Law Commons^™

Digging Up The Dirt: China's Exploitation Of Transgenic Seed Approvals, Lucas A. Westerman

University of Colorado Law Review

In 2013, China rejected shipments of U.S. corn imports due to the presence of an unapproved transgenic trait, creating an international trade disruption that sent ripples throughout the U.S. agriculture industry and grain markets. Syngenta, the seed company that began selling the trait to U.S. farmers prior to receiving China's import approval, largely shouldered the blame. U.S. farmers held Syngenta singularly liable and initiated a class action in an attempt to force Syngenta to pay for the drop in grain prices due to the disruption. The highly publicized domestic legal dispute left China's opportunistic actions largely unnoticed. The time has …

Disparate Impact And Mortgage Lending: A Beginner's Guide, Alex Gano

University of Colorado Law Review

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the federal government began to enforce fair lending laws with a vigor previously unseen. To hold lenders accountable for the racially discriminatory effects of their mortgage lending practices, federal prosecutors and financial regulators applied the theory of disparate impact to fair lending laws for the first time.

Unclear, however, is what legal standards exist to evaluate allegations of discriminatory effects in this industry. No court has ever decided a fair lending case under a theory of disparate impact on its merits. That will likely change soon as major municipalities are pushing the boundaries …

Achieving American Retirement Prosperity By Changing Americans' Thinking About Retirement, Peter H. Huang

Publications

There are many decisions that Americans have to make about retirement before, at, and after retirement. For example, Americans have to decide when to start saving for retirement, how much to save, how to invest those savings, when to retire, when to claim social security, and how to take required minimum distributions from 401(k) plans or Individual Retirement Accounts. Different things can go wrong at each of these decisions for different reasons. Many Americans, for various reasons, including insufficient energy, money, motivation, time, and understanding, do no retirement planning. Some Americans do some retirement planning, yet worry they are doing …

Averting Robot Eyes, Margot Kaminski, Matthew Rueben, William D. Smart, Cindy M. Grimm

Publications

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms.

We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; …

A Contextual Approach To Harmless Error Review, Justin Murray

Publications

Harmless error review is profoundly important, but arguably broken, in the form that courts currently employ it in criminal cases. One significant reason for this brokenness lies in the dissonance between the reductionism of modern harmless error methodology and the diverse normative ambitions of criminal procedure. Nearly all harmless error rules used by courts today focus exclusively on whether the procedural error under review affected the result of a judicial proceeding. I refer to these rules as “result-based harmless error review.” The singular preoccupation of result-based harmless error review with the outputs of criminal processes stands in marked contrast with …

Responsible Resource Development And Prevention Of Sex Trafficking: Safeguarding Native Women And Children On The Fort Berthold Reservation, Kathleen Finn, Erica Gajda, Thomas Perin, Carla Fredericks

Publications

In 2010, large deposits of oil and natural gas were found in the Bakken shale formation, much of which is encompassed by the Fort Berthold Indian reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (“MHA Nation” or “Three Affiliated Tribes” or “the Tribe”). However, rapid oil and gas development has brought an unprecedented rise of violent crime on and near the Fort Berthold reservation. Specifically, the influx of well-paid male oil and gas workers, living in temporary housing often referred to as “man camps,” has coincided with a disturbing increase in sex trafficking of Native women. The social risks …

Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article makes the case against a nascent consensus among feminist and other progressive scholars about men's parental rights. Most progressive proposals to reform parentage law focus on making it easier for men to assert parental rights, especially when they are not married to the mother of the child. These proposals may seek, for example, to require the state to make more extensive efforts to locate biological fathers, to require pregnant women to notify men of their impending paternity, or to require new mothers to give biological fathers access to infants.

These proposals disregard the mother's existing parental rights and …

Siri-Ously 2.0: What Artificial Intelligence Reveals About The First Amendment, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

The First Amendment may protect speech by strong Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this Article, we support this provocative claim by expanding on earlier work, addressing significant concerns and challenges, and suggesting potential paths forward.

This is not a claim about the state of technology. Whether strong AI — as-yet-hypothetical machines that can actually think — will ever come to exist remains far from clear. It is instead a claim that discussing AI speech sheds light on key features of prevailing First Amendment doctrine and theory, including the surprising lack of humanness at its core.

Courts and commentators wrestling with free …

The Algorithm As A Human Artifact: Implications For Legal [Re]Search, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

The results of using the search algorithms in Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel, and Casetext are compared. Six groups of humans created six different algorithms, and the results are a testament to the variability of human problem solving. That variability has implications both for researching and teaching research.

Agency Innovation In Vermont Yankee's White Space, Emily S. Bremer, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

The literature on “agency discretion” has, with a few notable exceptions, largely focused on substantive policy discretion, not procedural discretion. In this essay, we seek to refocus debate on the latter, which we argue is no less worthy of attention. We do so by defining the parameters of what we call Vermont Yankee’s “white space” — the scope of agency discretion to experiment with procedures within the boundaries established by law (and thus beyond the reach of the courts). Our goal is to begin a conversation about the dimensions of this procedural negative space, in which agencies are free …

Administrative Dissents, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Commissioners, like judges, dissent. They do so at length, with vigor, and with persistence. Yet while separate judicial decisions are the subject of a rich literature, their administrative counterparts have long languished in obscurity. A closer look is warranted, however, because studying administrative dissent can enhance our understanding of internal agency operations as well as the relationships between agencies and other actors. This Article presents the results of an original review of separate statements at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dating back four decades. It uses these findings to move beyond two common generalizations about …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton

Publications

The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power, its substantial resources, its privileged access to national security and intelligence information, and its wide variety of expressive roles as commander-in-chief, policymaker, educator, employer, property owner, and more. Precisely because of this power, variety, and ubiquity, the government's speech can both provide great value and inflict great harm to the public. In wartime, more specifically, the government can affirmatively choose to use its voice to inform, inspire, heal, and unite -- or instead to deceive, divide, bully, and silence.

In this essay, I examine the U.S. government's role as …

Entrepreneurial Administration, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.

Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a …

Book Review, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

No abstract provided.

Introducing Govinfo: A New Source For Federal Government Documents Online, Erik Beck

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Prescription For Overcoming Gender Inequity In Complex Litigation: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson

Publications

Having been honored by a request to contribute to a Symposium honoring my talented friend Alafair Burke, I composed this essay describing the various ways the criminal justice system has been depicted in English-language crime fiction. This survey, necessarily highly selective, considers portrayals penned by writers from Dickens to Tana French. Various dimensions of comparison include the authors’ apparent beliefs about the rule of law (from ridiculously idealistic to uncompromisingly cynical), the characters’ professional perspectives (private detective, police officer, prosecutor, defense lawyer, judge, victim, accused), and the protagonists’ status as institutional insiders or outsiders or occupants of the uncomfortable middle. …

A Distinction Without A Difference: Convergence In Claim Construction Standards, Laura E. Dolbow

Publications

No abstract provided.

Fcc: Friend Or Foe? Sdr: Trick Or Treat?, J. Pierre De Vries

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Mixed Blessing In Subsidized Internet Access, Rob Frieden

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Colorado Technology Law Journal

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Right To Be Forgotten: Much Ado About Nothing, Giancarlo F. Frosio

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Droit À L'Oubli: Canadian Perspective On The Global 'Right To Be Forgotten' Debate, Eloise Gratton, Jules Polonetsky

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Emotional Abrogation: How Internet Child Pornography Prosecution Impacts Search And Seizure Of Computers In Other Crimes, Kyriaki Council

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Twitter Against The Islamic State: Edge Provider Transparency In The Spotlight, Ariel Diamond

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Trans(Parency) Pacific Partnership: The Downfall Of The Tpp?, Kelly Hughes

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Preventing The Rogue Bot Journalist: Protection From Nonhuman Defamation, Laurel Witt

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Colorado Technology Law Journal

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Colorado Technology Law Journal

Colorado Technology Law Journal

No abstract provided.