Digital Commons Network^™

International Declaration On Gender Apartheid And Its Destructive Consequences, Georges Abi-Saab, Belquis Ahmadi, Hala Alkarib, Waheeda Amien, Penelope Andrews, Zainah Anwar, Marzia Babakarkhail, Cecilia Bailliet, Manizha Bakhtari, Karima Bennoune, Laurence Boisson De Chazournes, Roya Boroumand, Terry Boullata, Charlotte Bunch, Rebecca J. Cook, Roberta Clarke, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Suraya Dalil, Wesahl Domingo, Shirin Ebadi, Yakin Ertük, Alda Facio, Stephanie Farrior, Hannah Garry, James Thuo Gathii, Richard Goldstone, Pablo De Greiff, Mozn Hassan, Yoko Hayashi, Helena Kennedy, Sisi Khampepe, Fawzia Koofi, Viviana Krsticevic, Joanna Lewis, Marina Mahathir, Haanya Malik, Elham Manea, Gay J. Mcdougall, Juan E. Méndez, Davood Moradian, Denis Mukwege, Nadia Murad, Elizabeth Odio Benito, Thandi Orleyn, Mikiko Otani, Tamana Zaryab Paryani, Pragna Patel, Fausto Pocar, Javaid Rehman, Mary Robinson, Kenneth Roth, Albie Sachs, Mariam Safi, Gita Sahgal, Sima Samar, Habiba Sarabi, Fatou Sou, Leigh Toomey, Melanne Verveer, Zarqa Yaftali, Ganna Yudkivska

Other Publications

The Declaration is the result of an 18-month process of global consultation with leading experts, including a series of virtual consultations with women human rights defenders (WHRDs) from Afghanistan in spring 2025 and an in-person convening of United Nations (UN) experts, Afghan and South African WHRDs, civil society representatives, and international law experts at the University of Michigan Law School in September 2025.

This effort builds on the precedent of other experts’ declarations, signed on to by leading international legal and human rights experts, which were very influential in developing a human rights jurisprudence on a range of issues, and …

Abortion On The Move: Navigating The Fractured Reproductive Healthcare Landscape, Kim D. Ricardo

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Copper To Ashes: Violations Of The Right To A Healthy Environment And Health In Tsumeb, Namibia, Sarah Dávila A.

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Imperfect Guardians, Amna A. Akbar, Ryan D. Doerfler

Articles

Professor David Strauss attributes the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary jurisprudence to a breakdown of elite consensus. He observes that lawyers and judges disagree about the proper “victims” of our political process: Are they Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ people or, instead, Whites, Christians, and gun owners? Strauss worries the jurisprudential approach that emerged from Carolene Products now allows for judicial intervention on behalf of groups loaded with political power. Even then, he insists on the classic liberal defense of the courts: that courts serve as an important if imperfect check against the majoritarian domination of minorities.

In this Essay, we identify …

Follow The Money: A Historical And Bibliometric Reflection On The Rise Of Law And Economics, 1970-2025, Scott H. Dewey

Articles

From roughly 1970 to 2010, law and economics rose from the margins to a dominant position in American legal academia, accompanied by a dramatic increase in citations to law and economics scholarship. Citation analysis is often treated as a proxy for intellectual merit, but that assumption becomes questionable when ideas are advanced through systematic, well-funded, and sustained promotion aimed at serving specific political and economic interests. This study examines the right-wing funding networks that supported the rise of law and economics and analyzes the resulting bibliometric patterns in legal scholarship. By tracing these financial and citation dynamics, the study argues …

Untangling Ai Openness, Parth Nobel, Alan Rozenshtein, Chinmayi Sharma

Articles

The debate over AI openness—whether to make components of an artificial intelligence system available for public inspection and modification—forces policymakers to balance innovation, democratized access, safety, and national security. By inviting startups and researchers into the fold, it enables independent oversight and inclusive collaboration. But technology giants can also use it to entrench their own power, while adversaries can use it to shortcut years and billions of dollars in building systems, like China’s DeepSeek, that rival our own. How we govern AI openness today will shape the future of AI and America’s role in it.

Policymakers and scholars grasp the …

Space Mining, Richard Painter

Articles

The Trump Administration and U.S. Congress are promoting new ventures to extract valuable minerals from outer space. This Article does not dismiss the idea out of hand, but explores reasons for caution, including practical problems with space mining, its environmental impact, the likelihood that the United States could violate international law, and the risk of armed conflict. These problems are exacerbated by financial conflicts of interest in our government with a handful of billionaires, who have a financial interest in space mining work. The promotion of their agenda could involve wasteful government spending on subsidies for private ventures, with a …

More Than “Just A Misdemeanor”: Why Diversion Is Critical For Low Level Youth Offenders, Lynn Williams, Ariana M. Ellis

Akron Law Student Publications

Over the past two decades, juvenile arrests have declined sharply nationwide. Yet, during this same period, policies and penalties governing youth have grown increasingly punitive. Many lawmakers continue to advance “tough on crime” legislation that subjects all youth in the juvenile justice system to the same level of sanction, regardless of the seriousness of their offense or prior legal history. This article argues that juvenile delinquency should be addressed through individualized assessments of both risk and needs, rather than through uniform punitive measures. Unnecessary or disproportionate court involvement, particularly for low-risk youth, can produce significant short- and long-term harms, disrupt …

Balancing The Barre: Judicial Approaches To The Analysis Of Copyright Infringement Claims Of Choreographic Works, Sylvia R. Ofoma

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Glorifying Khaki: Policing, Power, And Copaganda In Hindi Cinema, Stuti Shah, Jyotika Tomar

National Law School of India Review

This article adopts US civil rights advocate Alec Karakatsanis’s conceptualisation of ‘copaganda’ to analyse the commercially successful ‘Cop Universe’ directed by Rohit Shetty, situating it within a broader socio-legal analysis of contemporary policing in India. It argues that copaganda in Hindi cinema recasts police officers not only as vigilantes, but also as embodiments of Hindutva and nationalist virility and a Brahmanical patriarchal order. In doing so, these films normalise extra-legal policing, obscure the structural realities of custodial violence and impunity, and reframe state violence as both necessary and morally desirable. The article situates these cinematic narratives alongside contemporary developments in …

The Missing Constitutional Law Of Executive Conditions, Nicole Huberfeld, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

This Article contributes to the development of the constitutional law of executive conditions. The appropriations presidentialism of the second Trump Administration—the shift from bilateral executive/legislative cooperation and compromise in federal spending to executive unilateralism in defiance of congressional control—has forced courts into the administration of federal spending like never before. As a result, judges have been forced to confront legal questions that remained mostly dormant during the era of executive/legislative cooperation, including questions about the constitutionality of efforts to encourage through spending conditions what the federal government cannot mandate (or has not mandated) directly, like speech or silence on particular …

The Paradox Of Intellectual Property At The U.S. Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court is dramatically more politically polarized in the Roberts Court era, and the justices have been criticized for highly ideological and partisan decision-making. Yet, we show that there is one area of law that is becoming less ideologically divided and predictable: intellectual property (IP). In an earlier study, we showed that, prior to the Roberts Court, IP case outcomes were predictable based on judicial ideology, with more conservative justices embracing IP rights, as they do for real property. In the last two decades, IP has become more influential on the economy and society, through the increasing dominance of …

China’S Shift Towards Data Openness: Integrating Security With Trade In Cross-Border Data Transfer, Yichen Huang

Michigan Technology Law Review

As the world's second-largest economy, China's stringent cross-border data transfer laws have deterred numerous multinational investments. To address this issue, China has prioritized data openness in its legislative agenda. The passage of the Provisions on Facilitating and Standardizing Cross-Border Data Transfer (the “New Cross-Border Data Transfer Regulation”) in March 2024 marked a significant milestone in this effort. Despite this progress, investors continue to express concerns about enforcing the new law. This article analyzes these recent legal developments and argues that they signal the government's determination to relax data control measures. China's stance is shifting from prioritizing security over trade to …

Genomic Surveillance: Your Dna Is Not Neutral, You Don’T Even Own It., Uri Kim

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

From Player Piano To Generative Ai: Artificial Expression And The Law Of Copyright, Douglas Lind, Adrienne Holz

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

American copyright law has experienced challenges and sometimes faltered when confronting mechanical reproduction. This Article retraces the rise and diffusion of the player piano and the phonograph, examining how they reshaped the making and listening to music. As these technologies spread throughout American society more rapidly than copyright law could adjust, courts misclassified piano rolls and records as merely mechanics. Reducing these new fixations to machinery rather than embodiments of human expression left recorded human musical performances inadequately protected, which facilitated piracy. Applying these lessons, this Article contends that generative AI training implicates copyright law in ways not dissimilar to …

What Is Hate Speech? A Proposal For An Ordinary And Legal Definition, Hannah Van Dijcke

SJD Dissertations

The term “hate speech” has been stretched in legal and public debates to cover speech ranging from insults to Holocaust denial. This definitional stretching has consequences beyond mere conceptual confusion: it risks obscuring the profound harm that hate speech does, and it facilitates the term’s misuse.

In this dissertation, I aim to precisely define hate speech and its harm, both in an ordinary (colloquial or non-legal) sense and in a legal sense. To do so, I examine real-world examples of speech widely understood to express hate, including texts from the context of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and conduct …

The Trial Of Socrates, Jonathan Van Patten

Faculty Publications

In many important ways, the trial of Socrates was not just the trial of the century, nor even the trial of the millennium. It predated the trial of Jesus, which is important for many other reasons, but Socrates’ contribution to how we think about justice and the rule of law is without equal. This Article explores the ways that this fifth-century B.C. trial, located geographically on the margin of what came to be known as the West, is at the center of what makes us a civilization. It is not simply about the drama, nor the politics of free inquiry, …

Subversion By Design, Daniel Nicastro

Loyola Consumer Law Review

Dark patterns, in the words of the design expert who coined the term, are ".. . tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something."¹ The FTC, in its 2022 Staff Report on the subject, defined them similarly as ". . . design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."² Endemic to the digital retail space, dark patterns subvert consumer decision making, resulting in inflated spending, widespread privacy violations, and the …

The Ftc's First Action Under The Inform Consumers Act: A New Era Of Enforcement?, Karli Hiltner

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preemption Without Protection: Reconsidering The Airline Deregulation Act In An Era Of Federal Retreat, Carmela Frontzak

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Privacy Protection: Why Ai Chatbots Demand Coppa Changes, Jacob Yeskis

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Regulating Manipulative Design Is Not Preempted By Cda 230 Or The First Amendment, Brett Frischmann, Peter Ormerod

Emory Law Journal

For over two decades, there has been a heated debate among legal scholars, activists, judges, and others about the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A persistent theme in those debates has been hyperbolic claims about the necessity of immunity from state laws for digital tech platforms and fearmongering that anything less than maximum immunity will destroy the Internet.

This Article argues that states retain considerable discretion to regulate digital platforms’ design and engineering decisions. We argue that manipulation, engineered behavior, and even habituation and normalization of engineered behavior by digital platforms are content-agnostic harms attributable to …

The Evolution Of Trust And Safety, Danielle Keats Citron, Ari Ezra Waldman

Emory Law Journal

This Article tells the inside story of the rise, spread, and evolution of trust and safety. We bring unique perspectives to this story. One of us (Citron) was on the inside, advising many tech companies over the years on how to create healthy digital environments. The other (Waldman) was on the outside, observing, through field research, how tech companies respond to and translate law into their routines, organizational structures, and practices. Together, these perspectives offer scholars and policymakers unmatched opportunities not just to see what is happening but to understand it as well. For decades, U.S. tech companies resisted legal …

Platform Polarization?, Matthew B. Lawrence

Emory Law Journal

This Essay explores what the ongoing politicization of Americans’ relationships to and through the technologies they use to interact online might come to mean for the workings of American government and for the constitutional law questions—especially First Amendment and separation-of-power questions—that depend on those workings. James Madison described the workings of government as a function of the interaction of human nature, law, and social movements (factions). From local newspapers to national magazines to radio to broadcast TV to cable news, experience has taught that a fourth variable—the communications technology through which people interact—is also critically important. In the recent era, …

Justice For One, Injustice For All: The Consequences Of The Legal Services Corporation’S Class Action Restriction, Elizabeth J. Lattner

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bundle Of Bytes: The Legal And Ethical Considerations For The Transfer, Ownership, And Disposition Of Digital Assets, Wendy Donelan Madsen

South Dakota Law Review

The right to transfer, own, and dispose of one’s assets after death is one of Americans’ most cherished rights. For most of the last century, Americans primarily held tangible assets, which were sufficiently managed through estate administration laws. Some key rights, such as transferring, owning, and disposing of tangible assets, are well understood by the bundle of sticks analogy common in property law. However, in the twenty-first century, Americans have accumulated significant digital assets that also require transfer, ownership, and disposition. Yet the current laws governing intangible assets do not adequately address these needs. Therefore, the bundle of bytes offers …

The Nfl’S Collision With Antitrust Law: A Strategy For Defending The National Football League’S Joint Agreements With Streaming Providers, Jack Mays

Chapman Law Review

The next frontier of sports broadcasting is here. Media consumption has shifted dramatically in recent years. Streaming services have become the preferred medium for television shows and movies, and sports broadcasts have expanded beyond traditional cable to streaming services. Given this reconfiguration of public behavior, the Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA)—a 1961 exemption to antitrust law—should be construed to allow the National Football League (NFL) to collectively negotiate with streaming providers like Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, and Netflix.

The SBA exempts joint agreements between professional sports leagues and broadcasters from antitrust scrutiny when those agreements involve the “sponsored telecasting” of games. …

Student Scholars: Access-To-Justice Research In The Law School Direct Representation Clinic, Claire Johnson Raba

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Non-Punishment Principle And Restorative Justice, Rachel J. Wechsler

Faculty Publications

The non-punishment principle is a legal norm that has increasingly gained legitimacy over the past quarter-century within international, regional, and domestic law on human trafficking. At its core, this principle opposes the punishment of human trafficking victims for unlawful conduct they engage in as a consequence of their trafficking victimization. Little is known about the presence and operation of the non-punishment principle within U.S. law. This Article fills this gap as the first to comprehensively map and analyze the principle’s instantiation across state and federal law.

From this new map, three key themes emerge. First, the non-punishment principle has a …

Taxing Dynasties, David Gamage, Brian D. Galle, Bob Lord

Faculty Publications

The estate tax and the broader wealth-transfer-tax system are even more broken than is commonly understood. Over the past two decades, researchers and policy experts have identified a handful of key tactics that mega-rich families use to pass wealth from generation to generation without paying tax. These tax dodges are notorious enough to be known by their acronyms, such as the IDGT and the GRAT. Scholars and policymakers have proposed reforms to block these tactics, or at least to make them more difficult.

In this Article, we present new analysis, backed by new empirical findings, to show that these proposed …