Law Commons^™

Computationally Assessing Suspicion, Wesley M. Oliver, Morgan A. Gray, Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Law enforcement officers performing drug interdiction on interstate highways have to decide nearly every day whether there is reasonable suspicion to detain motorists until a trained dog can sniff for the presence of drugs. The officers’ assessments are often wrong, however, and lead to unnecessary detentions of innocent persons and the suppression of drugs found on guilty ones. We propose a computational method of evaluating suspicion in these encounters and offer experimental results from early efforts demonstrating its feasibility. With the assistance of large language and predictive machine learning models, it appears that judges, advocates, and even police officers could …

Machine Learning-Based Medical Devices: The Fda’S Regulation, Requirements, And Restrictions, Charli Beam

Journal of Law and Health

The FDA should create functional regulations for the growing number of machine learning medical devices. The healthcare system is increasingly using these devices for diagnosis. Machine learning devices trained on biased data sets are susceptible to furthering certain types of bias and generating flawed outcomes. The FDA should require ML medical devices to include a label that describes the demographics of the tested population. If manufacturers fail to include this information, the FDA could determine the label false or misleading under §502 of the FD&C Act and stop sales of the device. After approval, the FDA should use §814.89(2) and …

Robophobia, Andrew Keane Woods

University of Colorado Law Review

Robots-machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence-play an increasingly important role in society, often supplementing or even replacing human judgment. Scholars have rightly become concerned with the fairness, accuracy, and humanity of these systems. Indeed, anxiety about machine bias is at a fever pitch. While these concerns are important, they nearly all run in one direction: we worry about robot bias against humans; we rarely worry about human bias against robots.

This is a mistake. Not because robots deserve, in some deontological sense, to be treated fairly-although that may be true-but because our bias against nonhuman deciders is bad for us. For example, …

Saliency, Anchors & Frames: A Multicomponent Damages Experiment, Bernard Chao

Michigan Technology Law Review

Modern technology products contain thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of different features. Nonetheless, when electronics manufacturers are sued for patent infringement, these suits typically accuse only one feature, or in more complex suits, a handful of features, of actual patent infringement. But damages verdicts often do not reflect the relatively small contribution an individual patent makes to an infringing product. One study observed that verdicts in these types of cases average 9.98% of the price of the entire product. While both courts and commentators have blamed the law of patent damages, the role cognitive biases play in these outsized damages …

Instrument Choice, Carbon Emissions, And Information, Michael Wara

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This Article examines the consequences of a previously unrecognized difference between pollutant cap-and-trade schemes and pollution taxes. Implementation of cap-and-trade relies on a forecast of future emissions, while implementation of a pollution tax does not. Realistic policy designs using either regulatory instrument almost always involve a phase-in over time to avoid economic disruption. Cap-and-trade accomplishes this phase-in via a limit on emissions that falls gradually below the forecast of future pollutant emissions. Emissions taxation accomplishes the same via a gradually increasing levy on pollution. Because of the administrative complexity of establishing an emissions trading market, cap-and-trade programs typically require between …

Judges, Juries, And Patent Cases - An Emprical Peek Inside The Black Box, Kimberly A. Moore

Michigan Law Review

The frequency with which juries participate in patent litigation has skyrocketed recently. At the same time, there is a popular perception that the increasing complexity of technology being patented (especially in the electronic, computer software, biological and chemical fields) has made patent trials extremely difficult for lay juries to understand. These developments have sparked extensive scholarly debate and increasing skepticism regarding the role of juries in patent cases. Juries have participated in some aspects of patent litigation since the enactment of the first patent statute in 1790, which provided for "such damages as shall be assessed by a jury." The …