Law Commons^™

The Philosophy Of Ai: Learning From History, Shaping Our Future. Hearing Before The Committee On Homeland Security And Government Affairs, Senate, One Hundred Eighteenth Congress, First Session., Margaret Hu

Congressional Testimony

No abstract provided.

Biden's Executive Order Puts Civil Rights Rights In The Middle Of The Ai Regulation Discussion, Margaret Hu

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Starting Is The Hardest Part: Using Chatgpt To Overcome Writer’S Block, Margie Alsbrook

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

We all know that editing a draft, even a bad draft, is easier than starting from scratch with a blank page. Even if ChatGPT produces something you hate, the draft produced by the software can “unstick” us and our students and jump start a surge of productive work. With editing this eventually leads us to good work product, and that work product will likely be better because we started earlier and went through a more thoughtful process. The presentation would also include ways in which ChatGPT can help LRW professors with some of the parts of the job that we …

Move Over Wright & Miller--Is Chatgpt The Only Secondary Source You Will Ever Need? Spoiler Alert...It's Not!, Jacob Waldo, Susan O. Winters

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

AI tools like ChatGPT are increasingly widespread, and despite an uncertain future due to a rapidly evolving technology landscape, they are likely here to stay. Many of the digital tools used by law students and lawyers will soon be incorporating sophisticated AI technology into their platforms. Students already use ChatGPT to brainstorm, proofread their papers (or write them entirely), summarize information, and more. Failing to integrate ChatGPT into the legal research curriculum not only risks diminishing our professional authenticity with students but could also lead to the devaluation of traditional legal research skills in favor of convenient, albeit less reliable …

Scheherazade, Chatgpt, And Me: Storytelling And Ai, Tracy L. M. Norton

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

Humans developed language to tell stories. Gesturing, demonstration, and vocalization worked for communicating instructions or basic information. But establishing and maintaining community required story, and story required language. Our desire to tell better stories and share them more widely has led to the creation of art forms from simple guitar ballads to epic motion pictures and intricate first-person video games. So it’s no wonder that, in the era of generative artificial intelligence, storytellers would be among the first to put AI to work. Storytellers have been using AI for years already to develop stories, which means that AI has itself …

The Case For Iterative Legal Writing Practice With Chatgpt, Joseph Regalia

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

In this session, Professor Joe Regalia will share his work developing legal-writing education tools that leverage GPT technology. He will also share best practices for creating assessments, exercises, and activities for your own students that are tailored to how and what you teach in the classroom.

Much of this presentation will focus on case studies and live, hands-on examples (given this is virtual) so that we can spend most of the time learning by doing together.

An Immodest Proposal: Ai, Llms, And The Case For A Standalone Legal Research Requirement, Nicholas Mignanelli, Susan Drisko Zago, Jordan Jefferson, Sarah C. Slinger

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

The legal research course is over a century old. As a law school subject, it predates many doctrinal courses, as well as the advent of clinical legal education. It is several decades older than its sister subject, legal writing. In spite of its age and obvious importance, the place of the legal research course in the law school curriculum remains contested. While some law faculties recognize the value of legal research instruction and require a standalone legal research course in the first year, the vast majority combine it with legal writing (often over the objections of legal writing instructors and …

Chatgpt In A Contract Drafting Class, Ben Fernandez, Kristen Hardy

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

Our presentation will discuss the impact of ChatGPT on contract drafting pedagogy. Specifically, we will examine ChatGPT’s basis of knowledge and whether it has sufficient theoretical foundation to be used as a pedagogical tool; whether ChatGPT’s practical application supports proven methods of instructional delivery; and ChatGPT’s functionality as an assessment tool.

1. ChatGPT’s basis of knowledge and whether it has sufficient theoretical foundation to be used as a pedagogical tool

Our presentation will compare the pretraining of ChatGPT and to the typical Contract Drafting pedagogy. We will start by showing the program on a screen and asking it how it …

What Did I Miss? A Demonstration Of The Differences Between Chatgpt-4 And 3.5 That Impact Legal Research And Writing, Laura Killinger, Leslie A. Street

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

Many news sources are raving about how much more advanced ChatGPT-4 is than 3.5. You may have heard that ChatGPT-4 outscored 90% of test takers on the Uniform Bar Exam, while ChatGPT 3.5 only outscored 10% of test takers. But what does this mean for teaching legal research and writing? In this presentation, we will compare specific examples of ChatGPT 3.5 (the free version many of us tried in the spring) and ChatGPT-4 (the paid version released in March).

“You’Ve Got A Friend In Me”: Helping Students Help Ai, Brad Charles, Mark Cooney

Incorporating ChatGPT in the Legal Research & Writing Classroom

ChatGPT and its family of generative tools may seem new, but the process that ChatGPT imitates is as old as Egyptian papyri: The end-user still had to adapt the form text to each person’s unique situation.

Similarly, modern attorneys may use AI to adapt legal documents to their clients’ needs. But they must also learn how to spot problems in AI-generated documents — omissions, wrongful additions, inaccurate law, legalese, and poor typography. They need to instruct ChatGPT or other generative AI to continue revising until the document reflects best practices.

In short, our students as future attorneys need to know …

On The Danger Of Not Understanding Technology, Fredric I. Lederer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Optimizing Cybersecurity Risk In Medical Cyber-Physical Devices, Christopher S. Yoo, Bethany C. Lee

William & Mary Law Review

Medical devices are increasingly connected, both to cyber networks and to sensors collecting data from physical stimuli. These cyber-physical systems pose a new host of deadly security risks that traditional notions of cybersecurity struggle to take into account. Previously, we could predict how algorithms would function as they drew on defined inputs. But cyber-physical systems draw on unbounded inputs from the real world. Moreover, with wide networks of cyber-physical medical devices, a single cybersecurity breach could pose lethal dangers to masses of patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with regulating medical devices to ensure safety and …

Smart Wearables: The Overlooked And Underrated Essential Worker, Rebekah Hill

William & Mary Law Review

This Note argues that the FDA should revamp its criteria for regulating medical devices to unambiguously include smart wearables. Specifically, this Note calls for the FDA to amend its definition of “medical device” to focus on what a device is technologically capable of rather than its intended use.

Part I will examine the established legislation regarding medical devices; in particular, it will examine the relationship between FDA regulations and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule and argue that when taken together, HIPAA creates a strong presumption that smart wearables should be regulated by the FDA. This …

Regulating Crypto, On And Off The Chain, Eric D. Chason

William & Mary Law Review

Cryptocurrency had its most turbulent year in 2022. The collapse of TerraUSD ushered in a broad market decline, and the FTX debacle brought new publicity and scrutiny to crypto’s woes. Both events will likely spark new regulation and legislation.

Policymakers and regulators should regulate market structures like exchanges. While many cryptocurrencies are extremely transparent and require little if any additional disclosures, others are plagued by serious informational asymmetries. An exchange might allow participants to trade Bitcoin, and regulators need to protect investors who rely on such exchanges. Investors may face informational asymmetries regarding the operation and safety of the exchange. …

Emerging Technology's Language Wars: Cryptocurrency, Carla L. Reyes

William & Mary Law Review

Work at the intersection of blockchain technology and law suffers from a distinct linguistic disadvantage. As a highly interdisciplinary area of inquiry, legal researchers, lawmakers, researchers in the technical sciences, and the public all talk past each other, using the same words, but as different terms of art. Evidence of these language wars largely derives from anecdote. To better assess the nature and scope of the problem, this Article uses corpus linguistics to reveal the inherent value conflicts embedded in definitional differences and debates related to developing regulation in one specific area of the blockchain technology ecosystem: cryptocurrency. Using cryptocurrency …

Defi: Shadow Banking 2.0?, Hilary J. Allen

William & Mary Law Review

The growth of so-called “shadow banking” was a significant contributor to the financial crisis of 2008, which had huge social costs that we still grapple with today. Our financial regulatory system still has not fully figured out how to address the risks of the derivatives, securitizations, and money market mutual funds that comprised Shadow Banking 1.0, but we are already facing the prospect of Shadow Banking 2.0 in the form of decentralized finance, or “DeFi.” DeFi’s proponents speak of a future where sending money is as easy as sending a photograph—but money is not the same as a photograph. The …

Implied Organizations And Technological Governance, Shawn Bayern

William & Mary Law Review

Common law historically adapted creatively and gracefully to the emergence of new types of organizations. Today, statutory forms of organizations predominate. But statutory organizational forms may be ill-suited to govern the novel, loosely coupled, and rapidly changing organizations that can arise through distributed technological mechanisms. This Article suggests that the common law of implied organizations can be a fertile ground for legal responses to technological organizations and indeed may be important not just for regulating such organizations but for giving them important legal capabilities.

Making Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

William & Mary Law Review

People value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.

Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and …

Blockchains As Infrastructure And Semicommons, James Grimmelmann, A. Jason Windawi

William & Mary Law Review

Blockchains are not self-executing machines. They are resource systems designed by people, maintained by people, and governed by people. Their technical protocols help to solve some difficult problems in shared resource management, but behind those protocols there are always communities of people struggling with familiar challenges in governing their provision and use of common infrastructure.

In this Article, we describe blockchains as shared, distributed transactional ledgers using two frameworks from commons theory. Brett Frischmann’s theory of infrastructure provides an external view, showing how blockchains provide useful, generic infrastructure for recording transactions and why that infrastructure is most naturally made available …

Blockchain Real Estate And Nfts, Juliet M. Moringiello, Christopher K. Odinet

William & Mary Law Review

Non-fungible tokens (popularly known as NFTs) and blockchains are frequently promoted as the solution to a multitude of property ownership problems. The promise of an immutable blockchain is often touted as a mechanism to resolve disputes over intangible rights, notably intellectual property rights, and even to facilitate quicker and easier real estate transactions.

In this Symposium Article, we question the use of distributed ledger technologies as a method of facilitating and verifying the transfer of physical assets. As our example of an existing transfer method, we use real property law, which is characterized by centuries-old common law rules regarding fractionalized …

Digital Asset Regulation: Peering Into The Past, Peering Into The Future, Kevin Werbach

William & Mary Law Review

Blockchain is often compared to the internet as a disruptive technology that will realign economic structures across the world. This analogy extends to law and regulation. Similar to internet-based services, digital assets raise a host of challenges for policymakers. They also pose general questions regarding the desirability and practicality of regulating decentralized systems. Such debates play out against a backdrop of concerns that regulatory action will chill innovation or push market activity to more tolerant jurisdictions. The story of internet policy in the late 1990s and early 2000s therefore provides important lessons for policymakers today when confronting digital assets. Two …

Technology Integration In Higher Education And Student Privacy Beyond Learning Environments -- A Comparison Of The Uk And Us Perspective, Iria Giuffrida, Alex Hall

Faculty Publications

Technology integration in higher education (HE) has brought immense innovation. While research is investigating the benefits of leveraging, through learning analytics, the data created by the greater presence of technology in HE, it is also analysing the privacy implications of vast universes of data now at the fingertips of HE administrators. This paper argues that student privacy challenges linked to technology integration occur not only within but also beyond learning environments, namely at the enterprise level. By analysing the UK and US legal frameworks surrounding how HE institutions respond to parents demanding disclosure of their adult children's personal data in …

A Tokenized Future: Regulatory Lessons From Crowdfunding And Standard Form Contracts, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the world of risk investing in the cryptoeconomy. The broader crypto market is booming despite the latest downturn. People and institutions are buying in. The question is now how to regulate it.

This Article first tackles the question of whether coins, tokens, and other investable cryptoassets are securities. Second, for those cryptoassets that are not securities, this Article seeks to find a regulatory solution that balances promoting innovation with investor protection, just as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would do. To strike the right balance, this Article adopts a proposal by Ian Ayres and Alan Schwartz …

Ftx: How The Sec Should React, Darian M. Ibrahim

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Decentralizing Sustainably -- How Blockchain Can Benefit Environmental Goals, Logan J. Losito

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

[...] As presented in this Note, with a lack of clear guidance, disparate legislation from U.S. states continues to form a patchwork approach of policy to the topic of blockchain, with notably little attention paid towards environmentally sustainable practices. While this transpires across the states, sentiments from members of the federal legislative and, most recently, the executive branches of government express priorities in two areas when developing policy on the matter.

As this Note will outline, the concerns are generally over the sustainability of cryptocurrency mining practices and the potential for blockchain innovation to benefit environmental sustainability goals. However, while …

From Negative To Positive Algorithm Rights, Cary Coglianese, Kat Hefter

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

We consider this issue here and suggest that the current calls for a negative right to be free from AI could very well transform over time into positive claims that demand the use of algorithmic tools by government officials. In Part I, we begin by sketching the current landscape surrounding the adoption of AI by government. That landscape is characterized by strong activist and scholarly voices expressing a pronounced aversion to the use of digital algorithms—and taking a decidedly negative rights tone. In Part II, we show that, although aversion to complex technology might be understandable, that aversion is neither …

Preimplantation Genetic Testing: A Fundamental Right, Julianna S. Swann

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Unlike many European countries of similar economic, social, scientific, and political advancement, there is virtually no regulation of preimplantation genetic testing in the United States. This Note will explore preimplantation genetic testing and demonstrate that potential parents in the United States have a right to conduct said testing under the umbrella of the fundamental right to privacy. This Note will demonstrate the need for the regulation for preimplantation genetic testing that will comply with the Undue Burden Test set out in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, while acknowledging and supporting the fundamental right of potential parents to conduct testing. This …

Facing Injustice: How Face Recognition Technology May Increase The Incidence Of Misidentifications And Wrongful Convictions, Laura Moy

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Part I of this Article explains how face recognition is used in conjunction with eyewitness identification in the law enforcement context. Part II explores how and why the growing use of face recognition technology may increase, rather than decrease, misidentifications and therefore wrongful convictions. Part III recommends policy changes that should be considered, including some of the reforms to eyewitness identification procedures that have been advanced by others.

This abstract has been adapted from the author's introduction.

How Analogizing Socio-Legal Responses To Organ Transplantation Can Further The Legalization Of Reproductive Genetic Innovation, Myrisha S. Lewis

Faculty Publications

The Nobel Foundation emphasized the significance of genetic innovation to society, science, and medicine by awarding the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to “the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.” This Article focuses on “reproductive genetic innovation,” a term that includes cytoplasmic transfer, mitochondrial transfer, and germline or heritable gene editing techniques that are all categorized as “experimental” in the United States. These techniques all use in vitro fertilization, a legal and widely available practice. Yet reproductive genetic innovation has resulted in controversy and numerous barriers including a recurring federal budget rider, threats of federal enforcement action, and the unavailability of federal funding. …

Smart Cities And Sustainability: A New Challenge To Accountability?, Iria Giuffrida

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

From 1800 to today, the global population has shifted from only three percent living in an urban environment to well over fifty percent in 2020. As a result of urbanization, cities around the world struggle to manage traffic and waste, efficiently distribute utilities, and lower pollution to slow the progression of global warming. Smart city technologies have emerged as a tool to process cities’ various forms of data collected through networks of precisely placed sensors and map solutions to many of the environmental and social issues created by urbanization. For swelling metropolitan areas in the United States, China, and Europe …