Law Commons^™

Cyber Plungers: Colonial Pipeline And The Case For An Omnibus Cybersecurity Legislation, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The May 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline was a wake-up call for a federal administration slow to realize the dangers that cybersecurity threats pose to our critical national infrastructure. The attack forced hundreds of thousands of Americans along the east coast to stand in endless lines for gas, spiking both prices and public fears. These stressors on our economy and supply chains triggered emergency proclamations in four states, including Georgia. That a single cyberattack could lead to a national emergency of this magnitude was seen by many as proof of even more crippling threats to come. Executive Director of …

Considering "Machine Testimony": The Impact Of Facial Recognition Software On Eyewitness Identifications, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article uses a wrongful conviction lens to compare identifications by machines, notably facial recognition software, with identifications by humans. The Article advocates for greater reliability checks on both before use against a criminal defendant. The Article examines the cascading influence of facial recognition software on eyewitness identifications themselves and the related potential for greater errors. As a solution, the Article advocates the inclusion of eyewitness identification in the Organization of Scientific Area Committees' ("OSAC") review of facial recognition software for a more robust examination and consideration of software and its usage. The Article also encourages police departments to adopt …

When Critical Race Theory Enters The Law & Technology Frame, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Jessica Eaglin intertwines the social construction of race, law and technology. This piece highlights how the approach to use technology as precise tools for criminal administration or objective solutions to societal issues often fails to consider how laws and technologies are created in our racialized society. If we do not consider how race and technology are co-productive, we will fail to reach substantive justice and instead reinforce existing racial hierarchies legitimated by laws.

Forensic Evidence In Arizona: Reforms For Victims And Defendants, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Arizona is nationally recognized as a leader in forensic science. Our state court judges serve on the Legal Resource Committee for the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and provide guidance to NIST’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science. Our Phoenix lab analysts and lab directors have national reputations. And Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law has been home to many leading academics in the field of forensics and the law, among them Michael Saks, David Kaye, and Jay Koehler. We have a robust forensic science community in Arizona and in Phoenix in particular. …

Tangibility As Technology, João Marinotti

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Property law has traditionally relied on tangible boundaries to delineate legal thinghood and to inform the bounds of in rem rights and duties. Unfortunately, property doctrines have fossilized around tangibility, causing fragmentation in the legal treatment of digital assets. In the United States, for example, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) may simultaneously be classified as commodities, securities, currencies, assets, or not property at all, depending on the jurisdiction, domain, or specific asset in question. This fragmented system of overlapping legal treatments increases the information cost of using digital assets, decreases efficiency, and ultimately hinders future innovation.

In this Article, I …

Using The Engagedmd Multimedia Platform To Improve Informed Consent For Ovulation Induction, Intrauterine Insemination, And In Vitro Fertilization, Jody L. Madeira, Jennifer Rehbein, Mindy S. Christianson, Miryoung Lee, J. Preston Parry, Guido Pennings, Steven R. Lindheim Md

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Objective: To study patient and provider feedback on how a multimedia platform (EngagedMD) helps patients to understand the risks and consequences of in vitro fertilization (IVF), ovulation induction (OI), and intrauterine insemination (IUI) treatments and the impact of the informed consent process.

Design: Prospective survey study.

Setting: IVF units in the United States.

Patient(s): Six-thousand three-hundred and thirty-three patients who viewed the multimedia platform before IVF or OI-IUI treatment at 13 U.S. IVF centers and 128 providers.

Intervention(s): Quantitative survey with 17 questions.

Main Outcome Measure(s): Assessment of the impact of a multimedia platform on patient anxiety, comprehension, and satisfaction …

"We Only Spy On Foreigners": The Myth Of A Universal Right To Privacy And The Practice Of Foreign Mass Surveillance, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The digital age brought with it a new epoch in global political life, one neatly coined by Professor Philip Howard as the “pax technica.” In this new world order, government and industry are “tightly bound” in technological and security arrangements that serve to push forward an information and cyber revolution of unparalleled magnitude. While the rise of information technologies tells a miraculous story of triumph over the physical constraints that once shackled mankind, these very technologies are also the cause of grave concern. Intelligence agencies have been recently involved in the exercise of global indiscriminate surveillance, which purports to go …

The New Writs Of Assistance, Ian Samuel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The providers of network services (and the makers of network devices) know an enormous amount about our lives. Because they do, these network intermediaries are being asked with increasing frequency to assist the government in solving crimes or gathering intelligence. Given how much they know about us, if the government can secure the assistance of these intermediaries, it will enjoy a huge increase in its theoretical capacity for surveillance—the ability to learn, in principle, almost anything about anyone. That has the potential to create serious social harm, even assuming that the government continues to adhere to ordinary democratic norms and …

Autonomy In The Age Of Autonomous Vehicles, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay describes intertwined policy challenges related to autonomous vehicle data. The policy goals of promoting privacy, safety, competition, and commerce are all so deeply intertwined, I conclude, that they must be understood and addressed together. This essay does not attempt to solve the problem. Instead, it presents a descriptive snapshot of the current state of play in the industry and closes by raising a set of questions. I hope these questions will prompt useful discussions among policy experts and the public.

The Data-Pooling Problem, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

American innovation policy as expressed through intellectual property law contains a curious gap: it encourages individual research investments, but does little to facilitate cooperation among inventors, which is often a necessary precondition for innovation. This Article provides an in-depth analysis of a policy problem that relates to this gap: increasingly, public and private innovation investments depend upon the willingness of private firms and institutions to cooperatively pool industrial, commercial, and scientific data. Data holders often have powerful disincentives to cooperate with one another, however. As a result, important research that the federal government has sought to encourage through intellectual property …

The Role Of Agency: Compensated Surrogacy And The Institutionalization Of Assisted Reproduction Practices, Jody L. Madeira, June Cabone

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The surrogacy debate often conflates what should be seen as three distinct issues: the permissibility of the practice under any circumstances, the role of for-profit intermediaries in arranging surrogacy, and the role of compensation in influencing decision-making.

For those who see surrogacy as intrinsically objectionable, nothing short of a total ban will suffice. For those who object to the commodification of reproduction or to the role of for-profit agencies in recruiting surrogates, however, the solutions lie in regulation rather than prohibition. Commercial agencies, unlike infertile couples who enter into arrangements with their friends and relatives, are repeat players. They are …

The Art Of Informed Consent: Assessing Patient Perceptions, Behaviors, And Lived Experience Of Ivf And Embryo Disposition Informed Consent Processes, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Technology And The Law On The Use Of Force: New Security Challenges In The Twenty-First Century, By Jackson Maogoto, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Review of:

Technology and the Law on the Use of Force: New Security Challenges in the Twenty-First Century. By Jackson Maogoto. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2015. Pp xviii, 111. Price: $117.71 (Hardcover).

Disclosing Big Data, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article reveals that the law is failing to adequately encourage producers of “big data” to disclose their most innovative work to the public. “Big data” refers to a new industrial and scientific phenomenon that holds the potential to transform diverse industries—from medicine, to energy, to online services. At the heart of this phenomenon are innovative and complex practices by which experts shape featureless digital records into valuable information products. The fact that these big data practices are unlikely to be widely disclosed to the public is worrisome for familiar reasons: the law generally prefers to induce technological disclosure in …

Power And Governance In Patent Pools, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The recent influx of patent pools, research consortia, and similar cooperative groups led by companies at the vanguard of American innovation has raised a pressing question: How does collective action influence the incentive to innovate? This question hinges on how patent pools are internally governed — a topic that has not been deeply examined by legal scholars. Through an original study of fifty-two private agreements, this Article pulls back the veil on patent licensing collectives to examine whether such organizations are designed to encourage long-term innovation.

This study draws on collective patent license agreements spanning the years 1856 to 2013 …

Virtual Designs, Mark D. Janis, Jason J. Du Mont

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Industrial design is migrating to the virtual world, and the design patent system is migrating with it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already granted several thousand design patents on virtual designs, patents that cover the designs of graphical user interfaces for smartphones, tablets, and other products, as well as the designs of icons or other artifacts of various virtual environments. Many more such design patent applications are pending; in fact, U.S. design patent applications for virtual designs represent one of the fastest growing forms of design subject matter at the USPTO.

Our project is the first comprehensive …

The (Data Privacy) Law Hasn't Even Checked In When Technology Takes Off, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Enabling After-Arising Technology, Kevin Emerson Collins

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Claims To Information Qua Information And A Structural Theory Of Section 101, Kevin Emerson Collins

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this article, I start from the premises that claims to inventive information qua information are not and should not be patentable, and I pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I argue that a structural theory of Section l0l of the Patent Act provides a policy-driven, conceptually coherent and statutorily justified interpretation that explains why claims to inventive information qua information should be excluded from the realm of patentable subject matter. In brief, patentable subject matter must be restricted in this manner to preserve the duality of claiming and disclosing upon which the entire patent regime is constructed.

Second, I …

The Reach Of Literal Claim Scope Into After-Arising Technology: On Thing Construction And The Meaning Of Meaning, Kevin Emerson Collins

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Broadly speaking, courts and commentators have offered two theories to explain the relationship between the literal scope of a patent claim and after-arising technology (AAT), i.e. technology that is not discovered until after a claim has been filed. The fixation theory asserts that claim scope is and/or should be fixed on the date a claim is filed and that this fixation makes it impossible for the claim to encompass AA T because a claim must grow in some sense after the filing date in order to encompass AA T. In stark contrast, the growth theory argues that literal claim scope …

Bridging The Data Gap: Balancing The Supply And Demand For Chemical Information, John S. Applegate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Warrantless Location Tracking, Ian Samuel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The ubiquity of cell phones has transformed police investigations. Tracking a suspect's movements by following her phone is now a common but largely unnoticed surveillance technique. It is useful, no doubt, precisely because it is so revealing; it also raises significant privacy concerns. In this Note, I consider what the procedural requirements for cell phone tracking should be by examining the relevant statutory and constitutional law. Ultimately, the best standard is probable cause; only an ordinary warrant can satisfy the text of the statutes and the mandates of the Constitution.

Terrorism, Technology, And Information Privacy: Finding The Balance, Fred H. Cate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Book Review. Gunning, J. And H. Szoke, Eds. The Regulation Of Assisted Reproductive Technology, Jennifer Bryan Morgan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Equilibrium In A Technology-Specific Patent System, Mark D. Janis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Taming Of The Precautionary Principle, John S. Applegate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Maintaining Incentives For Bioprospecting: The Occasional Need For A Right To Lie, Robert H. Heidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Building on a model by Anthony Kronman, the author argues that biotechnological researchers searching for valuable cells should occasionally be allowed to deceive research subjects whose cells prove valuable. The wish to preserve proper incentives for these searches justifies this exception to the law's usual abhorrence of deception. The subject's ability to "hold up" the researcher once the subject learns of his cells' value combined with the law's likely refusal to force an unwilling subject to continue his cooperation with the researcher poses risks for biotechnologists that other producers of information do not face and that the right to deceive …

The Eu Data Protection Directive, Information Privacy, And The Public Interest, Fred H. Cate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Uses Of Scientific Information In Environmental Decisionmaking, A. Dan Tarlock, Marcia R. Gelpe

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Law And Science In Our Age, A. A. Fatouros

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.