Digital Commons Network^™

Deepfakes Can Ruin Lives And Livelihoods – Would Owning The ‘Rights’ To Our Own Faces And Voices Help?, Graeme W. Austin, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Not that long ago, the term “deepfake” wasn’t in most people’s vocabularies. Now, it is not only commonplace, but is also the focus of intense legal scrutiny around the world.

Known in legal documents as “digital replicas”, deepfakes are created by artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate the visual and vocal appearance of real people, living or dead.

Unregulated, they can do a lot of damage, including financial fraud (already a problem in New Zealand), political disinformation, fake news, and the creation and dissemination of AI-generated pornography and child sexual abuse material.

For professional performers and entertainers, the proliferation and increasing …

Black English For Lawyers: A Primer, L. Alexander Walker Iii

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers do not know as much about Black English as they should, and people’s freedom hangs in the balance. Differences between language varieties in sounds and grammar can change and have changed the outcome of cases: “He at work” and “He be at work” mean two completely different things. To reduce misinterpretation and therefore wrongful outcomes, this Article provides a primer on the sounds, words, grammar, and social context of Black English targeted directly at legal practitioners. It begins by explaining key concepts in linguistics and making the case for why lawyers must foreground accurate description over normative prescription when …

Law For The Rich, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

With top incomes and wealth reaching historic highs, scholars and politicians have proposed new taxes and novel legal rules aimed at reversing the emergence of the new Gilded Age. Yet while new taxes target the rich directly by imposing greater burdens only on those with incomes or wealth above multi-million-dollar thresholds, none of the proposed legal reforms do anything of the sort. There appears to be no interest in changing property law, corporate law, antitrust law, or labor law, among others, to have special, more burdensome rules applicable only to the rich. This Article asks: Why not? Why shy away …

Sovereignty, Sins, And The Reassertion Of Primary Taxing Rights By The United States, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In this report, Graetz argues that the United States must reassert its primary taxing rights over income long conceded to other countries, especially income from intellectual property created in the United States, and he explains some changes necessary to make that happen.

When Anti-Fraud Laws Become A Barrier To Computer Science Research, Madelyne Xiao, Andrew Sellars, Sarah Scheffler

Faculty Scholarship

Computer science research sometimes brushes with the law, from red-team exercises that probe the boundaries of authentication mechanisms, to AI research processing copyrighted material, to platform research measuring the behavior of algorithms and users. U.S.-based computer security research is no stranger to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in a relationship that is still evolving through case law, research practices, changing policies, and legislation

Amid the landscape computer scientists, lawyers, and policymakers have learned to navigate, anti-fraud laws are a surprisingly under-examined challenge for computer science research. Fraud brings separate issues that …

A Comprehensive Quality Improvement Program To Improve Intubation Performance In Critical Care Transport, Andrew P. Reimer

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: Advanced airway management is a primary skill critical care transport teams provide. There are several measures of performance for airway management that can be tracked and improved through quality improvement initiatives. The purpose of this project was to improve first-pass intubation success rates and the associated Definitive Airway Sans Hypoxia/Hypotension on First Attempt (DASH-1A) metric—definitive airway without hypoxia or hypotension. Methods: A multiyear quality improvement initiative was undertaken. Best practices from the literature were identified and implemented through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Model for Improvement using a plan-do-study-act cycle approach. Improvement cycles included airway training in a cadaver …

Alpha Synuclein And Inflammaging, Geneviève L. Putnam, Robert W. Maitta

Faculty Scholarship

The α-synuclein protein is an established molecule in Lewy body pathology, especially Parkinson's disease (PD). While the pathological role of α-synuclein (α-syn) in PD has been well described, novel evidence may suggest that α-syn interacts with inflammasomes in response to aging. As age is an inevitable physiological state and is also considered the greatest risk factor for PD, this calls for investigation into how α-syn, aging, and PD could be linked. There is a growing amount of data regarding α-syn normal function in the body that includes involvement in cellular transport such as protein complexes assembly, vesicular trafficking, neurotransmitter release, …

Melanoma Detection, Treatment, Survival, And Mortality Through Year 2 Of The Pandemic, Uriel Kim, Richard S. Hoehn, Siran M. Koroukian, Johnie Rose, Jeremy S. Bordeaux, Bryan T. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the timely diagnosis and treatment of many cancers, including melanoma, the fifth most common cancer in the U.S. This study aimed to quantify the disruption and recovery of melanoma detection, treatment, survival, and mortality during the pandemic by analyzing data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program from 2000 to 2021. Our epidemiological analysis found that melanoma incidence initially dropped by 14.8% (95% CI: − 17.2 to − 12.4) in 2020 compared to pre-pandemic projections. Although incidence rates substantially recovered by 2021, an estimated 10,274 patients (95% CI: − 12,824 to − 7,724) remained …

Interference With The Democratic Process As Public Nuisance, Richard C. Boldt, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that the tort of public nuisance provides a vehicle for holding accountable those engaged in antidemocratic conduct. Recent history suggests that neither the criminal justice system nor Constitutional checks and balances are always up to the task. Following the 2020 election, some supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral votes, tampered with election machines, and intimidated election workers and voters. Depending on the results of the 2024 election, criminal charges against Trump and some of his followers may be dismissed. The Senate failed to convict the President on articles of …

Guardianship And Its Alternatives: A Handbook On Maryland Law, Joan O'Sullivan, Ellen A. Callegary, Rebecca Hall, James F. Silver

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shaping Strategy In The Digital Age: The Impact Of Consumer Electronic Word Of Mouth On Firm Strategic Emphasis, Brandon Holle, Hang T. Nguyen, Hieu V. Phan

Faculty Scholarship

This research explores how consumer electronic word of mouth (eWOM) influences a firm’s strategic emphasis, focusing on the distinct effects of positive and negative eWOM on value appropriation (e.g., advertising) versus value creation (e.g., R&D). Analyzing over 33 million social media posts covering 39 corporate brands from 2010 to 2020, the authors find that positive consumer eWOM influences firms to prioritize a strategic emphasis on value appropriation, while negative consumer eWOM is associated with a strategic emphasis on value creation. These effects are moderated by product category, market competition, and industry instability. Firms in hedonic categories have attenuated responses to …

Artificial Intelligence And The Self-Represented Inventor, Brenda M. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Lack of access to competent legal representation is pervasive throughout the justice system. Unfortunately, the patent system is no exception. Self-represented inventors are far less likely to obtain patents than those with legal representation. Increasing access to artificial intelligence (AI) can mitigate some of the disadvantages of self-representation, but the use of AI will also raise new challenges. To the extent that AI systems can help self-represented inventors, they can begin to address one of the underlying causes of the patent gap—lack of access to high quality legal services. Women and people of color hold fewer patents, in part, because …

Lone Stars Lessons, Amy F. Kimpel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first comprehensive empirical account of Operation Lone Star (OLS), Texas Governor Abbott’s immigration enforcement initiative at the southern border. Though OLS consists of several components, including border wall construction and the busing of migrants to “blue” states, the machinery of OLS is primarily designed to apprehend recent migrants and prosecute them for violations of Texas state criminal law. The most common OLS prosecutions are for misdemeanor criminal trespass after migrants are arrested on private ranch lands near the border. As many criminal justice reforms aim to shrink the scale and scope of the criminal legal system, …

Deep And Continuous Palliative Sedation Without Artificial Nutrition And Hydration: An International Review, Richard Liu, Thaddeus Pope, April Xiaoyi Xu

Faculty Scholarship

Deep and continuous palliative sedation combined with withholding or withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration (collectively termed “PSs̄ANH”) is a medical process regularly used in end-of-life care as a means of alleviating suffering. But PSs̄ANH is often not governed by a clear legal framework. To shed light on different approaches to regulating PSs̄ANH, this Article conducts a comparative analysis of the PSs̄ANH legality across twelve jurisdictions.

To facilitate understanding of this broad issue, we subdivided PSs̄ANH into three categories:

(1) PSs̄ANH will not hasten death (“Type 1 PSs̄ANH”),
(2) PSs̄ANH might, but is not certain to, hasten death (“Type 2 …

Medicare Mandates For Shared Decision Making With Patient Decision Aids: Linking Payment To Preference, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has increasingly required shared decision making with evidence-based patient decision aids as an essential Medicare condition for payment. CMS is doing this because it recognizes that most healthcare is preference sensitive and value laden. So, whether treatment is “right” or “beneficial” for a patient is not only a matter of clinical expertise. It equally depends on the patient’s values, preferences, and goals. So, CMS wants to ensure that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the healthcare that they receive and for which CMS pays. In short, under its …

Navigating Copyright In Ai-Enhanced Game Design: Legal Challenges In Multimodal And Dynamic Content Creation, Andrew Begemann, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in video game design has transformed traditional workflows, allowing for the generation of text, images, music, videos, and code at unprecedented scales. However, this advancement presents complex challenges for copyright law, traditionally rooted in human originality and authorship. This article examines recent case law that underscores the evolving legal landscape, exploring landmark cases such as Zarya of the Dawn and Andersen v. Stability AI. These cases reveal the tensions between AI-generated outputs and copyright eligibility, especially in the dynamic, multimodal compositions inherent to video games. The review analyzes how various AI tools are employed …

Universal Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Doge's Matrix Structure And Presidential Power, Jason Marisam

Faculty Scholarship

At the start of his second term, President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a novel White House entity tasked with reshaping the federal bureaucracy. Far more than a traditional advisory commission, DOGE employed a matrix structure that embedded staff across executive agencies, establishing dual reporting lines to both agency heads and the White House. This essay argues that DOGE’s organizational design represents a structural innovation in presidential control and an evolution of the longstanding “czar” model. Drawing on organizational and principal-agent theories, the essay explores how the matrix structure enhanced the President’s capacity to monitor agency behavior, …

Reframing Compliance For A Polarized World, Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate compliance relies on an intricate network of individuals and organizations to monitor and report wrongdoing. Compliance improves our collective well-being by curbing corporate misconduct and by facilitating the freer flow of information.

Despite notable failures, compliance has thrived over the past three decades, becoming a well-respected element of corporate governance. Now, however, compliance faces a new challenge, as polarization has become the norm in American life. Political parties have grown more ideologically homogeneous, and politicians embrace more extreme variations of the positions they supported just a few years ago. Partisan thinking has moved beyond discrete political debates, spreading to …

Benched Judges, Anna Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah Haan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Defendants, Mariam A. Hinds

Faculty Scholarship

Although the overrepresentation of men, specifically Black men and men of color, in the criminal legal system is well documented, the people who support these men, especially women, have garnered less attention. Women who are proximate to system-involved men—mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, and wives—are invisible actors in the criminal legal system who perform critical tasks and provide essential support. They appear in court to demonstrate a person’s family and community ties, use their assets as collateral for bail, deposit money in commissary accounts, maintain social ties during imprisonment through letters and visits, and bear the burden of filling the …

Grading Legal Research, Julie Tedjeske Crane

Faculty Scholarship

Law school grading practices often conflict with legal research instruction goals. Small class sizes render norm-referenced (curved) grading unreliable, and the emphasis on ranking students detracts from learning essential skills. Drawing on scholarship on legal education and other disciplines, this article examines several grading approaches that may better serve students and instructors, including criteria-referenced, specification-based, and equitable grading systems. It offers practical suggestions for improving grading practices, such as working with colleagues on assessment design, being intentional about grading formative work, and using anonymous grading. The article concludes with a call for more discussion about grading in legal research courses.

Self-Regulation In Emerging And Innovative Industries, Daniel E. Walters, Hannah J. Wiseman

Faculty Scholarship

Self-regulation—governance of firm behavior by private entities—has a long history both in the United States and globally, and there is an extensive literature on the topic. But there has been far less attention paid to the role self-regulation can play in spurring and enabling innovation and growth within emerging industries. These industries—both currently ascendant ones such as hydrogen and artificial intelligence, as well as formerly new (but now well established) activities in hydraulic fracturing and Internet communications—plausibly benefit from self-regulation’s ability to coordinate economic actors and reassure often skeptical publics. Examining the ways that self-regulation impacts this special type of …

Original Discontent, William Magnuson

Faculty Scholarship

There are many theories of constitutional interpretation. Most, but not all, of them assert that, in interpreting the Constitution’s provisions, we should start by taking seriously the intentions of the enactors, meaning, roughly speaking, its drafters, defenders and ratifiers. This Article argues that, in doing so, judges, scholars and policymakers have underestimated an important feature of the process of constitution-making: the discontent of the enactors themselves with the Constitution they were enacting. Time and again, during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, during the penning of the Federalist Papers, and during the state ratifying conventions, the enactors expressed deep reservations about …

The Globalization Of Copyright Exceptions For Ai Training, Matthew Sag, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Generative AI, machine learning and other computational uses of copyrighted works pose profound questions for copyright law. This article conducts of global survey of how different countries have attempted to answer these questions in relation to the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for training. Although the world has yet to achieve international consensus on this issue, an international equilibrium is emerging. Jurisdictions with common law and civil law traditions, and with varying economic conditions, technological capabilities, political systems, and cultural backgrounds, have found ways to reconcile copyright law and AI training. In this equilibrium, countries recognize that text data mining, …

The Great Unsettling: Administrative Governance After Loper Bright, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

“Chevron is overruled.” These three words surely captured more attention than any others in the U.S. Supreme Court’s thirty-five-page opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. For forty years, the Chevron doctrine had been virtually synonymous with administrative law. Now that the Court has taken a step that many scholars thought unfathomable even just a few years ago, speculation abounds about the possible downstream impacts of Loper Bright on both what agencies will be able to do in the future and how lower courts will respond when reviewing agency action. The vast majority of early expert commentaries suggest …

Moral Politics Theory Applied To Abortion: Utopias, Dystopias, And Dobbs, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines Moral Politics Theory (MPT) as a way to understand current tensions in the US concerning reproductive justice. MPT, as developed and researched for over thirty years by cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, provides a way to explain differences in political worldviews. According to Lakoff’s research in Moral Politics and Don’t Think of an Elephant!, conservatives tend to hold a strict-father model, and progressives hold a nurturant-parent model. People in the political middle tend to endorse both models; Lakoff labels those in the middle as “biconceptuals,” and discusses how this group is most susceptible to persuasion because metaphors frame …

Law, Conflict, And Hybrid Warfare: A Teaching Imperative For A Changing World, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers increasingly find themselves at the frontlines of the battlefield, just not in the traditional sense. Hybrid warfare is a conflict form that combines traditional military offensive measures with nontraditional methods, including the harnessing of legal systems to achieve strategic goals. Lawyers have always been at the frontline of typical legal risk assessment, thinking about a client's risk of liability or regulation costs generally. Now, lawyers must stand at the ready for a lot more: lawyers must be prepared for cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns using artificial intelligence, the use of court systems to suppress reporting or shield bad actors, and so …

The United States Healthcare System: From Medicare To Post-Pandemic Health Policy, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

My purpose in this essay is to comment on national health policy in the United States over the past sixty years.  My conclusions are less optimistic than what I had hoped when I began my teaching and research career in the 1990s to be able to say in 2025.  In particular, the successful expansion of publicly supported health coverage via the passage of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or “Obamacare”) in 2010 seems to have triggered -- though I hesitate to say that it caused – a backsliding from broader commitments to clinical performance, population health, and social solidarity that …