Digital Commons Network^™

Optional Price Discrimination, Lee Anne Fennell

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Price discrimination gets a bad rap. It is associated with the exploitation of monopoly power and with opportunistically extracting surplus from consumers. As merchants develop ever-more-powerful mechanisms for gathering and compiling information about consumers, the specter of fully personalized pricing seems to loom as an ominous threat. Despite past economic defenses of price discrimination as an efficient and even consumer friendly move in some contexts, ¹ recent writing highlights the perceived unfairness of tailoring prices to willingness to pay, especially when this is accomplished through “big data.”²

Yet a parallel phenomenon quietly coexists with all this distress over personalized …

Defining Smart Contract Defects On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important …

Artificially Intelligent Boards And The Future Of Delaware Corporate Law, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

The prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impact the development of Delaware corporate law are at once over- and under-stated. As a general matter, claims to the effect that AI systems might ultimately displace human directors not only exaggerate the foreseeable technological potential of these systems, but also tend to ignore doctrinal and institutional impediments intrinsic to Delaware's competitive model – notably, heavy reliance on nuanced and context-specific applications of the fiduciary duty of loyalty by a true court of equity. At the same time, however, there are specific applications of AI systems that might not merely be accommodated by …

The Law And Economics Of Behavioral Regulation, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the law and economics of behavioral regulation (“nudging”), which governments and organizations increasingly use to substitute for and complement traditional instruments. To advance its welfare-based assessment, Section 1 examines alternative nudging definitions and Section 2 considers competing nudges taxonomies. Section 3 describes the benefits of nudges and their regulatory appeal, while Section 4 considers their myriad costs—most notably the private costs they generate for their targets and other market participants. Section 5 then illustrates the assessment of public and private welfare nudges using cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and rationality-effects analysis.

Faith In Elections, Derek T. Muller

Journal Articles

Americans may be suffering a crisis of faith. But not necessarily a crisis of religious faith. Instead, it is a crisis of faith in elections.

This language of faith in elections—do we have faith, are we losing faith, can we restore faith—pervades our political discourse and suggests religious imagery. Examples only scratch the surface of the language of faith in elections, democracy, and the American ideal. The language is seemingly everywhere. Words, of course, take on different meanings in different contexts. But the choice to use the word faith does appear to deliberately invoke religious imagery. Words like trust, confidence, …

Race-Aware Algorithms: Fairness, Nondiscrimination And Affirmative Action, Pauline T. Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

The growing use of predictive algorithms is increasing concerns that they may discriminate, but mitigating or removing bias requires designers to be aware of protected characteristics and take them into account. If they do so, however, will those efforts be considered a form of discrimination? Put concretely, if model-builders take race into account to prevent racial bias against Black people, have they then engaged in discrimination against white people? Some scholars assume so and seek to justify those practices under existing affirmative action doctrine. By invoking the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence, however, they implicitly assume that these practices entail discrimination …

Deregulated Redistricting, Travis Crum

Scholarship@WashULaw

From the civil rights movement through the Obama administration, each successive redistricting cycle involved ever-greater regulation of the mapmaking process. But in the past decade, the Supreme Court has re-written the ground rules for redistricting. For the first time in fifty years, Southern States will redistrict free of the preclearance process that long protected minorities from having their political power diminished. Political parties can now openly engage in egregious partisan gerrymandering.

The Court has withdrawn from the political thicket on every front except race. In so doing, the Court has engaged in decision-making that is both activist and restrained, but …

In A League Of Its Own: Should Intellectual Property Law Protect Sports Moves?, Jacqueline Kett

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Algorithmic Decision-Making And Discrimination In Developing Countries, Cecil Abungu

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

This article seeks to investigate how developing countries can ensure that algorithmic decision-making does not leave protected groups in their jurisdictions exposed to unlawful discrimination that would be almost impossible to prevent or prove. The article shows that universally, longstanding methods used to prevent and prove discrimination will struggle when confronted with algorithmic decision-making. It then argues that while some of the proposed solutions to this issue are promising, they cannot be successfully implemented in a vast majority of developing countries because these countries lack the necessary institutional foundation. The key features of this institutional foundation include: (i) a wellrooted …

The Real Cost Of Fake News: Smartmatic's $2.7 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox News, Michael Conklin

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Low-Cost Machine Learning Based Network Intrusion Detection System With Data Privacy Preservation, Jyoti Fakirah, Lauhim Mahfuz Zishan, Roshni Mooruth, Michael L. Johnstone, Wencheng Yang

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Network intrusion is a well-studied area of cyber security. Current machine learning-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) monitor network data and the patterns within those data but at the cost of presenting significant issues in terms of privacy violations which may threaten end-user privacy. Therefore, to mitigate risk and preserve a balance between security and privacy, it is imperative to protect user privacy with respect to intrusion data. Moreover, cost is a driver of a machine learning-based NIDS because such systems are increasingly being deployed on resource-limited edge devices. To solve these issues, in this paper we propose a NIDS …

Human-Controlled Fuzzing With Afl, Maxim Grishin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Fuzzing techniques are applied to reveal different types of bugs and vulnerabilities. American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) is a free most popular software fuzzer used by many other fuzzing frameworks. AFL supports autonomous mode of operation that uses the previous step output into the next step, as a result fuzzer spends a lot of time analyzing minor code sections. By making fuzzing process more focused and human controlled security expert can save time and find more bugs in less time. We designed a new module that can fuzz only the specified functions. As a result, the chosen ones will be inspected …

The Amorphous Nature Of Hackers: An Exploratory Study, Kento Yasuhara, Daniel Walnycky, Ibrahim Baggili, Ahmed Alhishwan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this work, we aim to better understand outsider perspectives of the hacker community through a series of situation based survey questions. By doing this, we hope to gain insight into the overall reputation of hackers from participants in a wide range of technical and non-technical backgrounds. This is important to digital forensics since convicted hackers will be tried by people, each with their own perception of who hackers are. Do cyber crimes and national security issues negatively affect people’s perceptions of hackers? Does hacktivism and information warfare positively affect people’s perception of hackers? Do individual personality factors affect one’s …

Finding The Right Angle: Lessons From Mathematics For The Legal Writing Classroom, Maria Termini

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Case For The Abolition Of Criminal Confessions, Guha Krishnamurthi

SMU Law Review

Confessions have long been considered the gold standard of evidence in criminal proceedings. But in truth, confession evidence imposes significant harms on our criminal justice system, through false convictions and other violations of defendants’ due process and moral rights. Moreover, our current doctrine is unable to eliminate or even curb these harms.

This Article makes the case for the abolition of confession evidence in criminal proceedings. Though it may seem radical, abolition is sensible and best furthers our penological goals. As a theoretical matter, confession evidence has low probative value, but it is prejudicially overvalued by juries and judges. Consequently, …

Compelling Code, Nicole Ligon

SMU Law Review

Does the First Amendment protect computer code from being compelled by the government? As society becomes more reliant on coded devices— like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and even some baby bassinets—courts will need to grapple with this question. In considering compulsions related to code, this Article concludes that intermediate scrutiny is almost always the appropriate standard of review. Rather than expressing a particular viewpoint, code generally constitutes a functional and neutral script. Given that a machine’s interpretation of code generally results in an objective action, not a subjective belief, the government need only show in most instances that the compulsion furthers …

Out Of Sight And Out Of Mind: Criminal Laws Disguised Moral Culpability Requirement, Andrew Ingram

University of Richmond Law Review

Last spring, the Supreme Court of the United States made a little-remarked constitutional ruling in Kahler v. Kansas. Upon casual inspection, Kahler looks like a doctrinal dead-end. The petitioner asked the Supreme Court to recognize a due process right for mentally ill defendants to raise the M’Naghten right-and-wrong test of insanity, and the Court said, “No.” The petitioner’s failure notwithstanding, Kahler is not a barren vine. On the contrary, it is heavy-laden with new doctrinal insights for criminal law scholars.

The case deserves a thorough look—not for what it can teach us about constitutional contentions that the Court has …

The Gendered Interpretation Of Child Marriage: A Niger Case Study, Melissa Safi

Dissertations and Theses

This paper seeks to answer the question, what is the primary factor driving child marriage? I explore the literature in several scholarly articles that explain why the harmful, traditional practice of child marriage is an issue that predominantly affects girls globally. I also utilize the feminist theory of international relations to support my analysis of child marriage as a gender issue. Incorporating evidence from annual international reports, scholarly articles, and mixed methods studies, this paper examines a case study of Niger, where child marriage affects more than half the population of girls under the age of 18. In studying Niger, …

Can Continuing Legal Education Pass The Test? Empirical Lessons From The Medical World, Rima Sirota

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Faith In Elections, Derek T. Muller

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Sequencing In Damages, Edward K. Cheng, Ehud Guttel, Yuval Procaccia

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Tort law contains multiple doctrines governing the assignment of liability and the calculation of damages. But in what sequence should courts apply these doctrines? Does it matter, for example, whether a court applies comparative fault before or after mitigation of damages? The answer, rather surprisingly, is that sequencing does matter, and it can substantially affect the compensation that a tort victim ultimately receives. Yet the existing case law on sequencing is ad hoc, inconsistent, and undertheorized, and the issue has been entirely overlooked by the academic literature. In this Article, we introduce and examine the question of sequencing. We offer …

Hunting And Gathering On The Legal Information Savannah, Susan Nevelow Mart, Adam Litzler, David Gunderman

Publications

This article asks, what is it like for novice researchers to research real-world legal problems using four platforms: Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, Lexis Advance, and Westlaw? The study findings produced some surprises, as well as some clear implications for teaching legal research.

Realizing Diversity, Sustainability, And Stakeholder Capitalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Stakeholder capitalism conceives of capitalism with companies maximizing their long-term value, while considering in addition to the interests of their shareholders, also the interests of all their other stakeholders. Examples of such additional stakeholders include customers, employees, communities, creditors, competitors, society at large, and our planet. America today does not have stakeholder capitalism. Instead, America presently has shareholder capitalism, in which publicly held corporations only maximize their stock value to shareholders.

This Essay analyzes proposals for the United States Securities Exchange Commission to require that all reporting companies make periodic mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosures of comparable, standardized, …

Addressing Pollution From More Frequent, But Still Exceptional, Wildfires, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson, Kristi M. Smith

Publications

No abstract provided.

Blind Justice: Algorithms And Neutrality In The Case Of Redistricting, Douglas M. Spencer, Moon Duchin

Publications

In several areas of law and public policy, there have been longstanding dreams that computers can secure decisionmaking that takes only some things into account, while remaining demonstrably neutral to other factors. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider mandating race-neutrality in multiple domains, notably in college admissions and redistricting. In this piece, we clarify the real and imagined uses of computers in redistricting, considering their application for optimization approaches and, more recently, for representative sampling. The current pitch to the Court for a race-blind Voting Rights Act is discussed at length.

ปัญหาของการเปิดเผยและส่งมอบข้อมูลภายใต้มาตรา 70 วรรคสอง แห่งพระราชบัญญัติการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์ พ.ศ. 2562, ชิตพล พงศ์วชิราพร

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาปัญหาและกฎหมายเกี่ยวกับมาตรการในการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์ซึ่งเป็นการกำหนดมาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ รวมทั้งศึกษาแนวคิด มาตรการในการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์และมาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ในประเทศไทยและในต่างประเทศ เพื่อเสนอแนะแนวทางในการพัฒนามาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ตามพระราชบัญญัติการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์ พ.ศ. 2562 ให้มีความเหมาะสม จากการศึกษาพบว่า การที่พระราชบัญญัติการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์ พ.ศ. 2562 กำหนดข้อยกเว้นในการเปิดเผยและส่งมอบข้อมูลเพื่อประโยชน์ในการดำเนินคดีกับผู้กระทำความผิดตามกฎหมายอื่นได้ เป็นการให้อำนาจแก่เจ้าหน้าที่รัฐในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐาน ซึ่งข้อมูลต่าง ๆ ที่ได้มาตามพระราชบัญญัติ ฯ ย่อมเป็นข้อมูลอิเล็กทรอนิกส์เป็นส่วนใหญ่ จึงถือได้ว่าเป็นมาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ประการหนึ่ง เนื่องจากมาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานเป็นมาตรการที่เป็นการกระทบกระเทือนต่อสิทธิเสรีภาพของประชาชน จึงจำเป็นต้องมีหลักเกณฑ์ที่เหมาะสมในการใช้อำนาจของเจ้าหน้าที่รัฐ และในปัจจุบันยังไม่มีบทบัญญัติของกฎหมายกำหนดหลักเกณฑ์ในการปฏิบัติเกี่ยวกับการใช้อำนาจดังกล่าว ย่อมอาจก่อให้เกิดปัญหาในทางปฏิบัติได้ ด้วยเหตุผลที่กล่าวไปข้างต้น ผู้เขียนจึงเสนอแนะให้มีการแก้ไขมาตรการในการรักษาความมั่นคงปลอดภัยไซเบอร์ซึ่งเป็นการกำหนดมาตรการในการแสวงหาพยานหลักฐานอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ โดยให้มีการกำหนดหลักเกณฑ์ที่เหมาะสมแก่การเปิดเผยหรือส่งมอบข้อมูลเพื่อประโยชน์ในการดำเนินคดีกับผู้กระทำความผิดตามกฎหมายอื่น เพื่อเป็นบรรทัดฐานให้เจ้าหน้าที่รัฐได้ใช้เป็นแนวทางในการปฏิบัติ และเป็นการคุ้มครองสิทธิเสรีภาพของประชาชน

Ms. Attribution: How Authorship Credit Contributes To The Gender Gap, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Misattribution plagues the practice of law in the United States. Seasoned practitioners and legislators alike will often claim full credit for joint work and, in some cases, for the entirety of a junior associate’s writing. The powerful over-credit themselves on legislation, opinions, and other legal works to the detriment of junior staff and associates. The ingrained and expected practice of leveraging junior attorneys as ghost-writers is, to many, unethical. But it presents a distinct concern that others have yet to interrogate: misattribution disparately impacts underrepresented members of the legal profession.

This Article fills that space by offering a quantitative analysis …

Credibility In Empirical Legal Analysis, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Empirical analysis is central in both legal scholarship and litigation, but it is not credible. Researchers can manipulate data to arrive at any conclusion they wish to obtain. A practice known as data fishing—searching for and selectively reporting methods and results that are favorable to the researcher—entirely invalidates a study’s results by giving rise to false positives and false impressions. Nevertheless, it is prevalent in law, leading to false claims, incorrect verdicts, and destructive policy. In this article, I examine the harm that data fishing in empirical legal research causes. I then build on methods in the sciences to develop …

Justice Breyer And Patent Eligibility, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Justice Breyer leaves the Supreme Court having left a significant mark on patent eligibility law. In Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, he eliminated the ability to obtain patents on many useful applications of new (and even breakthrough) discoveries. The author discusses how Justice Breyer’s test for patent eligibility both contradicts the historical approach and has had pernicious impact on the patent system and investment in development of technology, including, and in particular, medical technologies.

Can Blockchain Revolutionize Tax Administration?, Orly Sulami Mazur

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Experts predict that the use of smart contracts and other applications of blockchain technology could revolutionize the manner in which we do business. Blockchain technology promises the elimination of middlemen, increased trust and transparency, and improved access to shared information and records. Thus, it is no surprise that companies and entrepreneurs are developing blockchain solutions for an array of markets, ranging from real estate to health care. But can this new technology revolutionize tax administration?

This Article is the first to consider blockchain technology’s role in addressing the shortcomings of our current administration system— namely, a large tax gap, high …