Digital Commons Network^™

The Private Law Of Self-Help, João Marinotti

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Individuals regularly take steps to protect themselves, their property, and their broader legal interests. They carry pepper spray, have guard dogs, and install fences. Such measures are colloquially deemed methods of self-help. Yet, despite its ubiquity, self-help as a legal concept has been chronically understudied. Consequently, American private law is missing a doctrinally coherent and prescriptively useful framework for self-help. As a matter of legal theory, this conceptual void is problematic in and of itself; the doctrinal incoherence stemming from this analytical gap decreases the law’s stability and undermines its predictability.

But the concern is not merely theoretical. The magnitude …

‘News Reporting On Possible Origins Of The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Critical Review And Case Study’, Raya M. Fanuzzi

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This project is a critical analysis of news reports that discuss the potential origins of the 'COVID-19' pandemic for the purposes of identifying themes and trends in the actual reporting. Around 500 news reports published in the U.S. were analyzed and over 100 of them were selected for the critical review. Articles were found using 'Access News Archive' and Google search engine. Original methods for analyzing and reviewing articles were developed and used. A case study is included aside from the review which focuses specifically on trends in fact-check reporting during the pandemic.

The Myth Of The Guilty Suspect: Confession, Narrative, And Political Assent, Susan L. Tanner

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Humans Outside The Loop, Charlotte A. Tschider

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not all artificial. Despite the need for high-powered machines that can create complex algorithms and routinely improve them, humans are instrumental in every step used to create AI. From data selection, decisional design, training, testing, and tuning to managing AI’s development as it is used in the human world, humans exert agency and control over the choices and practices underlying AI products. AI is now ubiquitous: it is part of every sector of the economy and many people’s everyday lives. When AI development companies create unsafe products, however, we might be surprised to discover that very …

Fumble! How Professional Leagues Have Dropped The Ball In Gambling Regulation, Dylan Teixeira

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Asking Gpt For The Ordinary Meaning Of Statutory Terms, Christoph Engel, Richard H. Mcadams

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

We report on our test of the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT (GPT) as a tool for generating evidence of the ordinary meaning of statutory terms. We explain why the most useful evidence for interpretation involves a distribution of replies rather than only what GPT regards as the single “best” reply. That motivates our decision to use Chat 3.5 Turbo instead of Chat 4 and to run each prompt we use 100 times. Asking GPT whether the statutory term “vehicle” includes a list of candidate objects (e.g., bus, bicycle, skateboard) allows us to test it against a benchmark, the results …

The Fourteenth Amendment And The Vénus Noire, Farah Peterson

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Beyond Discrimination: Market Humiliation And Private Law, Hila Keren

University of Colorado Law Review

Market humiliation is a corrosive relational process to which the law repeatedly fails to respond due to the law’s heavy reliance on the discrimination paradigm. In this process, providers of market resources, from housing and work to goods and services, use their powers to reject or mistreat other market users due to their identities. They thus cause users severe harm and deprive them of dignified participation in the marketplace. The problem has recently reached a peak. The discussion in 303 Creative v. Elenis indicates that the Supreme Court might legitimize market humiliation by granting private providers broad free speech exemptions …

The Violence Of Free Speech And Press Metaphors, Erin C. Carroll

Washington and Lee Law Review

Today, our free speech marketplace is often overwhelming, confusing, and even dangerous. Threats, misdirection, and lies abound. Online firestorms lead to offline violence. This Article argues that the way we conceptualize free speech and the free press are partly to blame: our metaphors are hurting us.

The primary metaphor courts have used for a century to describe free speech—the marketplace of ideas—has been linked to violence since its inception. Originating in a case about espionage and revolution, in a dissent written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a thrice-injured Civil War veteran, the marketplace has been described as a space where competition …

Native Nation Resistance To The Machinations Of Settler Colonial Democracy, Nazune Menka

Faculty Articles

This Essay’s publication coincides with the centennial commemoration of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which offers an opportunity to revisit the historical and contemporary ways the concept of citizenship has been used to both increase Indigenous legibility and refute the project of empire. Through a review of the history of territorial incorporation, statehood, federal recognition, and citizenship, I examine the machinations of settler colonialism that seek to eliminate, contain, and assimilate Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples into the federal polity. Seeking to concretize this examination—and to respond to calls to broaden the scope of Indigeneity and the field of …

Green Colonialism: Sidelined While On The Front Lines, M. Alexander Pearl

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

The United Nations General Assembly recently unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing the “right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right.” in July, 2022. ... The resolution was heralded by U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Inger Andersen as a “victory for people and the planet,” and it was described as a catalyst for action by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd. ... Boyd went on to say that the resolution could encourage States “to enshrine the right to a healthy environment in . . . constitutions and regional treaties.”... This short …

The Copyright Work Of Authorship, Hemnes, Thomas

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

The “work of authorship” lies at the heart of the Copyright Act of 1976. It is what copyright protects. Central though the concept is, the Act never defines what a work of authorship might be. According to the Act, it can be perceived in tangible fixations, but is distinct from the fixations. The Act also provides examples: writings, drawings, computer programs, but never describes how these might be distinguished from their fixations. Unlike the Patent Act, where “metes and bounds” of a patentable invention are defined by a patent’s claims, the Copyright Act provides no guidance as to what the …

Unjust Enrichment In Law And Equity, Jennifer Nadler

All Papers

In Moses v Macferlan, Lord Mansfield used money had and received, a common law money count, to provide relief in a case where an action’s outcome failed to align with the actor’s intention. In the First Restatement of Restitution, Warren Seavey and Austin Scott gathered together all cases, quasi-contractual and equitable, under the single principle that ‘a person who has been unjustly enriched at the expense of another is required to make restitution to the other.’ These two influential acts of fusion between common law and equity have caused a great deal of confusion in the scholarship and jurisprudence on …

The Violence Of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal Of The Justice Capabilities Framework, Abhineet Maurya

Socio-Legal Review

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World …

Cultivating Legalism From Paper Proofs: Analysing Everyday Forms Of Claim Making By Van Gujjar Pastoralists In Uttarakhand, Mohammad Meer Hamja, Pranav Menon

Socio-Legal Review

Scholarship from South Asia has often highlighted how subaltern peoples partake in social movements as figures of resistance but rarely analyse their techniques of working the law in their favour to negotiate citizenship with the state. Such modes of articulating claims through affective gestures and vernacular legalese foster plural meanings to otherwise rigid legal categories and dogmatic bureaucratic interpretation. This paper draws upon socio-historical and ethnographic accounts of Van Gujjars to highlight how these pastoralists utilise myriad forms of paper proofs and documentary evidence to engage in claim making across the forests of Uttarakhand. Through an articulation of everyday tactics …

Artificial Intelligence Is Like A Perpetual Stew, Nathan Reitinger

American University Law Review

Artificial intelligence is inescapable. It is in our phones, fridges, and most of the businesses we engage with use it to “improve” their services. From deciding on what YouTube video to watch next to driving vehicles or firing weapons, artificial intelligence is a linchpin in our society. But what is artificial intelligence? And, more importantly, why does that matter? It matters because we are currently unprepared to deal with the paradigm-shifting legal issues brought about by artificial intelligence. And without this understanding, we are nearly certainly going to make mistakes. The bright side is that artificial intelligence is not complicated. …

Becoming The "Bill Of Rights": The First Ten Amendments From Founding To Reconstruction, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

The first ten amendments to the federal Constitution have no formal title. It is only by cultural tradition that Americans refer to these provisions as our national “Bill of Rights.” Until recently, most scholars assumed that this tradition could be traced back to the moment of ratification. Over the last decade or so, however, a number of scholars have challenged this assumption. These “Bill of Rights revisionists” claim that Americans did not commonly refer to the first ten amendments as “the bill of rights” until the twentieth century. Prior to that, most Americans either did not believe they had a …

The (Still) Unexplored Possibilities Of A Poetics Of Law, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this contribution to the symposium celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, I have accepted White’s invitation in the last chapter of his magisterial book to think about poems and judicial opinions as compatible acts of imagination and meaning making. White asks brilliant questions, and his book is full of them, each a nugget of insight and also a prod that asks the reader to think harder, think deeper, revisit her first thoughts, to perhaps change her mind, and above all, with guidance, to educate herself. In this chapter of the book, White is …

"Who Are The Landlords Here?" - Group Rights In The Age Of Populism: Jewish Ownership Of Symbolic And Geographic Space In Israel, Meital Pinto

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The world is witnessing the rise offar-right political parties. In Israel's recent national legislative election, Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit), a far-right, anti-Arab political party, reached an unprecedented achievement. The party won six seats in the Knesset and its leader, Itamar Ben Gvir was appointed as the Minister of National Security. "Who are the Landlords Here?" was the party's election slogan; it signals that Jews should not only own the state but also its public space. This normative political statement aligns with the dominant attitude towards group rights for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. The dominant attitude perceives group rights in …

Robot Inventors, Robot Patents, Robot Examiners, And Robot Patent Prosecutors, Henry H. Perrit Jr.

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sounds Marks, Deborah Gerhardt, Jon J. Lee

Faculty Articles

A lion roars just before a film rolls. A doughboy giggles. A giant green man laughs a hearty, “Ho, Ho, Ho.” These iconic sounds are all federally registered as trademarks. They identify specific brands and distinguish their products and services from the competition. Human brains treat sounds like these as categorization tools and cognitive shortcuts—ideal trademark symbols. But what about the sounds your favorite toys or electronic devices make? Or those made by a fictional character in the latest block- buster? This Article tackles these issues and others. We push back against the widely-held belief that all unconventional trade-marks—product designs, …

Author Biographies

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Borderline Ambiguity: Major Questions And Immigration Law, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Conceptual Schemes/Frameworks And Their Relation To Law: A New Argument For Separation Of Church And State, Vincent J. Samar

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

A central question that arises when interpreting the U.S. Constitution is which theory of interpretation is the best? In his recent book, "How to Interpret the Constitution," Cass Sunstein reviews various theories of constitutional interpretation currently in vogue and then offers what he believes would be the best approach going forward. In this Article, I want to take up a more basic question presupposed by the very idea of a theory of interpretation. That is, whether it is even possible to arrive at more than a provisional understanding of what would be the best interpretation in any given area of …

Monitoring France's Performance Under The Strategic Action Plan For Roma And Traveller Inclusion (2020-2025), Sarah Brody

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

“‘Go In Fear Of Abstractions’: The Precision, Persuasiveness, And Power Of Gender In Legal Writing”, Dr. Justin Kishbaugh

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Death Of The Evolving Standards Of Decency, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause is in jeopardy. The constitutionality of punishments is usually judged according to the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” And in evaluating these standards, the Court has traditionally looked to changing societal views on punishment. This is a living constitution approach to interpretation, and the Eighth Amendment is the only area of law in which the Court has consistently and explicitly ap-plied such an approach. But a living constitution approach is diametrically opposed to the current Court’s focus on originalism. This is the first originalist Court in history, and …

The Emerging Crime Of Persecution Based On Sexual Orientation, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article argues that persecution based on sexual orientation constitutes a crime against humanity under international law. Unlike other scholarship that has focused on the definition of crimes against humanity in the 1998 Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court—which does not explicitly enumerate “sexual orientation” as a protected classification—this Article looks to customary international law made up by the practices of states.

Diligent research has revealed that between 1998 and 2022, at least 107 states enacted laws or revised existing laws decriminalizing sexual orientation and/or categorizing sexual orientation as a protected classification from discrimination. This is in addition to …

Beyond Chatgpt: Transforming Government With Augmented Llms, Orly Mazur, Adam Thimmesch

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The release of ChatGPT demonstrated the remarkable capabilities and the existing limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the natural language chatbots that they power. One area that is ripe for innovation using this new technology, but that has often been bypassed in mainstream discussions, is the public sector.

This Article redirects attention towards this overlooked area, acknowledging the limitations of LLMs, while specifically exploring their potential to transform government operations. The Article discusses the various technological advancements that allow for the development of tools far more refined than the general-use chatbots commonly available to the public. The Article then …

Diverse Originalism, History & Tradition, Christina Mulligan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.