Digital Commons Network^™

Ai Inventorship: Recognizing The True Inventors Requires Change, Nicholas Scambia

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The Analytical Engine was conceived almost two hundred years ago—a general-purpose programmable computing engine which had essential features resembling a modern-day computer. While truly a marvel for its time, the Analytical Engine lacked the ability to perform functions on its own, as it was only able to do tasks for which it was programmed.

Today, artificial intelligence (“AI”) has become increasingly popular and powerful and is projected to keep growing. AI demonstrated its autonomous strength to the whole world on national TV when IBM’s Watson competed on Jeopardy!, beating the game show’s legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Since …

Auto Dissertation I, Vol. 1: Breaths Along The Potomac: An Epistolary Art Gallery, Dominic Shodekeh Talifero

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Normative Contestation In The International Order: Is China Remaking Global Governance?, Kal Raustiala

International Law Studies

This essay explores China’s approach to global order. China’s remarkable rise has coincided with increasing engagement with the institutions of global governance. These institutions—in particular the United Nations—make up the core of what U.S. leaders have often referred to as the liberal world order or the rules-based order. Many U.S. officials see China as a deep threat intent on challenging, and perhaps even seeking to replace, this rules-based order. This essay, however, makes the case that China’s near-term goals for global governance appear more modest. Much of China’s behavior within institutions such as the UN suggests that what it seeks …

Advantages And Disadvantages—A Comparison Of The Present Maine Law And The U3c, John A. Spanogle Jr.

Maine Law Review

The Uniform Consumer Credit Code [U3C] is a statute which will be proposed to the Maine Legislature for enactment in the near future. Like its sister code, the Uniform Commercial Code [UCC], the U3C was drafted and is being supported by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Their hope is that the widespread acceptance of the UCC will lead to similar acceptance of the U3C. An understanding of the U3C requires an understanding of its drafting history and the motivations of the various pressure groups responsible for its drafting. The drafting history begins with the UCC, which …

Artificial Intelligence For Lawyers And Law Students: Crutch, Craft, Or Catalyst?, David S. Kemp

Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Quantitative Ai Risk Assessments: Opportunities And Challenges, David Piorkowski, Michael Hind, John Richards

Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Trauma, And Professional Well-Being: How The Legal Community Takes Back Its Mental Health, Brenda D. Gibson

Arkansas Law Review

Accompanying a notable shift in the legal academy to being more attentive to our students’ mental health, there must be an equal (or even greater) shift to focusing on trauma, mental health, and well-being in the broader profession. Significantly, trauma and its effects are compounded when combined with the challenges faced by underrepresented populations within the profession. To date, these challenges have been greeted by an ad hoc, piecemeal reaction to stress and trauma,10 which only inhibits wellness in the profession. Part I explores the current literature in both the humanities and the legal profession, beginning with a brief discussion …

The New And Improved Vawa: A Look Into State Law And Local Nuisance Ordinances After The 2022 Reauthorization, Alexis Stevens, J.D.

Lincoln Memorial University Law Review Archive

The Violence Against Women Act has protected victims of domestic violence, dating violence, stalking and sexual harassment for over 30 years now. The Act has been reauthorized four times, providing stronger protection for victims each time. The most recent reauthorization in 2022 includes protection for domestic violence victims against chronic nuisance ordinances. These ordinances allow municipalities to punish landlords and tenants if a tenant calls the police too many times to the property, including times in which a domestic violence victim, seeking help, calls the police on their perpetrator. Many states have enacted statutes that align with the 2022 Reauthorization …

No Lawyer, No Jail: A Critical Case Study Of Pragmatism And The Flaws Of “Purposeful” Decision Making In Argersinger V. Hamlin, Alisa Smith, Sarah K. Stice

Seattle University Law Review

By releasing conference notes and internal communications, Supreme Court Justices provide insight into the otherwise private decisionmaking process, shedding light on how case outcomes and legal reasoning are framed and negotiated. The watershed case of Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972) extended the constitutional right to counsel to some, but not all, misdemeanor defendants. The case was argued twice, and the Court relied on empirical and authoritative sources to answer complex and practical questions about requiring counsel. This case study employs critical discourse analysis to uncover what influenced the Justices’ decisions and how they framed, shaped, and constructed social realities to foreground …

Bostock And The Limits Of Textualism: A Doctrinal Structuralist Approach, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Court held that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This result, the majority claimed, was required by the interpretive theory called textualism. But textualist justices in the dissent vehemently disagreed. This split, and the controversy that has followed it, has had two consequences. First, it added fuel to the ongoing debate about the value of textualism. Second, it opened the door for lower courts to decline to apply Bostock to similar antidiscrimination laws, such as Title IX in education or the Equal Protection Clause (such as the Skrmetti case, …

Layered Alignment, Spencer Williams

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Most artificial intelligence (ai) researchers now believe that ai represents an existential threat to humanity. The most dangerous threat posed by ai is an issue known as the alignment problem: the risk that a sufficiently intelligent and capable ai system could become misaligned with the goals and values of its human creators and instead pursue its own objectives to the detriment of humanity, including the possibility of extinction. The tension at the heart of the alignment problem is familiar to scholars of agency, contracts, and corporate law, though it goes by a different name: the principal-agent problem. In the traditional …

Generative Ai's Illusory Case For Fair Use, Jacqueline C. Charlesworth

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Pointing to Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. and other leading technology-driven fair use precedents, artificial intelligence (AI) companies and those who advocate for their interests claim that mass unauthorized reproduction of books, music, photographs, visual art, news articles, and other copyrighted works to train generative AI systems is a fair use of those works. Though acknowledging that works are copied without permission for the training process, the proponents of fair use maintain that an AI machine learns only uncopyrightable information about the works during that process. Once trained, …

Examining The Relationship Between Legal Frameworks, And Cultural Norms In Domestic Violence Cases In The United States, Ifedolapo Awonuga

2025 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Domestic violence is a pervasive and systemic issue that affects millions of people worldwide and has serious repercussions for families, individuals, and society at large. The research investigates how legal frameworks, societal conventions, and cultural values interact to impact the prevalence and resolution of domestic violence in contemporary society. The study looks at the extent institutional biases, social stigma, and deeply ingrained legal policies hinder efficient victim support, prevention, and intervention. The study combines quantitative analysis of case data, public opinion, and survey results with qualitative analysis of legal frameworks and peer-reviewed literature using a mixed-methods design. The two-pronged approach …

Recognizing Injustice, Reclaiming Voices: Establishing A Missing Persons Database For Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Children In Nebraska, Bayly W. Watson

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Indigenous people have been the victims of harsh persecution since the time of colonization; this has negatively impacted Native communities and has contributed significantly to the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children (MMIWC) across the United States and Canada. Under Legislative Bill 154, Richards et al. (2021) conducted an initial study to identify missing Native cases in Nebraska and in 2023, the Attorney General appointed a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) Liaison to help combat the number of missing Indigenous in the state. This thesis contributes to previous research by analyzing 20,049 reports from three …

Reimagining The Leader Behind The Badge: A Qualitative Study Examining Perceptions Of Law Enforcement Leadership From The Perspective Of Law Enforcement Officers, Willie Ng

Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the influence of leadership practices within law enforcement on the professional journey, job performance, and personal well-being of a career officer with over 30 years in the field. Set against a backdrop of evolving societal expectations and public scrutiny, the research investigates how entrenched leadership practices impact both individual experiences and the broader organizational culture within law enforcement. Key themes include outdated hierarchical practices, declining public trust, and resistance to innovation. These themes are examined using the new professionalism model, which emphasizes transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and innovation as essential leadership principles in modern policing (Bass & Avolio, …

Foreword: The ‘Why’ & How’ Of Artificial Intelligence In Legal Scholarship, Spencer Nayar, Michael I. Cooper

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

In the course of publishing the 2024–25 Volume of the Texas A&M Journal of Property Law, we, the Editorial Board, were presented with the opportunity to publish a collection of articles drafted explicitly with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). After some consideration, we made the decision to do so. The following is our endeavor to share with our peers and colleagues—who may soon find themselves in similar situations—what we have learned in this process and, separately, contribute some forward-looking standards that can be implemented in the arena of legal scholarship for the transparent signaling and taxonomizing of AI-assisted works.

Customs, Courts, And Conflict: Strengthening The Legal System In South Sudan, Anusha Sheila Aubeelack

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the dual legal system in South Sudan and how it can be strengthened as the country transitions to a democracy. It gives a brief historical account of the evolution of the South Sudanese legal system and the current challenges posed by overlapping normative frameworks. It argues that while customary law remains deeply embedded in South Sudanese society, its co-existence with statutory law has created jurisdictional ambiguities, inconsistencies in the delivery of justice and public mistrust in state institutions. Reforms such as the drafting of the Permanent Constitution of South Sudan to harmonize both legal traditions, the formal …

Understanding The Mechanisms Of Interpretive Change, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pragmatics And Textualism, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

In theoretical linguistics the word “pragmatics” refers to the roles of context and communicative intentions in the production of meaning. Those roles include contextual disambiguation and the communication of implicit content via “pragmatic enrichment.” Textualism is sometimes characterized as the view that the meaning of statutory texts should not take context into account, but that characterization is misleading. Not only do self-identified textualists explicitly maintain that context should be considered when interpreting statutes—all good textualists must do so. Absent consideration of context, the meaning of statutory texts would be pervasively ambiguous, sparse, and incomplete. Good textualism requires pragmatics.

“Pragmatics and …

Administrative Law And The Pandemic, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

American administrative law’s relationship to change is, as they say, compli­cated. On the one hand, continual evolution has been an endemic feature of American administrative law. Doctrines such as Chevron deference to agency statutory interpretations were born, grew, and declined in just the period from the 1980s to today. On the other, the United States (US) Supreme Court regularly rejects such common law development in administrative law as illegitimate and insists that federal judges must adhere to the original terms of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and other statutes, unless the Constitution requires otherwise. And to this day scholars …

The Founders’ Common Law And Bruen’S Text, History, And Tradition Test: From History ‘Lite’ To History Right, Saul Cornell

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gun Regulation After Loper Bright: The Statutory Interpretation/Policymaking Continuum, William D. Araiza

Buffalo Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, rejecting “Chevron deference” to administrative agency interpretations of their organic statutes, has caused great uncertainty about the fate of federal regulation. This Essay considers that question in the context of federal gun regulation. Using examples of regulatory actions taken by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, it illustrates the wide range of functions reflected in agency actions—in particular, how those actions can span the spectrum from pure statutory interpretation to pure policymaking, with hybrid way stations between those two extremes.

The variety of functions agencies perform suggests …

Hunting For Employees, Employers, Independent Contractors, Dependent Contractors And Other Figments Of The Legal Imagination, Brian Langille, Ben Mayer-Goodman

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper exposes the falsity of a fundamental assumption of labour law—namely that there is such a thing as an “employee” or “employer” or “independent contractor” and that such legal entities can be “found” through an examination of the facts. As we shall demonstrate, once we have discarded the flawed assumption that “employees” or “employers” (or “independent” or “dependent contractors,” or “worker,” or any other legal creature) exist in the real world, we see that labour law’s purpose as it is currently widely understood is also fundamentally flawed. It is from this standpoint that a new conceptual framework for—and normative …

Juggling Tires, Teapots, Burning Torches, And Pennies: The Challenge Of Defining The “Communities Of Interest” Criterion In Municipal Redistricting, Steve Burke

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The World Cup As A Racial Rebuilt Project, Khaled A. Beydoun

Utah Law Review

Scholars, particularly Critical Race Theorists, have written trenchantly about the law’s role in racial formation. Yet, while instrumental in this process, the law does not stand alone as a conduit of making race. Particularly for misrepresented groups, like Arabs, who struggle to find existential self-determination between imperial identity impositions, ethnic cleansing, and clashing racial ascriptions, the law fails to create racial categories that reflect their lived realities.

Beyond the asymmetrical landscape of legal ordering, sport stands as a powerful site of racial formation. Sport is where racialization can unfold indigenously, rebelliously, and “from the bottom.” Particularly soccer, a game of …

Bostock And The Limits Of Textualism: A Doctrinal Structuralist Approach, Martin Katz

William & Mary Law Review

In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This result, the majority claimed, was required by the interpretive theory called textualism. But textualist Justices in the dissent vehemently disagreed. This split, and the controversy that has followed it, has had two consequences. First, it added fuel to the ongoing debate about the value of textualism. Second, it opened the door for lower courts to decline to apply Bostock to similar antidiscrimination laws, such as Title IX in education or the Equal Protection Clause.

This Article argues …

Text, Context, Or Both?: Considering When And How To Use Statutory History In The New Textualist Framework, Devon Brostoff

Fordham Law Review

Statutory history represents the evolution of a statute through enacted amendments. Although textualists have widely rejected traditional forms of legislative history, statutory history has not received the same fate. Instead, textualists have accepted the use of statutory history as a resource separate from—and superior to—legislative history. Thus, this Note examines how courts are using statutory history, focusing primarily on the author’s analysis of a set of courts of appeals cases that rely on statutory history. Using these cases, this Note explores whether statutory history is best understood as text or context within the interpretation process. Further, this Note challenges the …

Symbiotic International Law: Combatting Uyghur Forced Labor, Preston Jordan Lim

Utah Law Review

Since 2017, the Chinese government has launched a campaign of repression against the Muslim Turkic minorities of Xinjiang, a region located in China’s Northwest. While most scholars have focused on the mass internment of Uyghurs and other minorities, this Article highlights an under-discussed aspect of China’s campaign: the construction of a sophisticated forced labor system. Minority forced labor supplies key sectors of the global economy—from the automotive to the energy sectors—and allows Chinese companies to outcompete foreign firms. The unprecedented scope and sophistication of what I term the “modern Xinjiang forced labor system” imperils the very future of the international …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Antiracist Expert Evidence, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Asees Bhasin, Spencer Piston

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2020, when mass protests against racism swept across the United States, scholars, lawyers, and the general public have become increasingly aware that racism permeates society and the criminal legal system, from overt racial animus to the nuanced effects of structural racism. Demonstrating the influence of racism is therefore vital to the practice of criminal defense, yet many attorneys do not know how to prove racism in court. We surveyed over seven hundred criminal-defense attorneys across the United States, and nearly half had never heard of expert witnesses testifying or submitting written reports on racism—what we call “antiracist expert evidence.” …