Digital Commons Network^™

Civil Litigation In The Nineteenth Century Landraad Of The Former Dutch East-Indies (Indonesia): Simplification Aimed At Access To Justice?, Cornelis H. Van Rhee

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Set Of One, David L. Faigman

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Comparator Argument In Trans-Healthcare Ban Cases, Craig Konnoth

UC Law Journal

As states have increasingly restricted gender affirming care for minors across the nation (reinforced by a recent Executive Order by President Trump), and though the Supreme Court ruled on one such state ban, a powerful argument has largely been overlooked. This argument emphasizes the fact that transgender minors are not alone in receiving gender affirming care. Cisgender minors also receive such care for precisely the same reasons as transgender minors— unwanted breast tissue development, undesired hair growth, unusual vocal development, and puberty onset. Indeed, cisgender children receive such care at higher numbers than trans children, and many of the medications …

Systemic Jurisdictional Ambiguity, Norman W. Spaulding

UC Law Journal

The purpose of jurisdictional rules is to provide reasonably clear signals about when a court does and does not have power over a case. Judging from the modern Supreme Court’s rules for determining jurisdiction, however, one would think jurisdictional rules need neither be clear nor consistent. From rules for determining standing, federal question jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction to Erie doctrine and the power of Congress to create non-Article III courts—rules that affect the administration of justice in millions of cases every year—modern jurisdictional rules are notorious for their inconsistency and ambiguity. This level of ambiguity is remarkable given the zeal …

A Case Against Mass Deportation: The Japanese American Internment Camps And Recent Treatment Of Korematsu, Isaac Bloch

UC Law Journal

The large-scale deportation of non-citizens has become a preeminent policy issue. Unfortunately, executive curtailment of immigrant communities’ liberty is not without historical parallels. During World War II, federal officials sent individuals of Japanese descent to internment camps through a series of executive orders and military proclamations. Although attorneys in the Department of Justice believed aspects of these actions were unconstitutional at the time, the administration prevailed at the nation’s highest court. Can recognition of this past wrong aid challenges to contemporary immigration enforcement regimes? How do our courts formally account for the most egregious jurisprudential errors of the past, and …

The Mono Basin Project: Remedying Environmental Injustice Through Tribal Beneficial Use Designations, Molly Greene

UC Law Environmental Journal

Due to a history of violence, dispossession, and racism, Native American tribes in California face structural disadvantages and inequities with respect to water rights. At the same time, tribes lack meaningful legal remedies to gain access to the water resources necessary to maintain their ways of life. One key issue is that California water agencies traditionally did not consider tribal water uses when implementing water quality control laws, leaving such uses unprotected. For years, tribes have urged the State to fill in these gaps in the law by adopting tribal beneficial uses (“TBUs”), which would protect tribal water uses, such …

Recognizing Arab Climate Refugees Under Both International And Regional Law, Fatemah Albader, Rahima Musaliar

UC Law Environmental Journal

Climate change is increasingly displacing populations worldwide, yet existing international and regional legal frameworks, including the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Arab Charter on Human Rights, fail to recognize climate refugees as a protected category. These legal instruments define refugees narrowly, limiting protection to individuals fleeing persecution on specific grounds such as race, religion, or political opinion. As climate change accelerates environmental degradation, resulting in extreme weather events, desertification, and resource scarcity, millions of people are being forced to migrate, often across international borders, without legal recourse or asylum rights. This Article argues that climate refugees should be afforded the …

The Esg Disclosure Paradox: Gaps In Environmental Justice Criteria, Barbara Ballan

UC Law Environmental Journal

Environmental Justice (“EJ”) and Environmental Social Governance (“ESG”) are terms used to address the impacts of corporate actions as well as environmental and social regulation on the people and the planet. ESG disclosure is a corporate-driven invention that aims to measure progress towards sustainability and disclose environmental and social criteria while fostering value for businesses. EJ, by contrast, emerged as a social movement that evolved into regulatory frameworks. Governmental agencies and EJ advocates are utilizing EJ mapping tools and metrics to assess inequalities in environmental impacts caused by private and public policy and decision-making. Though these concepts may initially create …

Meeting Of The Executive Committee - Open Session Book 01/12/2026, Uc Law Sf

2026 Board of Directors Agenda and Materials

No abstract provided.

When Ownership Meets Licensing–New Normative Expectations And The Need For Nft Categorization: All Your Projects “Are” Belong To Us, Charles Belle

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

The current treatment of all NFTs in legal scholarship as identical digital assets fundamentally misunderstands their varied applications and the new normative expectations they create. The Moonbirds controversy of 2022, where a creator’s unilateral license change affected nearly 20,000 token holders, exemplifies the crisis: token holders believed they owned digital assets that could be controlled and commercialized, but existing copyright frameworks treat NFTs merely as licenses subject to creator discretion. Picture for Profile (PFP) Projects—community-based NFT collections involving thousands of tokens often with governance and commercial rights—combine concepts of possession, community governance, and commercialization in ways that challenge traditional intellectual …

From Prompt To Clone: Copyright Challenges In Ai Model Distillation, Claudia Philipp

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

This paper examines the legality of model distillation in the context of large language models (LLMs), where smaller “student” models are trained by mimicking the outputs of larger, proprietary “teacher” models. As artificial intelligence continues to advance rapidly, the legal framework surrounding patent, and contract law is being tested. Specifically, the paper explores whether current U.S. copyright law offers sufficient protection for frontier LLM developers and whether practices like unauthorized distillation amount to infringement. By analyzing model architecture, training data, behavioral mimicry, and reverse engineering under prevailing legal doctrines—including fair use, terms of use enforcement, and recent litigation—the paper finds …

Private Money: Stablecoins, Bitcoin, And The Genius Act, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

Cryptocurrency has been legalized in the United States. The 2025 GENIUS Act provides a sensible regulatory framework for cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange while avoiding predicted monetary chaos. The Act correctly distinguishes between volatile fiat cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are unsuitable as payment mechanisms, and stablecoins backed by traditional currencies and reserves.

Historical analysis spanning American monetary systems from the “free banking era” before 1860 through modern digital payments demonstrates that private money has long coexisted with government currency but requires appropriate regulation to prevent bank runs, fraud, and monetary instability. The GENIUS Act addresses key cryptocurrency risks—technological failures, …

Pharmaceutical Mergers: Do We Have The Right Cure?, Robin Feldman, Gideon Schor, Yaniv Konchitchki, Tanziuzzaman Sakib

Faculty Scholarship

Few federal agencies wield tools more powerful than the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to review—and deny—proposed mergers between companies. This authority is powerful for a reason: Large mergers can be uniquely harmful to the United States economy, potentially reducing competition, undercutting consumer choice, and inflating prices.

The pharmaceutical industry is particularly sensitive to merger harms, given the limited number of competitors and the inelasticity of demand for prescription drugs. As a result, when pharmaceutical companies seek to merge, the FTC often requires that one of the companies divest ownership of certain drugs not yet on the market—so-called “pipeline” drugs––to a …

Table Of Contents

The Judges' Book

No abstract provided.

Foreword, Alex G. Tse

The Judges' Book

No abstract provided.

Civil Procedure: The Complexities Of Consent To Personal Jurisdiction, Scott Dodson

The Judges' Book

In Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co., the Supreme Court decided a personal-jurisdiction case outside the minimum contacts framework for the first time since 1990. Five justices deemed consent to be a method of establishing personal jurisdiction without regard to International Shoe. And, relying on pre-Shoe precedent, the Court held the defendant to have consented to general personal jurisdiction in Pennsylvania by complying with that state’s unique business-registration statute, which permitted its courts to “exercise general personal jurisdiction” over a registered corporation.

Mallory could be read as treating consent to personal jurisdiction as a simple, monolithic concept. …

Civil Procedure: Personal Jurisdiction And Federalism, Scott Dodson

The Judges' Book

The historical development of personal jurisdiction has featured an important interstate-federalism aim: to keep harmony among sovereign states. By purporting to use state borders to partition case allocation among states, personal jurisdiction follows the mantra that good fences make good neighbors.

This structural component fits uncomfortably with the idea of personal jurisdiction as an agent of the individual right protected by the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. Due process, after all, concerns a state’s relationship to a defendant, not the state’s relationship to another state.

In this chapter, I argue that whatever interstate-federalism value personal jurisdiction might, in theory, protect, the …

Civil Procedure: Personal Jurisdiction And The Fifth Amendment, Scott Dodson

The Judges' Book

Since Pennoyer v. Neff, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has constrained the exercise of personal jurisdiction by state courts. The Fourteenth Amendment permits state courts to exercise personal jurisdiction in four circumstances: (1) consent, (2) in-state service on an individual, (3) residency or citizenship in the state, and (4) minimum contacts with the state such that personal jurisdiction would not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. Confining state-court personal jurisdiction to connections between the litigant and the forum state serves not only litigant interests of fairness and reasonableness but also federal interests of interstate harmony.

In …

Constitutional Law: Constitutional Symmetry, Zachary S. Price

The Judges' Book

The United States is closely divided over politics, and these divisions have infected constitutional law. Conservatives, by and large, interpret the Constitution to protect religion, limit gun control, and obstruct federal administrative governance while allowing state-level regulation of moral questions like abortion. Progressives see a mirror-image constitution that advances social justice, confers broad federal power, and allows flexible administrative regulation while limiting state and local police authority and guaranteeing sexual and reproductive autonomy. As national politics have grown divided and polarized, achieving partisan goals through federal legislation has grown more difficult. The two parties have dreamed, in effect, of capturing …

Criminal Law: "Legally Magic" Words: The Accessibility Of Fifth Amendment Rights, Kate Weisburd

The Judges' Book

A basic but underappreciated problem pervades Fifth Amendment doctrine (including Miranda v. Arizona): people may know, in a broad sense, that they have the right to remain silent and to counsel, yet a deep disconnect exists between what ordinary people think is required to invoke those rights and what courts demand. Settled Supreme Court case law requires that the right to counsel and silence must be invoked clearly and unambiguously. In practice, those requirements have produced a body of law in which ordinary language and conduct often does not suffice to invoke either right, simply because the suspect did …

Employment Law: Governance And Guardrails: Artificial Intelligence And Low-Wage Workers, Seema N. Patel

The Judges' Book

“It’s like magic.” In August 2014, the New York Times reported on how Kronos scheduling software—which uses which uses real-time inputs, including weather forecasts, historical sales data, and nearby events, to predict customer traffic—had created a “chronic crisis over the clock” for Starbucks’s 130,000 baristas. For one barista, Jannette Navarro, the Kronos app controlled everything from how much sleep her four-year-old son might get to what groceries she could afford that month. The software was installed directly onto workers’ personal phones without consultation, negotiation, or notice. What seemed “like magic” to a Kronos executive wreaked havoc on workers’ lives.

A …

Ip Law: Ai And Cracks In The Foundation Of Ip, Robin C. Feldman

The Judges' Book

Our implicit image of progress, and the standards we use to calibrate the value of human contributions to that progress, are quietly at risk from the onslaught of AI. AI has the potential to significantly shrink the pool of information and creative work protected by IP, particularly shrinking the protectable space for the work of human contributors.

The changes wrought by AI raise existential questions for society’s conception of human invention. I use the term “existential” here not in the modern sense of threatening something’s existence, but rather in the broad sense of philosophical existentialism, as being concerned with exploring …

Retrenchment, Segregation, And Public Education: A Five-Year Analysis Of State Exclusionary School Discipline Legislation, Thalia Gonzalez, Will Martel

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding the decision in Brown v. Board of Education formally ending educational segregation and more than two decades of state reform, the legislative landscape protecting minoritized children from the structural violence of exclusionary school discipline has dramatically shifted in less than five years. From the passage of state “Teacher’s Bills of Rights” to mandatory expulsions, rescissions of prior protections, and new categories of removal, a retrenchment of anti-inclusion legislation—and its corollary, educational carcerality— has occurred. While studies of other forms of legislative retrenchment in K–12 public schools, such as anti-Critical Race Theory and Don’t Say Gay laws, literacy bans, and …

Open Secrets, Robin C. Feldman, Vaughn Goehrig

Faculty Scholarship

Patents and trade secrets were never intended to meet, but in the world of biologic drugs, they've become as thick as thieves. Patent law's disclosure requirement has demanded far too little of biologics manufacturers-allowing them to keep vital manufacturing details under trade secret lock and key. This intellectual property patchwork has been devastating for drug affordability: Because the most critical manufacturing information remains hidden, makers of follow-on biologics (called biosimilars) are often stuck reinventing the wheel, even after the original patents have expired.

This Article makes two principal contributions to illuminating this problem. First, it presents, for the first time …

Prevention Beyond Deterrence, Benjamin A. Barsky

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reconceptualizes preventive justice—the public safety paradigm that seeks to prevent harm before it occurs. Scholars have long documented how cities have advanced this paradigm through largely punitive measures, notably variants of broken windows policing, which posit that aggressive misdemeanor enforcement deters more serious crime. Yet in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, and as underscored recently in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, these measures have faced a legitimacy crisis—prompting calls for nonpunitive responses to nonviolent incidents.

This Article establishes a preventive justice approach that advances health and safety without emphasizing crime deterrence. It draws on …

Virtual Influencers, Real Liability: Strategies For Companies To Ensure Consumer Protection When Using Ai Influencers, Sherri Hufstedler

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

When You Wish Upon A Clause, Hannah Lee

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

Fair Use Or Foul Play? Copyright Law’S Battle Over Using Sound Recordings In Ai Training, Matthew Schurz

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

How Slow Legislative Reform Allows For Fake News, The Remedies And Solutions To Modernize The Law, Christopher Kidwell

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

Board Of Directors Quarterly Meeting - Open Session Book 12/05/2025, Uc Law Sf

2025 Board of Directors Agenda and Materials

No abstract provided.