Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Commission Quorums, Nicholas Bednar, Todd Phillips

Articles

Multimember commissions are a central feature of the modern administrative state. Yet a growing number have lost their legal authority to function—not through statutory repeal or defunding, but because they lack a quorum. In many cases, these quorum losses stem from the President’s assertion of a broad removal power, which causes vacancies in the commission’s membership. Quorum losses lead to agency inaction, prevent the executive branch from ensuring faithful execution of the laws, and threaten the constitutional rights of individuals who appear before adjudicatory commissions.

This Article presents an empirical study of quorum rules in multimember commissions. It traces how …

Filling The Network Gap In Research Ethics: Analyzing Ethical Issues At Scale In Big Team Science, Susan Wolf, Gillian H. Roehrig, Timothy L. Pruett, Korkut Uygun, Claire Colby Mcvan, Evelyn Brister, Shawneequa L. Callier, Alexander M. Capron, James F. Childress, Rosario Isasi, Andrew D. Maynard, Kenneth A. Oye, Paul B. Thompson, Terrance R. Tiersch

Articles

Scientific research increasingly involves large, multidisciplinary teams networked across multiple institutions to develop new technologies. Despite the rise of complex research networks and big team science, there has been too little analysis to date of the ethical challenges facing these networks. The extensive literature on the ethical issues confronting individual researchers and small teams (the microlevel) and on the larger societal challenges flowing from research and new technology (the macrolevel) leaves a troubling gap in between, at the mesolevel of the research network involved in big team science. Yet the ability of complex networks to conduct research ethically—which is essential …

Advancing Neurotech Justice In Youth Digital Mental Health: Insights From An Interdisciplinary And Cross-Generational Workshop, Francis X. Shen, Craig W. Mcfarland, Donnella S. Comeau, Leo Anthony Celi, Benjamin C. Silverman, Sepideh Abdi, Mahsa Alborzi Avanaki

Articles

Researchers and clinicians are increasingly looking to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools to improve psychiatric care. Of particular promise is addressing the youth mental health crisis. Yet, the introduction of AI-enabled digital technologies for psychiatric treatment of young adults raises a host of ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELSI). To provide guidance in addressing these issues, we convened a two-day meeting at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University: Advancing Neurotech Justice in Mental Health: Insights from an Interdisciplinary and Cross-Generational Workshop. The meeting brought together a diverse cohort of 17 experts and 5 students …

Creating A Responsible Authorship Culture In Science: Anchoring Authorship Practices In Principles Of Transparency, Credit, And Accountability, Susan Wolf, Véronique Kiermer, Sofia Adams, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Joerg Heber, Mohammad Hosseini, Ana Marušić, Beau Nielsen, Magdalena Skipper, Geeta K. Swamy, Yensi Flores Bueso

Articles

Authorship remains the primary currency of academic credit and a cornerstone of research integrity, yet current practices often fail to reflect the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of modern science and questionable authorship practices persist. We argue that addressing these shortcomings is a collective responsibility shared by researchers, journals, research funders, scholarly societies, and research institutions. We examined authorship guidelines issued by journals and research institutions and found that their recommendations to researchers are highly variable. We propose that fostering a responsible authorship culture requires a shared, principle-based framework grounded in transparency, credit, and accountability. These three interconnected principles highlight when …

Need For Harmonized Terminology In Cryopreservation To Support Reproducibility, Regulation, And Translation, Susan Wolf, Lakshya Gangwar, Lowell Wolfe, Nikolas Zuchowicz, Irina Filz Von Reiterdank, Srivasupradha Ramesh, Bat-Erdene Namsrai, Joseph Kangas, Joseph Sushil Rao, Matthew Powell-Palm, Timothy L. Pruett, John C. Bischof, Korkut Uygun

Articles

As cryopreservation technologies continue to develop, the need for harmonized terminology across the multitude of disciplines where cryopreservation is applied is becoming increasingly acute. Terminology in cryopreservation remains inconsistent, leading to confusion and barriers to progress. Applications of cryopreservation in medicine, food, agriculture, and conservation remain limited by this lack of consensus. Inconsistent terminology contributes to ethical, legal, and societal issues in translating and integrating new cryopreservation technologies. Here we identify the problem with examples of cryopreservation terminology that demand harmonization. We describe the need for terminological consistency by providing examples of effective terminology harmonization projects in related fields. We …

Grading Machines: Can Ai Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?, Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz, Dane Thorley

Articles

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, enabling legal-advocacy organizations to adopt them as complements to—or substitutes for—lawyers and other human experts. The role of LLMs in legal education, however, is underexplored. While several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results, there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically contained in …

The Crisis Of Appropriations Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Appropriations law is a unique body of federal law.  Appropriations law imposes its own somewhat baroque set of statutory interpretation principles, approves of very broad delegations to the Executive Branch without meaningful limiting principles, and is often exempt from judicial review.  But perhaps that is all about to change.  Donald Trump’s historically aggressive challenge to Congress’s power of the purse has spurred an unusually large volume of exceptionally high-stakes appropriations law litigation. 

The potential implications go beyond the high-profile issues such as enforcement of the Impoundment Control Act.  In general, the unusual features of appropriations law are built on a …

The Efficiency Paradox Of Majoritarian Democracy, Barbara Luppi, Francesco Parisi

Articles

Majoritarian democracy is widely regarded as the canonical procedure for converting heterogeneous individual preferences into collective decisions, yet its welfare properties are far more fragile than legal and political theorists suggest. This paper contributes to the literature on the limits of majoritarianism by applying a spatial voting model to demonstrate that the conditions under which majoritarian democracies produce efficient outcomes are narrowly constrained by the structural features of majority rule itself. We formalize a multidimensional policy environment in which voters bargain over both the policy vector and lump‑sum transfers. We show that—even with transferable utility among members of the majority …

Democratizing Restitution: Trust As An Equitable Approach To Competing Claims On Cultural Heritage Objects, Britta Redwood

Articles

As formerly colonized states began to win their independence in the mid-twentieth century, a growing chorus of voices called on museums in London, Paris, Berlin, and other European cities to return objects taken during the colonial period. Having largely ignored these requests until recently, museums throughout Europe and the United States have begun negotiating returns of these objects to their rightful owners. There is a growing recognition among Western cultural institutions that continuing to hold cultural heritage objects taken under conditions of coercion or violence is morally untenable. More recently, some scholars have argued for a human rights approach to …

Boundaries Of Rules: Social Reactions To Legal Intervention, Francesco Parisi

Articles

This chapter examines what happens at the boundaries of rules: when social practices acquire legal recognition, when legal rules seek to reshape social expectations, and when formal and informal enforcement operate together. The conventional economic model treats the expected formal sanction as the principal source of compliance. Although this model provides a fundamental benchmark, it captures only part of the effects of legal intervention. The taxonomy developed here identifies the different ways in which legal, moral, and social incentives may interact. The kinds of public and private enforcement through which individuals express norms shape the additive, nonadditive, and countervailing effects …

Age, Law, And Political Economy, Alexander Boni-Saenz

Articles

This Article examines the intersection of age, class, and the law. Its central claim is that age is an essential dimension for the analysis of law and political economy. There are two primary reasons why. First, age is embedded in a large body of legal rules that structure the labor market and address vulnerabilities associated with particular life stages. Child labor laws set minimum ages for entry into the workforce, while social welfare laws use age eligibility criteria to shape the material conditions for older adults. Second, age and its sibling concept, generation, indirectly shape economic and political relations by …

Authorship Nonsense, Jessica Litman

Articles

Copyright law’s primary device for promoting progress is to bestow rights on the authors of works. Rights vest automatically and last for a very long time. Authors’ choices to retain, license, or transfer those rights fuel opportunities to communicate the works to their audiences. The copyright system’s mechanisms for determining who authored works (and therefore automatically obtained copyright rights) should be both accurate and reliable, since misidentifications will undermine the law’s working as intended.

This article examines authors’ creation of works and copyright law’s handling of authorship disputes. Many works result from creative collaboration. Although the copyright statute incorporates mechanisms …

In Service Of The State: Foreign Financing, Infrastructure, And Imperialism In Tsarist Russia, Christopher A. Hartwell, Paul Vaaler, Boris Vinogradov

Articles

Russia’s imperialism in the nineteenth century has been far less scrutinized than other episodes of great power colonization, but the Tsar’s expansion into the Caucasus was indeed an ongoing imperial project. The movement of Russian troops and settlers was only feasible with the creation of a large railway network, an undertaking for which the Tsarist regime lacked adequate funding. In response, the regime developed a system of state guarantees and incentives to attract foreign investors looking for higher returns and willing to finance railways serving the imperial project. We illustrate this point with a case study of Paris-based Crédit Lyonnais …

The Durability Of Protections Against Abuse At Interpol Amidst Rising Authoritarian Pressures, Kristina Daugirdas

Articles

Over centuries and across continents, authoritarian governments have demonstrated a large appetite for international cooperation to target political opponents across borders. In 1851, the “first modern police organization”—the Police Union of German States, whose members included Austria and Prussia—was established “with the express purpose of policing the political opposition of established autocratic regimes.” During the 1970s and early 1980s, military regimes in South America participated in a secret scheme known as Operation Condor to coordinate their efforts to suppress subversion. A recent analysis of twenty-nine “hard authoritarian” regional organizations found that twenty-five were engaged in police cooperation. The Shanghai Cooperation …

Reclaiming Homeowner Wealth: A Conversation With Barry, Fried, And Hatfield, Prentiss Cox

Articles

Homeowners in the United States pay residential real estate brokers commission rates that are about twice as high as the commission charges by brokers in comparable countries. Given the enormous size of the residential home sale market—both in aggregate terms and as a percentage of wealth owned by the average homeowner—this cost discrepancy results in U.S. homeowners transferring tens of billions of dollars each year to brokers that would be saved in a more competitive and fair market. In Et Tu, Agent? Commission-Based Steering in Residential Real Estate (“Et Tu?”), Jordan M. Barry, Will Fried, and John William Hatfield provide …

Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication In Law School: Lessons From Medicine, Social Work, And Business, Mireille Butler, Jaclyn Celebrezze

Articles

Legal clients in the United States are increasingly multilingual and multicultural. More than 71 million people living in the United States communicate in a language other than English. Consequently, the lawyer’s duty of shared understanding is taking on new meaning. With the advent of ABA Ethics Opinion 500, cross-cultural communication skills are a lawyer’s ethical duty and a law school’s mandate. Additionally, ABA Standard 303(c) and the potential of increased experiential learning credit requirements make clear that immediate curricular changes are needed. To prepare for the modern practice of law, tomorrow’s lawyers need to develop cross-cultural skills while in law …

What's The Point Of Reparation?, Daniel Fryer

Articles

Despite its ancient history in philosophical and legal thought, importance to progressive social movements, and relative simplicity as a notion of fairness—if you break something, you ought to fix it—reparative justice is largely misunderstood. This is problematic given increasing calls for reparation from historically disadvantaged groups. Rather than assessing the validity of these claims, this Article addresses a fundamentally antecedent issue: what’s the point of reparation? Rejecting arguments that claim reparation is about compensation, supplementing distributive justice, and reconciliation, I argue that the point of reparation is to repair unjust social relations created by past wrongdoing. The relational theory of …

Regulating Robotaxis, Bryant Walker Smith, Matthew T. Wansley

Articles

In several sunbelt cities, commercial robotaxi service has arrived. The leading robotaxi company is providing over 400,000 trips per week. The industry claims that robotaxis will save lives and provide convenient and affordable mobility. Critics counter that they will increase congestion, undermine transit, and subject the public to ubiquitous surveillance. We argue that the social impact of robotaxis depends on how they are regulated. We emphasize two points missing from the debate. First, some of the benefits of robotaxis may be political rather than technological—some longstanding public policy goals may become viable in a robotaxi world. Second, letting one private …

Standard Textualism, James A. Macleod

Articles

For as long as legal scholars have been writing about the rules-versus-standards distinction, textualism has been understood to produce characteristically rule-like law. This Article argues for the opposite view. Far from generating the “law of rules” that Scalia famously envisioned, the rule of modern textualism produces a law of standards—much more so than anybody, proponent of textualism or critic, appears to have recognized.

Two aspects of today’s textualism produce this result. The first is its emphasis on ordinary language and communication. Modern textualism typically produces standards because ordinary language and communication are typically standard-like. The second is modern textualism’s drive …

An Incidental Standard For Medical Ai, Nicholson W. Price Ii

Articles

Medical AI is poised to make a major difference in the provision of health. It brings major challenges, though: how can developers and implementers ensure that it will work safely and effectively—especially within the context of complex and highly variable health-care systems? Standards provide one key tool, potentially providing guidelines for everything from privacy to accuracy to how AI interacts with human clinicians. This Essay considers the last of these, describing a powerful quasi-standard from a surprising source: an FDA guidance document that tells developers when certain AI systems are not considered medical devices, and are therefore not regulated by …

Feedback Loops: Fly On The Wall, Patrick Barry

Articles

I recently turned to an interesting source to get some feedback on the way I communicate when leading meetings and speaking to large groups: artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Born into a family of fast-talking New Yorkers who don’t always wait for you to finish your thoughts before they jump in with theirs (my mom grew up in Manhattan and my dad grew up in Long Island), I recently realized that I have developed what the linguist Deborah Tannen calls a “high-involvement” conversation style, especially when I take the lead in meetings or teach my classes. I nod as other people …

New Judicial Federalism And The Establishment Clause: Classroom Ten Commandments As A Case Study In State Constitutional Protection, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

Louisiana recently enacted a law requiring a Ten Commandments display in every public school classroom from kindergarten to college. Forty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a nearly identical attempt to introduce Christianity into the public schools violated the Establishment Clause—the clause in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment that requires some degree of separation between church and state.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has since reduced the Establishment Clause to a shadow of its former self. It replaced doctrinal tests that protected religious minorities with a history and tradition test that is easily manipulated and that presumes the …

The Active Classroom: A Narrative Review Of Active Teaching Methods And The Flipped Classroom Model In Graduate Medical Education., Kalyan Kandra, Praneetha Vennam

Articles

Graduate medical education (GME) is undergoing a significant pedagogical transformation, moving away from traditional, passive learning environments toward more dynamic, learner-centered approaches. This narrative review examines the implementation and impact of active teaching methods in GME, with a specific focus on the flipped classroom model. In this narrative review, we compare and contrast these innovative strategies with traditional didactic lectures, evaluating their effects on learner engagement, knowledge retention, clinical reasoning, and overall satisfaction. Active learning, grounded in constructivist theory, repositions the resident as an active participant in their education, utilizing methods such as case-based learning, team-based learning, and simulation. The …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: A Comparative Constitutional Analysis Of Whistleblowing Speech, The Government's Managerial Domain, And The Imperatives Of Democratic Self-Government, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.

Articles

Since issuing its 1968 landmark decision in Pickering, which first recognized that the First Amendment protects government employees' speech about matters of public concern, the US. Supreme Court has proceeded to whittle away First Amendment protections for government employees. The Justices have done so by adopting a series of categorical exclusions to Pickering that all strongly favor the government as an employer and manager. These subsequent decisions have created a jurisprudential obstacle course that government employees must successfully run in order to invoke the Free Speech Clause at all. The current U.S. approach is plainly bad. However, it could be …

A Core Proposal For Budget Caring - Will The E.U. Adopt A Progressive Corporate Tax?, Domenico Imparato, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On 16 July 2025, the European Commission unveiled its proposed EU budget for the 2028–2034 period, representing a nearly EUR two trillion fiscal commitment for the bloc’s taxpayers – both individual and corporate. As leaked by some media outlets in the days leading up to the official announcement, the EU budget would introduce a new mechanism known as the ‘Corporate Resource for Europe’ (CORE). In the Commission’s proposal, CORE is described as a ‘financial contribution’ from the corporate sector, intended to become part of the European Union’s system of own resources. In practical terms, however, it would function as a …

The Academic, Psychological, And Physical Impact Of Motor Skills Difficulties On College Students: A Scoping Review, David Gaul Phd, Suzanne Mccarthy Wolf

Articles

Purpose of Review

This scoping review examines the extent and quality of research literature to determine the impact of motor skills difficulties on college or university students. It assesses the adequacy of current institutional supports and identifies opportunities for more inclusive educational practices.

Recent Findings

Four databases (PubMed, SCOPUS, PsycINFO, and Web of Science) were searched for English-language studies published since 1970. Eighteen studies met inclusion criteria: 12 empirical, 4 descriptive, and 2 program evaluations. Six papers from the UK addressed support, social isolation, and academic confidence; six Israeli studies focused on handwriting, dysgraphia, and accommodations; three US studies examined …

Organizational Memories Of Extreme Events: Evidence From Us Public Transit Agencies, Mattia Caldarulo, Ignacio Pezo, Elizabeth A. Corley, Shaika L. Islam, Eric W. Welch

Articles

The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events require organizations to effectively manage the threats these phenomena pose. To respond to these challenges, public agencies often turn to their organizational memories for guidance. Organizational memories support information processing capacity, facilitate sensemaking, and legitimize and speed up decision-making processes. While memories influence different aspects of organizational life, little is known about their antecedents and the mechanisms behind the retrieval of past events. This study contributes to the broader literature on organizational memory by investigating the elements shaping public agencies’ retrieval of extreme weather events. Integrating weather data from the National …

Safe Sex In The Age Of Big Tech Feminism, Brenda Dvoskin, Thomas E. Kadri

Articles

Lawmakers and technology companies are regulating online sexuality in the name of feminism. Whereas libertarian ideals dominated early debates about internet governance, "safety" has become the rallying cry to regulate online activity in the age of Big Tech. Legislators across the political spectrum and companies around the world are devising interventions meant to keep people - and especially women safe from the risks of online sexuality. Through law and technology, they target everything from privacy invasions to unwanted messages to sexual deepfakes. We call this regulatory and ideological trend Big Tech feminism.

This Article interrogates the feminist strands animating Big …

Understanding The Experiences Of People With And Without Vision Impairments When Using Mobile User Interface Alternative Color Modes, Sarah Andrew, Garreth W. Tigwell

Articles

A current trend in mobile user interface design is to provide alternative color modes (ACMs), such as light mode, dark mode, and high contrast mode, to improve people’s interaction experiences according to their vision access needs and/or the environment. For example, high contrast mode can improve UI visibility for people with low vision and for people using their smartphones in bright sunlight. However, little is known about the experiences of people using ACMs. To address this, we interviewed 29 people with and without vision impairments to discuss the benefits and challenges of ACMs. We found that while ACMs are beneficial, …