Law Commons^™

Symposium On Scholars’ Suggestions For Amendments, And Issues Raised By Artificial Intelligence

Fordham Law Review

CHAIR SCHILTZ: As those of you who have been in the rules work for a while know, rules work is cyclical. During the time I’ve been Chair of the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, we’ve had two packages of amendments that have gone through. The first package will take effect on December 1, 2024, and that’s the package that is led by the amendment to Rule 702 on expert testimony. And then we have another package that was just approved by the Judicial Conference and sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that package is led by the new rule …

Deepfakes Reach The Advisory Committee On Evidence Rules, Daniel J. Capra

Fordham Law Review

A number of articles have been written in the last couple of years about the evidentiary challenges posed by “deepfakes”—inauthentic videos and audios generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in such a way as to appear to be genuine. You are probably aware of some of the widely distributed examples, such as: (1) Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga jacket; (2) Jordan Peele’s video showing President Barack Obama speaking and saying things that President Obama never said; (3) Nancy Pelosi speaking while appearing to be intoxicated; and (4) Robert DeNiro’s de-aging in The Irishman.

The evidentiary risk posed by deepfakes is …

Rethinking Jurisdictional Maximalism In The Wake Of Mallory, Sayer Paige

Fordham Law Review

Jurisdiction-by-registration is the idea that by virtue of registering to do business in a state, corporations prospectively consent to jurisdiction on claims made against them in that state. For decades, this concept has stagnated behind the minimum contacts analysis developed by International Shoe Co. v. Washington and its progeny. Among other reasons, plaintiffs and states were not sure whether jurisdiction-by-registration withstood the Due Process Clause. But as the U.S. Supreme Court continued to narrow the limits of contacts-based jurisdiction, plaintiffs returned to registration based jurisdiction to recapture corporate defendants. Courts largely rejected these assertions. Then, in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern …

Avoiding Rejection: Studying When And Why State Courts Decline Certified Questions, Rachel Koehn Breland

Fordham Law Review

In December 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declared Tennessee’s punitive damages cap statute unconstitutional under the state’s constitution. Nearly five years later, however, Tennessee state courts are still reducing punitive damage awards under the statute—and they must, because the Tennessee Supreme Court has never addressed the statute’s constitutionality. See, the Sixth Circuit’s decision was merely an Erie guess as to how Tennessee courts would resolve the unsettled state law issue, and the Tennessee Supreme Court has since indicated that it would reach the opposite conclusion. But the Tennessee high court had already had an opportunity …