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Articles 1 - 30 of 314
Full-Text Articles in Law
Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan
Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan
Faculty Scholarship
Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death.
Privacy nicks come from the …
The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha
The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha
Faculty Scholarship
Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …
Virtual Energy, Joel B. Eisen, Felix Mormann, Heather E. Payne
Virtual Energy, Joel B. Eisen, Felix Mormann, Heather E. Payne
Faculty Scholarship
From employment to education, many areas of our daily lives have gone virtual, including the virtual workplace and virtual classes. By comparison, the way we generate, deliver, and consume electricity is an anachronism. And the electric industry’s outdated business model and regulatory framework are failing. For the last century-and-a-half, we have relied on ever larger power plants to generate the electricity we consume, often hundreds of miles away from the point of production. But the outsized carbon footprint of these power plants and the need to transmit their output over long distances threaten the electric grid’s reliability, affordability, and long-term …
A Public Technology Option, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
A Public Technology Option, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
Private technology increasingly underpins public governance. But the state’s growing reliance on private firms to provide a variety of complex technological products and services for public purposes brings significant costs for transparency: new forms of governance are becoming less visible and less amenable to democratic control. Transparency obligations initially designed for public agencies are a poor fit for private vendors that adhere to a very different set of expectations.
Aligning the use of technology in public governance with democratic values calls for rethinking, and in some cases abandoning, the legal structures and doctrinal commitments that insulate private vendors from meaningful …
After Ftx: Can The Original Bitcoin Use Case Be Saved?, Mark Burge
After Ftx: Can The Original Bitcoin Use Case Be Saved?, Mark Burge
Faculty Scholarship
Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies spawned by the innovation of blockchain programming have exploded in prominence, both in gains of massive market value and in dramatic market losses, the latter most notably seen in connection with the failure of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022. After years of investment and speculation, however, something crucial has faded: the original use case for Bitcoin as a system of payment. Can cryptocurrency-as-a-payment-system be saved, or are day traders and speculators the actual cryptocurrency future? This article suggests that cryptocurrency has been hobbled by a lack of foundational commercial and consumer-protection law that …
Opinion: How Software Stifles Competition And Innovation, James Bessen
Opinion: How Software Stifles Competition And Innovation, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
Innovation is not what it used to be, and software is part of the reason. In many industries—industries well beyond Big Tech—dominant firms have built large software-based platforms delivering important consumer benefits, but these platforms also slow the rise of innovative rivals, including productive startups.5 Because access to these platforms is limited, competition has been constrained, creating a troubling market dynamic that slows economic growth.
The Midas Touch: Atuahene's "Stategraft" And Unregulated Artificial Intelligence, Sonia Gipson Rankin
The Midas Touch: Atuahene's "Stategraft" And Unregulated Artificial Intelligence, Sonia Gipson Rankin
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s article, A Theory of Stategraft, develops the new theoretical conception of “stategraft.” Professor Atuahene notes that when state agents have engaged in practices of transferring property from persons to the state in violation of the state’s own laws or basic human rights, it sits at the nexus of illegal behavior and revenue-generating activity for the government. Although there are countless instances of “stategraft,” one particularly salient example is when the state uses artificial intelligence to illegally extract resources from people. This Essay will apply stategraft to an algorithm implemented in Michigan that falsely accused recipients of unemployment …
The Role Of Ethical Principles In Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Robert Seamans
The Role Of Ethical Principles In Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Robert Seamans
Faculty Scholarship
Do high-tech startups benefit from developing more ethical AI? AI startups implement policies and take actions to manage ethical issues associated with data collection, storage, and usage and adapt to the norms of their industry. This paper describes these startups' ethics-related actions, including ethical AI policy adoption, and examines how these actions relate to startup performance. We find that merely adopting an ethical AI policy (i.e., a less costly signal) does not relate to increased performance. However, there is evidence that investors reward startups that take more costly preventative pro-ethics actions, like seeking expert guidance, training employees about unconscious bias, …
The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage
The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage
Faculty Scholarship
First Amendment doctrine is becoming disembodied—increasingly detached from human speakers and listeners. Corporations claim that their speech rights limit government regulation of everything from product labeling to marketing to ordinary business licensing. Courts extend protections to commercial speech that ordinarily extended only to core political and religious speech. And now, we are told, automated information generated for cryptocurrencies, robocalling, and social media bots are also protected speech under the Constitution. Where does it end? It begins, no doubt, with corporate and commercial speech. We show, however, that heightened protection for corporate and commercial speech is built on several “artifices” - …
Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Martin Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge
Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Martin Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge
Faculty Scholarship
We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne …
Our Avatars, Ourselves, Mala Chatterjee
Our Avatars, Ourselves, Mala Chatterjee
Faculty Scholarship
On 2013 an episode of the British TV show Black Minvrimagined a harrowing possibility: that technology might allow us to recreate the dead. A young woman named Martha loses her partner in a sudden accident and copes with the loss-or perhaps refuses to cope with itwith the assistance of an unnerving artificial intelligence, trained on her partner's data footprint, that can speak, act, and appear exactly as he did. It's not long before Martha becomes obsessed with the emulation, gathering every remnant of her partner's life to incorporate into the model and spending hours on the phone conversing with his …
Europe's Digital Constitution, Anu Bradford
Europe's Digital Constitution, Anu Bradford
Faculty Scholarship
This Article uncovers the fundamental values underlying the European Union’s expansive set of digital regulations, which in aggregate can be viewed as Europe’s “digital constitution.” This constitution engrains Europe’s human-centric, rights-preserving, democracy-enhancing, and redistributive vision for the digital economy into binding law. This vision stands in stark contrast to the United States, which has traditionally placed its faith in markets and tech companies’ self-regulation. As a result, American tech companies today are regulated primarily by Brussels and not by Washington. By highlighting the distinctiveness and the global reach of the European digital constitution, this Article challenges the common narrative that …
The Failure Of Market Efficiency, William Magnuson
The Failure Of Market Efficiency, William Magnuson
Faculty Scholarship
Recent years have witnessed the near total triumph of market efficiency as a regulatory goal. Policymakers regularly proclaim their devotion to ensuring efficient capital markets. Courts use market efficiency as a guiding light for crafting legal doctrine. And scholars have explored in great depth the mechanisms of market efficiency and the role of law in promoting it. There is strong evidence that, at least on some metrics, our capital markets are indeed more efficient than they have ever been. But the pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost. By focusing our attention narrowly on economic efficiency concerns—such as competition, …
Using Artificial Intelligence In The Law Review Submissions Process, Brenda M. Simon
Using Artificial Intelligence In The Law Review Submissions Process, Brenda M. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
The use of artificial intelligence to help editors examine law review submissions may provide a way to improve an overburdened system. This Article is the first to explore the promise and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence in the law review submissions process. Technology-assisted review of submissions offers many possible benefits. It can simplify preemption checks, prevent plagiarism, detect failure to comply with formatting requirements, and identify missing citations. These efficiencies may allow editors to address serious flaws in the current selection process, including the use of heuristics that may result in discriminatory outcomes and dependence on lower-ranked journals to conduct …
Algorithmic Governance From The Bottom Up, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Algorithmic Governance From The Bottom Up, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a blessing and a curse for governance. In theory, algorithmic governance makes government more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But the emergence of automation in governance also rests on public-private collaborations that expand both public and private power, aggravate transparency and accountability gaps, and create significant obstacles for those seeking algorithmic justice. In response, a nascent body of law proposes technocratic policy changes to foster algorithmic accountability, ethics, and transparency.
This Article examines an alternative vision of algorithmic governance, one advanced primarily by social and labor movements instead of technocrats and firms. …
Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of …
Legal Perspectives On The Streaming Industry: The United States, Irene Calboli
Legal Perspectives On The Streaming Industry: The United States, Irene Calboli
Faculty Scholarship
In the past decade, streaming has become one of the most popular formats of “consuming” entertainment and other content—from music to videos, and concerts, sports, conferences, and other events. In the United States, the majority of consumers subscribe to one or more streaming services today. Popular streaming services include famous platforms such as Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, or Apple TV, Pandora, YouTube, and more. Beside subscription-based services, several of these platforms offer “freemium,” or ad-paid version of their services, which allow users to access content with advertisements for free. As elaborated in several industry reports and other publications, the rise …
Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege
Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege
Faculty Scholarship
The relationship between competition and innovation is difficult to disentangle, as exogenous variation in market structure is rare. The 1952 breakup of Germany’s leading chemical company, IG Farben, represents such a disruption. After the Second World War, the Allies occupying Germany imposed the breakup because of IG Farben’s importance for the German war economy instead of standard antitrust concerns. In technology areas where the breakup reduced concentration, patenting increased strongly, driven by domestic firms unrelated to IG Farben. An analysis of patent texts shows that an increased propensity to patent does not drive the effect. Descriptively, IG Farben’s successors increased …
Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman
Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Although many have written about racial and gender underrepresentation in STEM, no author has ever endeavored to simultaneously quantify the racial and gender gap at universities in the …
Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans
Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans
Faculty Scholarship
Artificial Intelligence startups use training data as direct inputs in product development. These firms must balance numerous trade-offs between ethical issues and data access without substantive guidance from regulators or existing judicial precedence. We survey these startups to determine what actions they have taken to address these ethical issues and the consequences of those actions. We find that 58% of these startups have established a set of AI principles. Startups with data-sharing relationships with high-technology firms; that were impacted by privacy regulations; or with prior (non-seed) funding from institutional investors are more likely to establish ethical AI principles. Lastly, startups …
Bilski And The Information Age A Decade Later, Michael J. Meurer
Bilski And The Information Age A Decade Later, Michael J. Meurer
Faculty Scholarship
In the years from State Street in 1999 to Alice in 2014, legal scholars vigorously debated whether patents should be used to incentivize the invention of business methods. That attention has waned just as economists have produced important new research on the topic, and just as artificial intelligence and cloud computing are changing the nature of business method innovation. This chapter rejoins the debate and concludes that the case for patent protection of business methods is weaker now than it was a decade ago.
Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp
Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp
Faculty Scholarship
The America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) created a robust administrative system—the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)—that provides a route for challenging the validity of granted patents outside of district courts. Congress determined that administrative adjudication of the validity of initial patent grants could be cheaper and more scientifically accurate than district court adjudication of such validity.
For private economic value per patent, few areas of technology can match the biopharmaceutical industry. This is particularly true for small-molecule drugs. A billion-dollar drug monopoly may be protected from competition by a relatively small number of patents. Accordingly, the social cost …
Homography Of Inventorship: Dabus And Valuing Inventors, Jordana Goodman
Homography Of Inventorship: Dabus And Valuing Inventors, Jordana Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
On July 28, 2021, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience ("DAB US") became the first computer to be recognized as a patent inventor. Due to the advocacy of DAB US's inventor, Dr. Stephen Thaler, the world's definition of "inventor" has finally fractured - dividing patent regimes between recognition of machine inventorship and lack thereof This division has sparked many scholarly conversations about inventorship contribution, but none have discussed the implications of a homographic inventorship.
This Article addresses the implications of international homographic inventorship - where countries have different notions and rules concerning patent inventorship - and the …
Legislating Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards
Legislating Data Loyalty, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards
Faculty Scholarship
Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.
In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …
Who Benefits?: How The Aia Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors, Jordana Goodman
Who Benefits?: How The Aia Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors, Jordana Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
Congress enacted the America Invents Act (“AIA”) to bolster economic development, sustain American innovation, and protect American jobs. This pro-business legislation, however, overlooked one actor critical to any successful innovation endeavor: the inventor. The AIA created access barriers, preventing inventors from efficiently and effectively seeking the entire remedy spectrum to which they are entitled. Paul Morinville and others have opined that the new first-to-file system put small inventors out of business, naming the AIA the single worst disaster in the history of the U.S. patent system. Beyond the filing and subject matter changes, the AIA created fundamental access to justice …
Chapter 8: Information Technology And The New Capitalism, James Bessen
Chapter 8: Information Technology And The New Capitalism, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
Harnessing Digitalization for Sustainable Economic Development: Insights for Asia describes digitalization’s role in raising the productive capacities of economies. It examines how digital transformation can enhance trade, financial inclusion, and firm competitiveness, as well as how greater digital infrastructure investment, internet connectivity, and financial and digital education in the region can maximize digitalization’s economic benefits. It also explains the importance of striking the right balance between the regulation and supervision of financial technology to enable innovation and safeguarding financial stability and consumer protection.
Part I of the book seeks to build an understanding of digitalization’s effects on macroeconomic performance, including …
Intellectual Property Exhaustion And Parallel Imports Of Pharmaceuticals: A Comparative And Critical Review, Irene Calboli
Intellectual Property Exhaustion And Parallel Imports Of Pharmaceuticals: A Comparative And Critical Review, Irene Calboli
Faculty Scholarship
This Chapter addresses the topic of intellectual property (IP) exhaustion in the context of the parallel trade of pharmaceuticals. These imports, which are controversial in general, are more complex with respect to pharmaceuticals, which require additional marketing and import authorizations. Nevertheless, individual countries remain free to accept these imports under the flexibility of Article 6 of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects to Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). This Chapter reviews several national approaches—in developed, developing, and least developed countries (LDCs)—from the perspective of the exhaustion of patent rights as well as other IP rights. Through this review, it highlights …
Replicability In Empirical Legal Research, Jason Chin, Kathryn Zeiler
Replicability In Empirical Legal Research, Jason Chin, Kathryn Zeiler
Faculty Scholarship
As part of a broader methodological reform movement, scientists are increasingly interested in improving the replicability of their research. Replicability allows others to perform replications to explore potential errors and statistical issues that might call the original results into question. Little attention, however, has been paid to the state of replicability in the field of empirical legal research (ELR). Quality is especially important in this field because empirical legal researchers produce work that is regularly relied upon by courts and other legal bodies. In this review article, we summarize the current state of ELR relative to the broader movement towards …
Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
A consensus seems to be emerging that algorithmic governance is too opaque and ought to be made more accountable and transparent. But algorithmic governance underscores the limited capacity of transparency law—the Freedom of Information Act and its state equivalents—to promote accountability. Drawing on the critical literature on “open government,” this Essay shows that algorithmic governance reflects and amplifies systemic weaknesses in the transparency regime, including privatization, secrecy, private sector cooptation, and reactive disclosure. These deficiencies highlight the urgent need to reorient transparency and accountability law toward meaningful public engagement in ongoing oversight. This shift requires rethinking FOIA’s core commitment to …
Federal Rules Of Platform Procedure, Rory Van Loo
Federal Rules Of Platform Procedure, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
Tech platforms serve as private courthouses for disputes about speech, lodging, commerce, elections, and reputation. After receiving allegations of defamatory content in top search results, Google must decide between protecting one person's public image and another's profits or speech. Amazon adjudicates disputes between consumers and third-party merchants about defective or counterfeit items. For many small businesses, layoffs and bankruptcy hang in the balance. This Article begins to uncover the processes that these platforms use to resolve disputes and proposes reforms. Other important businesses that intermediate, such as credit card companies ruling on a disputed charge between a merchant and consumer, …