Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond Hipaa: The Ftc’S Expanding Role In Digital Health Privacy Enforcement, Sandhya Srinivasa

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Consumer digital health platforms have become an increasingly prominent feature of modern health care, collecting and storing sensitive health information directly from users. Yet most of these applications operate outside the scope of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), creating a significant regulatory gap in the protection of personal health data. This case note examines how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped into that gap by leveraging Section 5 of the FTC Act and the Health Breach Notification Rule (HBNR) to police privacy and data security practices among non-HIPAA-covered digital health platforms. Focusing on three landmark enforcement …

But Who Are The Victims? Reassessing The 568 Higher Education Cartel, James V. Koch

Economics Faculty Publications

Thirty prestigious independent American institutions of higher education were at some time members of the 568 higher education group (often labeled a cartel). Seventeen of them were sued by the U.S. Government and representative students who alleged that their meetings and deliberations resulted in collusion that caused students to pay higher prices. Twelve of the seventeen institutions subsequently settled their cases and by 2024 collectively had paid $284 million to do so. However, an inspection of these institutions' pricing reveals that the median 568 Group institution lowered its average real net annual cost to its undergraduate students by 19.07% between …

Second Looks For Sentencing Equality, Joshua D. Weiss

SMU Law Review

This Article challenges a persistent assumption about the relationship between so-called “second look” laws and sentencing disparities. Courts, the United States Sentencing Commission, and scholars tend to assume that increasing judicial discretion to reduce previously imposed sentences on an individualized basis results in increased sentencing disparities. But this assumption is based on a limited focus on disparities caused by judges and fails to account for disparities caused by other institutional actors, especially prosecutors.

This Article examines the relationship between disparities and second-look laws by focusing on one such law: the federal reduction in sentence (RIS) statute, commonly referred to as …

Front Matter

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

When Planes Fall And People Die: An International And Domestic Overview Of Disaster In The Sky, Clayton Rainey

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Commercial aviation disasters expose catastrophic breakdowns in engineering, regulatory oversight, corporate governance, and human systems. From the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies involving Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 to the recent domestic crash of American Airlines Flight 5342, modern aviation disasters have become defining legal events that test the boundaries of product liability, federal preemption, sovereign immunity, and transnational treaty law. This Article examines how aviation mass-casualty events evolve into complex litigation involving aircraft manufacturers, airlines, regulatory agencies, and governmental entities, and how those legal frameworks differ in international versus domestic contexts.

Beyond legal doctrine, this Article …

Psychometric Properties Of The Digital Psychological Competence Scale For University Students In The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Mona Saad Falih Alamri

University of Tabuk Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences

Higher education has undergone a rapid digital transformation, requiring students to navigate technology-rich learning environments that demand integrated cognitive and psychological competencies. This study aimed to develop and validate a Psychodigital Competence Scale for university students in the western region of Saudi Arabia, using a sample of 523 students. The initial version included 21 items, which were revised through expert judgment (agreement >= 80%) to produce a final 16-item, four-factor scale. Construct validity was assessed using a pilot sample, and Pearson correlations demonstrated statistically significant item-scale relationships at the 0.05 and 0.01 levels. Reliability indicators showed significant split-half reliability (p < 0.01) and a high Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.908). Exploratory factor analysis supported data suitability (KMO = 0.85, Bartlett's test p < 0.01, determinant = 0.011), and confirmatory factor analysis validated the four-factor model. These findings confirm strong psychometric properties, establishing the scale as a reliable tool for psychological and educational research.

Regulating Drone Delivery Networks, Ramsay Eyre

Journal of Law and Mobility

For over a decade, drone delivery has been heralded as the next frontier of commercial transportation and logistics. However, drone delivery companies have been unable to scale their operations. Part of the problem, from the perspective of the companies invested in drone delivery, were federal regulations that in effect prohibited drones from making deliveries. In 2025, following years of effort by industry and allies in Congress to create new rules governing drones, the second Trump Administration proposed a new set of drone regulations pursuant to the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. These rules are intended to significantly expand the number …

Pharmaceutical-Telehealth Confederacies, Michelle Onder, Michael S. Sinha

Emory Business Law Review

Access to prescription pharmaceuticals has historically been controlled by a physician’s pen. As a result, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on advertising and promotion to mitigate this barrier: first and primarily, to physicians and other prescribers, and more recently, to the general public through direct-to-consumer advertising. The success of these promotional efforts can be seen in the greater prescribing of costly brand-name medicines, even in settings where lower-priced, comparably efficacious generic alternatives exist. Brand-name prescriptions now make up only 10% of all prescriptions written yet account for 88% of drug spending. Despite these substantial returns on investment, companies continue …

Fallen Unicorns, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Emory Business Law Review

Tech unicorns, from healthcare, teledentistry, space, ecommerce, trucking logistics, pre-owned cars, wearables, design, image search, to home-building sectors, receive effusive praises and secure enviable venture capital investments. Very soon after garnering notoriety, these unicorns die. This Article theorizes why unicorns suddenly collapse shortly after they have achieved the mythical status of being the rare tech startups with valuations of one billion dollars or more. With an in-depth case study of fallen unicorns, the Article identifies and examines the reasons for their tragic deaths, offering a critique of the fear of missing out (FOMO), overfunding, and irrational exuberance investors heaped on …

The Hard Law-Soft Law Nexus: Autonomous Vehicles As A Case Study, Gary Marchant, Chase Martins, Vrinda Gupta

Journal of Law and Mobility

The technology governance debate often focuses on the dichotomy of hard law versus soft law as competing models. Both hard law and soft law have their strengths and weaknesses. But framing soft law versus hard law as a dichotomous choice is often unrealistic—every technology will be governed by a mix of hard law and soft law. So, the more realistic questions are where hard law works best and where soft law succeeds, and how these two types of governance interact and integrate. After reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of hard law and soft law, this Article identifies six different hybrid …

Hardwiring Hercules?, Courtney M. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

It is time to reorient the debate over the right to a human decision. Within that debate, the strongest arguments in favor of human decisionmakers are Arguments from Explanation: AI technology is increasingly and necessarily opaque, and so machines should not replace human decisionmakers because machines cannot give the required explanations. Or so the humanist argument goes. Meanwhile, machinists argue that most humanist principles have been deflated by the Better Decision Argument, which reframes such principles as grounding not a right to a human decision, but merely to a “better” decision— whether by human or machine.

This Article turns that …

A New Frontier For An International Right With No Frontiers: Freedom Of Expression & Generative Ai Outputs, Evelyn Aswad

Faculty Articles

As people debate whether the First Amendment protects generative AI outputs, we should also reflect on what the global freedom of expression standard has to say on the matter. This standard will affect discussions around national and regional regulatory approaches to generative AI throughout the world. In addition, global corporate responsibility standards call on companies to respect international human rights in their operations, which may also impact how businesses that provide generative AI services approach their activities.

I argue that the global free expression standard protects the rights of individuals to seek and receive information of any kind, including gen …

People's Upr Written Record, Sarah Dávila A., Lauren E. Bartlett

Faculty White Papers

No abstract provided.

Lockstepping Structure, Darrell A.H. Miller

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The new judicial federalism is now entering its early middle age. As it has matured—moving from rights to structure—it has become more complicated in its application. For if one were to take arguments about state experimentation and interpretive flexibility to their logical conclusion, there is no reason state legislative, executive, and judicial powers should stay in lanes demarcated by federal constitutional law. Easily amended state constitutions and elected judges support theories of judicial function more akin to statewide legislative policymakers than passive judicial magistrates. Positive rights in state constitutions would seem to demand recalibration of the rules of standing and …

Transforming Police Officers To Community Peace Officers: A Scholarly Personal Narrative Addressing The Mental And Moral Conflicts In Community Engagement & Law Enforcement, London S. R. Mcbride

Doctor of Education

This dissertation explores the transformation of police officers into community peace officers by examining the mental and moral conflicts inherent in community engagement and law enforcement. Using scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as my methodology, the study integrates my lived experience as a Black law enforcement officer with broader discussions on race, power, leadership, and institutional culture. Grounded in critical race theory, social justice leadership, and trauma theory, the research investigates how systemic inequities, organizational resistance, and historical trauma influence policing practices and officer identity. The literature review highlights the legacy of racialized policing, the psychological toll of law enforcement work, …

The Structural Law Of Data, Bridget A. Fahey, Raul Castro Fernandez

University of Chicago Law Review

The central concern of structural constitutional law is the organization of governmental power, but power comes in many forms. This Article is about how the law of structure regulates decision-making about, and popular control over, an increasingly potent form of power: the power government obtains from data. The government has always relied on information to meet its objectives, but the digitization of information over the last half century has yielded a distinctive form of governmental power—one that is liquid, transferable, minable, dynamic, and vital to virtually all governmental activity today.

But despite the significant literature on private-sector “data governance,” public …

Settlements Of Adhesion, Nicole Summers

University of Chicago Law Review

Eviction cases make up over a quarter of all cases filed in the federal and state civil courts and have enormous consequences for tenants, who are nearly always unrepresented by counsel. These cases overwhelmingly settle, yet settlement scholars have entirely overlooked eviction both empirically and theoretically. One of the core questions animating settlement scholarship—how do the parties negotiate settlement?— has never been asked or answered in the eviction context. This Article does so.

The Article presents results from the first empirical study of eviction settlement negotiations. The study involved rigorous analysis of an original dataset of over one thousand hand-coded …

The Law And Economics Of Guilt And Shame, Ian Ayres, Joseph Bankman, Daniel Hemel

University of Chicago Law Review

The negative moral emotions of guilt and shame impose real social costs but also create opportunities for policymakers to engender compliance with legal rules in a cost-effective manner. We present a unified model of guilt and shame that demonstrates how legal policymakers can harness negative moral emotions to increase social welfare. The prospect of guilt and shame can deter individuals from violating moral norms and legal rules, thereby substituting for the expense of state enforcement. But when legal rules and law enforcement fail to induce total compliance, guilt and shame experienced by noncompliers can increase the law’s social costs. We …

Incarceration As Sexualized Violence, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual violence—rape, sexual assault, strip and body cavity searches, surveillance, and reproductive abuse—is a regular occurrence in women’s prisons. Some of that violence is clearly illegal; some occupies a legally gray middle ground; and some is considered essential to the operation of the prison system. All of it, however, could violate the law if the victims were not incarcerated. Sexual violence is so pervasive within women’s prisons that incarceration can only be understood as a form of sexualized violence. Given the certainty that people incarcerated in women’s prisons will experience some form of sexual abuse, continued incarceration can only be …

The Factorial Structure Of The Positive Thinking Scale Among Graduate Students (A Case Study Of Tabuk University), Mohammed Abdullah Asiri, Hissah Suliman Albalawi

University of Tabuk Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences

The aim of the research was to identify the factorial structure of the Positive Thinking Scale among graduate students, using confirmatory factor analysis, the level of positive thinking among graduate students, and the differences in the dimensions of positive thinking among graduate students, according to two variables: (gender and specialization). To achieve the research objectives, a descriptive analytical approach was used, and a scale was designed consisting of 36 items distributed across five dimensions (optimism and positive expectation, self-discipline and control of higher-level mental processes, mindfulness, critical thinking, and unconditional self-acceptance). The scale was applied to a stratified random sample …

Obituary For The Birth Certificate, Malinda L. Seymore

Faculty Scholarship

Have birth certificates outlived their usefulness? Birth certificates establish an individual’s name, identity, age, race, sex and gender, parental authority, and citizenship. In addition, the information collected at the time of birth and reflected on a long-form birth certificate provides data for public health policy, population statistics, internal migration, government planning, and resource allocation. Birth certificates are also the all-access pass to American life, necessary for many functions of modern life: registering a child in school, signing a child up for soccer, getting a driver’s license and passport, enlisting in the military, and applying for government benefits. All of this, …

Looking Forward, Reflecting Back: The Promise Of Dispute Resolution To Reform The Criminal Legal System, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal legal system in the United States is plagued by serious and systemic problems. There have been countless efforts at reform over the last many decades that have included changes in what is a crime, how crimes are punished, how prosecutors do their job, and changes in policing. Yet, despite these efforts, problems such as mass incarceration remain deeply embedded. It is easy to be swept up in pessimism when discussing the criminal legal system. Change is hard, at best incremental, and we seem to be in the beginning of an era of backlash against recent reforms. This is …

Comparison Of Groundwater Ownership Regimes In Ten Jurisdictions Across Five Continents, Gabriel Eckstein, Theo Buchler, Caleb Cook, Heping Dang, Robyn Stein, Stefano Burchi, Gabriela Cuadrado Quesada, Juan Pablo Galeano, Eric Garner, Amy Hardberger, Imad Antoine Ibrahim, Oudi Kgomongwe

Faculty Scholarship

The regulation of groundwater remains underdeveloped globally and often lags behind the domestic governance of surface water. As a result, groundwater is often subject to unfettered extraction, uses, and contamination. A clear understanding of ownership is central to the success of domestic regulations. However, the types of ownership regime in place in nations around the world are poorly documented in the academic literature. This study addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of domestic groundwater ownership regimes across ten jurisdictions in nine countries spanning five continents. It identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership: private ownership, public ownership, and non-ownership …

Symmetry, Presumptions, And The Judges Design, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

An instrumental variables approach called ‘the judges design’ used frequently in social sciences relies on an assumption called ‘average monotonicity’. This assumption pertains to how different judges’ (or other classifiers’) decision making processes relate to each other. Violations of it are hard to detect, which raises the importance of it being supported by a plausible theory. Decisions of judges who solve Bayesian decision problems violate average monotonicity as long as the signals they process are symmetric and they do not possess strong presumptions. This result is extended to cases where judge presumptions are symmetrically distributed and may include strong presumptions. …

Information Law Pluralism, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Information-intensive activities are reshaping political, social, and economic institutions. As they respond to these shifts, legislators and regulators are embracing information as a regulatory device for tech. Far from limiting themselves to public disclosure, consumer notice, and other traditional mechanisms of fostering transparency and information flows, however, legislators are using other, more nuanced tools to incentivize regulated entities to obtain, generate, and share information.

This Article maps the landscape of the emerging information-based regimes for regulating tech and assesses their conceptual and practical implications. It canvasses an extensive set of recently enacted laws regulating the information economy and shows that, …

Equal Justice & Generative Ai, Milan R. Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has long suffered from unequal access to justice, with countless low-and middle-income Americans forced to navigate the legal system alone. Recently, prominent judges, lawyers, and scholars have seized on generative AI as a potential corrective. These techno-optimists maintain that ChatGPT and other large language models can demystify the law and address unmet legal needs. Chief Justice John Roberts has proclaimed that AI-based tools "have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system."

Although AI will be an increasingly important source of legal assistance for underserved populations, the …

Exploit Machina, Andrea Matwyshyn

Faculty Scholarship

Over half a century ago, Hannah Arendt cautioned us to “think what we are doing” when we build new technologies. Engaging with her counsel and a set of historical case studies, this Article frames what it calls exploit machina problems. Exploit machina refers to situations where broken technologies and broken governance combine to irreparably harm the public. In other words, exploit machina involves organizational choices to knowingly leverage technology as part of legally problematic conduct, including various forms of fraud. In the language of data science, exploit machina situations implicate strategic decisions in building and managing artificial intelligence (AI); they …

Goods, Practices, Excellence, And The Law: Steps To An Internal Theory Of Value, Rowan Gray

CMC Senior Theses

Practices are the coherent and complex social activities we spend much of our lives engaging in. This category encompasses everything from figure skating to wine-tasting to friend relationships. We gain immense value from participating in practices, and philosophers have articulated a number of accounts for where the value emerges from and how we can best experience it. Many of these theories are ‘externalist’, because they posit that value is incidental to practices and emerges from outside of them.

In contrast, this thesis will argue that the value in practices is internal to each practice. The value comes from each practice’s …

Balancing The Scales Of Justice: The Unconstitutionality Of Marital Rape In India, Pallavi Raju

CMC Senior Theses

Marital rape remains an unpunished crime in India, despite decades of dispute and litigation. This thesis explores the question of why the state continues to retain the marital rape exception within the Indian criminal code, even though it commits to combat gender based violence in other areas of justice. The research begins with a broader understanding of privatization of women’s rights in the international sphere and culturally sanctioned violence to protect the institution of marriage. With a focus on the legal justifications and language of Indian court cases, this thesis determines that judges adjudicate on gender justice inconsistently. Attempting to …