Digital Commons Network^™

Inadequate Choice In School Choice: An Analysis Of South Carolina's House Bill 3843 And The Implications For Public School Students And Rural Schools, J. Meadows Welch

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

"I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds": Applying Strict Liability To Artificial Intelligence As An Abnormally Dangerous Activity, Renee Henson

Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools have produced a myriad of injuries, up to and including death. This burgeoning technology has caused scholars to ask questions, such as, How do we create a legal framework for AI? Because AI creators have acknowledged that even they do not know the capacities of their technology for good or bad outcomes, this Article argues that an existing framework, strict liability, is an appropriate fit for harms arising from this new technology because a party need not prove negligence to prevail. Strict liability was uniquely developed to handle those activities that are “abnormally dangerous.” An abnormally …

The Right To Sit In West Virginia, Leif Olson

West Virginia Law Review

In 1901, West Virginia guaranteed that women working outside the home would have a place to sit down at their workplace. In 2023, despite that law, no worker in West Virginia is functionally required to be given a chair. This Note explores the use of seating laws to prevent the modern and historic workplace issue of prolonged standing, or when an employee is required to stand in one place for too long at one time. Prolonged standing in the workplace is an ergonomics problem, a medical concern, and a labor issue. The pain, discomfort, and long-term chronic disease caused by …

When Public Meets Private: Private School Enrollment And Segregation In Virginia, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ash Taylor-Beierl, Erica Frankenberg, April Hewko, Andrene Castro

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Recognizing Virginia’s central role in the expansion of segregated southern private schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, we review law and policy related to private school segregation. We also conduct an empirical analysis of Virginia private school enrollment and segregation since the turn of the twenty-first century, finding uneven enrollment even as the number of private schools has grown. Segregation in the sector is deepening. As public funding for private schools rises, we make the case that the increasingly blurred lines between public and private education in Virginia are rooted in adaptive discrimination.

Skirting The Fourth Amendment: How Law Enforcement Agencies Abuse Technology And Constitutional Exceptions To Surveille The Public, Matthew Lloyd

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Existing Fourth Amendment law does not protect against law enforcement use of data gathered through the internet either by private companies who actively search their customer’s data and submit evidence of misconduct to law enforcement or from private companies who acquire the data on behalf of law enforcement. In an effort to pursue criminals, courts have permitted Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to develop in a manner that permits sweeping invasions of privacy without any probable cause through the private search doctrine or without any procedural protections through the third-party doctrine. It will require substantial judicial or legislative action to return the …

Children Seen But Not Heard, Stacey B. Steinberg

UF Law Faculty Publications

Children are expected to abide by the will of their parents. In the last 200 years, American jurisprudence has given parents the ability to control their children’s upbringing with few exceptions. The principle governing this norm is that parents know best and will use their better knowledge to protect their children’s welfare.

The COVID-19 pandemic, public school rules, and children’s privacy laws offer modern examples of regulations in which the interests of parents and children may not align. Minors may want access to vaccines, despite a parent’s refusal to sign a consent form. Minors may want to talk to their …

Materiality In The Long Now: Navigating The Intersection Of Decision-Making, Time, And Strategy, Daniel M. Labovitz, Alexander Kontoleon

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Existing formulations of materiality in the federal securities laws contain an inherent limitation because they don’t adequately account for how risks and opportunities change over time. This can mislead investors looking to understand how well a company is poised to avoid long-dated risks and take advantage of evolving opportunities because those risks and opportunities don’t neatly fit into the rubric of “likelihood of occurrence times magnitude of harm equals materiality.” This is because the likelihood of any long-dated risk occurring within a short reporting time frame will always approach zero, which means the traditional model of materiality will always classify …

Toward An Ethical Human-Computer Division Of Labor In Law Practice, Abdi Aidid

Fordham Law Review

In this Essay, I explain that responsible and ethical use of AI in law practice requires reconceptualizing the lawyer’s professional relationship to technology. The current commercial-industrial relationship is based on a stylized model of technology as mechanical application, not calibrated to emergent AI-enabled technologies. Put differently, lawyers cannot interact with AI-enabled technologies the way that they traditionally interact with, say, word processors. For AI-enabled technologies, I explain that a “division of labor” framework is more fruitful; like horizontal professional relationships between peers or vertical ones in professional hierarchies, lawyers ought to interact with sophisticated technologies through arrangements that optimize for …

Generating Derivatives: Ai And Copyright’S Most Troublesome Right, Oren Bracha

North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Risky Business: A Review Essay On The Law & Economics Of Selection In Insurance Markets, Peter Siegelman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Abolition Economics, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, René Reyes

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Over the past several decades, Law & Economics has established itself as one of the most well-known branches of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. The tools of L&E have been applied to a wide range of legal issues and have even been brought to bear on Critical Race Theory in an attempt to address some of CRT’s perceived shortcomings. This Article seeks to reverse this dynamic of influence by applying CRT and related critical perspectives to the field of economics. We call our approach Abolition Economics. By embracing the abolitionist ethos of “dismantle, change, and build,” we seek to break strict …

Chatgpt, Large Language Models, And Law, Harry Surden

Fordham Law Review

This Essay explores Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT/GPT-4, detailing the advances and challenges in applying AI to law. It first explains how these AI technologies work at an understandable level. It then examines the significant evolution of LLMs since 2022 and their improved capabilities in understanding and generating complex documents, such as legal texts. Finally, this Essay discusses the limitations of these technologies, offering a balanced view of their potential role in legal work.

Nondelegation And The Legislative Versus Administrative Exactions Divide: Why Legislatively Imposed Exactions Do Not Require A More Searching Standard Of Review, Hunter Dominick

Fordham Law Review

As the United States continues to grow and urbanize, local governments have tried to manage this growth to mitigate the external impacts that new developments can cause. One method by which state and local governments seek to control growth within their borders is by imposing conditions on the issuance of building permits—otherwise known as exactions. Exactions, however, face federal constitutional limits under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, the U.S. Supreme Court restricted exactions in …

Prison Labor: The Ethical And Economic Implications Of Rethinking The Thirteenth Amendment And Fair Labor Standards Act, Peter Holland

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Prisoners have historically been paid extremely low wages, if any, for the jobs they perform while incarcerated. The Thirteenth Amendment, which made slavery illegal except as a punishment for crime, has often been used to validate this practice. This paper will argue that denying prisoners minimum wage is a misapplication of both the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Additionally, the paper claims that paying prisoners minimum wage would have many positive economic consequences.

Charity Law & Blockchain Technology: Using Old Wineskins For New Wine?, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

Whenever something new emerges, the question of how existing law applies arises. Sometimes it is both easy to answer that question and the answer is consistent with the policy goals of existing law. But sometimes the answer to that question is uncertain, does not fit well with those policy goals, or reflects a mixture of these two issues.

This question is particularly vexing today with respect to new assets facilitated by blockchain technology. These new assets include cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and ownership interests in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Commentators have written about how certain laws, particularly securities law, apply …

Measuring Jury Perception Of Explainable Machine Learning And Demonstrative Evidence, Rachel Edie Sparks Rogers

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Subjective pattern comparison has been subject to increased scrutiny by the courts and by the general public, resulting in an increased interest in pattern comparison algorithms that provide quantitative assessments of similarity for use by forensic scientists. While these algorithms would mark an improvement over current subjective comparison methods, individuals without a statistical background may struggle with the statistical concepts and language necessary for describing algorithmic methods. If algorithms are to be used, examiners must be able to testify about their use in a way that is accessible to the jury. In a series of studies, we conduct an assessment …

Discovering Significant Topics From Legal Decisions With Selective Inference, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We propose and evaluate an automated pipeline for discovering significant topics from legal decision texts by passing features synthesized with topic models through penalized regressions and post-selection significance tests. The method identifies case topics significantly correlated with outcomes, topic-word distributions which can be manually interpreted to gain insights about significant topics, and case-topic weights which can be used to identify representative cases for each topic. We demonstrate the method on a new dataset of domain name disputes and a canonical dataset of European Court of Human Rights violation cases. Topic models based on latent semantic analysis as well as language …

Legal Hypergraphs, Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, Daniel Martin Katz

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Complexity science provides a powerful framework for understanding physical, biological and social systems, and network analysis is one of its principal tools. Since many complex systems exhibit multilateral interactions that change over time, in recent years, network scientists have become increasingly interested in modelling and measuring dynamic networks featuring higher-order relations. At the same time, while network analysis has been more widely adopted to investigate the structure and evolution of law as a complex system, the utility of dynamic higher-order networks in the legal domain has remained largely unexplored. Setting out to change this, we introduce temporal hypergraphs as a …

Tort Theory And The Restatement, In Retrospect, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This is my third paper on the Restatement (Third) of Torts. In my first paper, The Theory of Tort Doctrine and the Restatement (Third) of Torts, I offered a positive economic theory of the tort doctrine that had been presented in the Restatement (Third) of Torts: General Principles, and also an optimistic vision of how positive theoretical analysis could be integrated with the Restatement project. In my second paper, The Economics of the Restatement and of the Common Law, I set out the utilitarian-economic theory of how the common law litigation process could generate optimal (efficient, wealth-maximizing) rules and compared …

Urban Flooding: Legal Tools To Address A Growing Crisis, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

While sea level rise has long received a great deal of attention, another impact of climate change is now getting greater notice — increases in extreme precipitation. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture; for every increase of one degree Celsius, seven percent more water vapor is carried in the air. When that moisture is quickly released as intense rainstorms, stormwater systems can be overwhelmed, and cities can suffer devastating floods.

The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s over most of the world's land areas. One 2023 study — generally consistent with …

Digital Footprints: Technology, Race, And Justice, Cassandra Jones Havard

Cardozo Law Review

Data aggregation is ubiquitous. To widen credit access, lenders now use nonconventional sources of personal technological information to measure borrower creditworthiness. Alternative data credit scoring is touted as a useful solution for borrowers with little or no credit history or “thin credit files.” The supposedly neutral algorithm provides a predictive analysis of the borrower’s ability to repay, thus allowing the borrower to obtain credit within the formal banking network.

Alternative data has the potential to expand access to financial services for underserved populations and make credit markets more competitive. Machine learning, or predictive behavioral analytics, collects and sorts the borrower’s …

The Significance Of Using Digital Story-Telling For Enhancing English Oral Communication Skills Among Media Students At Al- Quds Open University, Murad A. Ahmed Tamimi

Middle East Journal of Communication Studies

Due to issues including uninspired teaching techniques and language anxiety, students at Al-Quds Open University, particularly those enrolled in the media major, experience difficulties in establishing strong oral communication skills in a multicultural context. A potential remedy is digital story-telling, which uses multimedia to craft captivating stories that appeal to students who are accustomed to using digital devices. This study evaluated how digital story-telling improved media students' spoken English communication abilities in the second semester of the 2023–2024 academic year. Incorporating motifs from the current Tufan al-Aqsa conflict, the study sought to offer stimulating and culturally appropriate educational opportunities. Twenty-seven …

Brazil’S Local Content Requirements: Evolution, Lessons Learned & International Trade Limitations, Eduardo G. Pereira, Aaron Koenck, William A. Clavijo Vitto, Fernanda Delgado, João Victor Correia Lopes, Ana Carolina Marins De Carvalho

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

The California Supreme Court Replaces Gingles Prong One, Bruce A. Wessel, Jason D. D'Andrea

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Tamara Lee Powell, Appellant V. Dean Deloy Powell, Appellee : Brief Of Appellant, Utah Court Of Appeals

Utah Court of Appeals Briefs (2020 –)

Appeal from a Judgment of the Third Judicial District Court Salt Lake County, Honorable Mark Kouris

Dennis R. James, Attorney for Appellant

David Corbett, Attorney for Appellee

Natural Resources In The Arctic: The Equal Distribution Of Uneven Resrouces, Ganeswar Matcha, Sudarsanan Sivakumar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

This paper analyses the governance machine in place at the Arctic and examines the application of the principles of “common heritage of mankind” at the Arctic. This paper also offers some tentative propositions aimed at protecting Out Bound investment rights and how the World Trade Organization or other countries, like the U.S., can intercede in the Arctic investment sphere and attempt to regulate along with the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.

Icolc Statement On Ai In Licensing, International Coalition Of Library Consortia

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) statement on artifical intelligence in licensing.

El Salvador’S Bitcoin Bond Is Finally Here!, Douglas Notaris

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review (CICLR) Blog

In 2021, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had a bold vision for the nation. He aspired for El Salvador to transform into a “bitcoin haven.” Now, what does this mean, you may be wondering? Well, it all traces back to the enactment of the “Bitcoin Law” on September 7, 2021. With the passage of this law, El Salvador became the first, and still the only, country to designate Bitcoin as legal tender.This meant that every Salvadoran business was obligated to adopt Bitcoin for transactions, taxes could be settled using Bitcoin, and the government had the capacity to disburse subsidies …

Public Domain And Access To Knowledge, Faith O. Majekolagbe

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

In a world where truth is behind paywalls and lies are free, the importance of a realm of works that are free from copyright protection becomes even more important for access to knowledge and information. This Article considers a thriving and accessible public domain a key mechanism for engendering access to knowledge and propelling human development globally. The copyright public domain as a realm of freely accessible and usable works and elements of works is under immense threat due to the constant extension of the term of copyright protection, disparities in the scope of the public domain globally, the absence …

The Return Of Three-Judge Constitutional Courts, Matt Queen

Duke Law Journal

State courts wield the authority to elevate state constitutional protections above those afforded by the U.S. Constitution. That power is great—so great that some legislatures have intervened in constitutional adjudication, purportedly to undermine forum shopping and check a single judge’s influence. Accordingly, North Carolina and Tennessee require that three-judge trial courts hear constitutional challenges to state laws. These courts echo twentieth-century congressional efforts to trim federal courts’ equitable jurisdiction. They also present new and familiar drawbacks spawned by their federal ancestors.

This Note examines these new constitutional courts through several lenses: their historical context, political development, advantages, and drawbacks. Although …