considers the physicians’ role in speaking truth to power from the perspective of standard medical professional ethics and identity, comparing it to that of lawyers. Finally, …

Automated Writer And Acquisition-Condition Classification Of Digitally Captured Handwriting Using Statistical Dynamic Features And Support Vector Machines, Long-Huang Tsai, Hsiang-Ju Lai, Wen-Chao Yang, Jiajun Jiang, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Digitally captured handwriting preserves pen trajectories and dynamic signals, but it also records hardware- and input-dependent properties that can confound forensic interpretation. This study revises a support vector machine (SVM) screening framework using 16,500 samples from 30 writers, 11 writing-content categories, and five acquisition conditions spanning three tablets and stylus or finger input. Twenty-four raw and derived time-series variables were summarized by maximum, minimum, mean, median, and standard deviation, yielding 120 features; the mode statistic was removed. Writing direction and angular velocity were recalculated with atan2-based vector formulas. Unavailable device/API channels were encoded as zero, and Z-score parameters were estimated …

Multidimensional Analysis Of Social Discourse On Twitter (X) Around Venezuelan Migration In Columbia, Joseph Martínez, Melissa Miller-Felton, Jose J. Padilla, Erika Frydenlund, Katherine Palacio

VMASC Publications

Colombia has become the principal host of Venezuelan migrants in Latin America, prompting a complex mix of solidarity, anxiety, and discrimination. This study offers a multidimensional analysis of Twitter (now X) discourse on Venezuelan migration in Colombia between 2014 and 2022, using natural language processing, geolocation inference, sentiment analysis, and manual annotation of derogatory terms. Drawing from 7.4 million posts, we examine how online discourse evolves across time, space, and language. While negative sentiment is pronounced in original tweets during periods of political and social unrest, our findings highlight that users tend to amplify neutral and positive messages—over 67% of …

Finding Aid For The Orma R. Smith Collection (Mum00760)

Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids (alphabetical)

Orma R. Smith was a judge in the U.S. District Court of Northern Mississippi from 1968 to 1982. His collection contains subject files, chamber papers from his tenure on the court, correspondence, photographs, and memorabilia.

Cybersecurity Mission Creep, Mailyn Fidler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So refrained, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls "cybersecuritized." Before this refraining, these issues present as important but not existential. But once cybersecuritization positions the issues as threats intensified by their technological nature, they gain access to the politics and law of urgency and exceptionalism and invite troubling governance responses. Positioned as security threats, cybersecuritized issues become endowed with the apparent normative …

Uncovering The Keystone: Case Study Of The Ubs Art Collection Gift, Loan And Contemporary Voices Exhibition At Moma In 2005 - Twenty Years Later, Maria Glikman Yamarakov

MA Theses

This research aims to reconstruct foundational history of the Case, based on the publicly available sources. Using the established factual background to test the significance of each of the three major assumptions, referred traditionally as motivation behind the studied Case undertaking. Through critical analysis this Thesis targets to uncover the keystone of this Case and use it as the background to introduce the governance Duty of Stewardship concept in the corporate collection context. Assuming the introduced concept sustains initial analysis, assess its potential value for further strategic development of the corporate collections of the contemporary art.

Transparency As A Regulatory Duty, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium piece offers a simple survey of transparency measures addressed to deepfakes and other related consumer harms, as well as the constitutional problems they present.

Evolving Legal Issues In Higher Education: Introduction To The Higher Education And The Law Symposium, Patricia E. Salkin

Touro Law Review

The Touro Law Review could not have selected a better time to highlight many of the evolving legal issues in higher education. It can be both an exciting time to practice law in this space and one that challenges the creative problem-solving skills of lawyers and their clients. This issue of the Law Review highlights a number of key developments and trends.

Required Learning, Voluntary Service: A Critical Look At Mandatory Cle And Pro Bono Options, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter critically examines the intersection of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) and pro bono service in the United States, focusing on the growing practice of awarding MCLE credits for pro bono work. It argues that MCLE, widely justified as promoting lawyer competence, rests on a striking lack of empirical support and is structured in ways that undermine effective professional learning. A pro bono option for earning MCLE credit, introduced as an incentive to expand access to justice, has similarly failed to demonstrate measurable impacts on pro bono participation. Nonetheless, the pro bono option holds untapped potential because, if properly …

State Aid And The Green Transition: Where Theory Meets (Member States’) Practice, Magdalena Porzeżyńska

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

The European Green Deal has placed the green transition at the centre of the European Union’s economic, industrial and climate policy, with climate neutrality by 2050 as a binding objective. In this context, State aid has evolved from a narrowly construed exception to the prohibition laid down in Article 107(1) TFEU into a key policy instrument supporting the Union’s climate and industrial ambitions. This article examines how the EU State aid framework has been adapted to facilitate Member States’ support for the green transition and assesses the opportunities and constraints inherent in this framework. The analysis focuses on the main …

Reawakening Waⁿdat: Community Research & Reclamation, Darcy Allred

Theses and Dissertations

The Wyandot(te) have undergone language dormancy due to settler colonial impacts of warfare, refugee relocation, forced removals, and U.S. assimilation projects. One of the most pressing priorities among our people today is reawakening our ancestral language, Waⁿdat. The common follow-up question is: how? Through the conduit of Waⁿdat language reclamation, this project grapples with the above question in collaboration with the Wyandot(te) community, and in adherence to the tribal sovereignty of the Wyandotte Nation. The project engages with diasporic perspectives, community-based pedagogy design, and tribally specific research protocols and policies. The living collective knowledgebase with which I engage in this …

If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You): Billy Joel Lyrics In Legal And Medical Scholarship, Seuli Bose Brill, Christian H. Brill

Touro Law Review

Law and medicine are often considered to be among the least accessible professions, partly because of the heavy use of non colloquial jargon. This article examines more than 150 instances in which Billy Joel’s lyrics have been used to improve the accessibility of legal and medical scholarship. Legal and medical professionals have used the words of the “Piano Man” to discuss a variety of topics—everything from civil procedure to property rights and the COVID-19 pandemic to colorectal surgery. Nontraditional communications techniques of this type do not just contribute to the body of legal and medical scholarship; they also help professionals …

The Proportionality Trap: Why Death Tolls In War Need Not Add Up Equally, Thane Rosenbaum

Touro Law Review

Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside . . . human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for terrorists to take hostages and travel freely. Beyond Proportionality examines Israel’s battles against Hamas and Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its war time conduct was based on military necessity and fought justly. The …

Anatomy Of A Successful College Closure, Kevin P. Mcdonough

Touro Law Review

Alarming forecasts of mass closures of colleges and universities in the United States have been part of the higher education landscape for many years now. Unfortunately, such prognosticators have been proven largely correct as college closures have been occurring with increasing regularity. The closure process has been carried out with varying degrees of success. At one end of the spectrum lies the poorly planned, precipitous closure, which often garners the most attention because of its devastating impact on students and their families. This Article examines certain actions and strategies that the leadership of a college compelled to cease operations can …

Unprecedented Leadership For Unprecedented Times: The Ethical Imperative For Transformational Change In American Higher Education, Andrés Acebo

Touro Law Review

Many eras quietly yield to another while its institutions continue speaking the language of a world that no longer exists. Such moments expose the widening distance between inherited assumptions and emerging realities, between institutional memory and societal need, between what once served the public well and what the future now requires. American higher education has arrived at such a moment. For more than a decade, its challenges have been described through the language of crisis. The prevailing literature has documented enrollment decline, demographic transformation, fiscal instability, technological disruption, political polarization, declining public confidence, and institutional fragility with increasing sophistication. Yet …