Law Commons^™

Privacy Is Not Dead: Expressively Using Law To Push Back Against Corporate Deregulators And Meaningfully Protect Data Privacy Rights, Alexander F. Krupp

Georgia Law Review

When the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed in 2016, it represented the world’s first major comprehensive data privacy law and kicked off a conversation about how we think about the right to privacy in the modern age. The law granted a broad range of rights to EU citizens, including a right to have companies delete data they collect about you, a right not to have your personal information sold, and a range of other rights all geared towards individual autonomy over personal data. All the while, platform companies like Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Amazon have taken …

The Color Of Pain: Racial Bias In Pain And Suffering Damages, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

For more than half a century, our legal system has formally eschewed race-based discrimination, and nearly every field of law has evolved to increase protections for minority groups historically burdened by racial prejudice. Yet, even today, juries in tort actions routinely consider a plaintiff’s race when calculating compensatory tort damages, and they do so in a manner that systematically results in lower awards to Black plaintiffs than to White. This Article examines this problem, zeroing in on the specific issue of racial bias in calculations of tort damages for pain and suffering.

The severity of a plaintiff’s injury is commonly …

The Double-Side Of Deepfakes: Obstacles And Assets In The Fight Against Child Pornography, Abigail Olson

Georgia Law Review

Deepfake technology recently took the internet by storm. Although they can be used for both innocuous and nefarious purposes, deepfakes overwhelmingly depict people who appear to be creating nonconsensual pornography. The rise of deepfake technology must be accounted for in the existing federal legal framework, specifically in cases implicating images of children. While deepfakes’ malicious uses ought to be criminalized, exceptions should be made to use deepfake technology as a tool to enforce and deter purveyors of child pornography. This Note explores what the emerging legal framework addressing deepfakes should look like and considers the importance of using the “flipside” …

Portraits Of Bankruptcy Filers, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne

Georgia Law Review

One in ten adult Americans has turned to the consumer bankruptcy system for help. For almost forty years, the only systematic data collection about the people who file bankruptcy has come from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), for which we serve as co-principal investigators. In this Article, we use CBP data from 2013 to 2019 to describe who is using the bankruptcy system, providing the first comprehensive overview of bankruptcy filers in thirty years. We use principal component analysis to leverage these data to identify distinct groups of people who file bankruptcy. This technique allows us to situate the distinctions …

Jus Sanguinis Or Just Plain Discrimination? Rejecting A Biological Requirement For Birthright Citizenship Of Children Born Abroad To Same-Sex Couples Via Assisted Reproductive Technology, Thomas Evans

Georgia Law Review

Until recently, the State Department had a policy deeming children born abroad to married same-sex couples to be children born out of wedlock. Then, applying the statute for children born out of wedlock with more rigorous requirements, the State Department only allowed citizenship to pass through a biological relationship between the biological parent and the child.

Although the State Department updated this policy in May 2021 to allow for birthright citizenship of children born abroad to married same-sex couples, the new policy does not go far enough. This Note argues that Congress should amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to …

Agents Of Bioshield: The Fda, Emergency Use Authorizations, And Public Trust, Kirstiana Perryman

Georgia Law Review

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic spurred the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to utilize the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) procedure more than ever before. The pandemic pushed the relatively obscure procedure into public consciousness, making it a frequent topic of discussion and debate. The EUA procedure permits the FDA Commissioner to authorize the introduction of drugs, devices, or biological products into interstate commerce for use in an actual or potential emergency. To issue an authorization, the FDA Commissioner must determine that it is “reasonable to believe,” based on the “totality of the evidence,” that the product “may be effective.” This standard …

Deadly 'Toxins': A National Empirical Study Of Racial Bias And Future Dangerousness Determinations, Justin D. Levinson, G. Ben Cohen, Koichi Hioki

Georgia Law Review

Since the beginning of the modern Death Penalty Era, one of the most important—and fraught—areas of capital punishment has been the so-called “future dangerousness” determination, a threshold inquiry that literally rests the defendant’s life or death on jurors’ predictions of the future. An overwhelming majority of capital executions have occurred in jurisdictions that embrace the perceived legitimacy of the future dangerousness inquiry, despite its obvious flaws and potential connection to the age-old racial disparities that continue to plague capital punishment. This Article presents, and empirically tests, the hypothesis that jurors’ future dangerousness assessments cannot be separated from their racial and …

Going, Going, Gone: Takings Clause Challenges To The Cdc’S Eviction Moratorium, Meredith Bradshaw

Georgia Law Review

In September 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services issued a residential eviction moratorium to prevent the further spread of COVID- 19. One year later, the U.S. Supreme Court terminated the moratorium. During the year that the moratorium was in effect, landlords across the country filed lawsuits against the CDC because they were unable to evict tenants who did not satisfy their rental obligations. Because the moratorium allowed tenants to remain on the property without paying rent, some landlords argued that the regulation effected …

The Expressiveness Of Regulatory Trade-Offs, Benjamin M. Chen

Georgia Law Review

Trade-offs between a sacred value—like human life—
against a secular one—like money—are considered taboo.
People are supposed to be offended by such trade-offs and to
punish those who contemplate them. Yet the last decades in the
United States have witnessed the rise of the cost-benefit state.
Most major rules promulgated today undergo a regulatory
impact analysis, and agencies monetize risks as grave as those
to human life and values as abstract as human dignity.
Prominent academics and lawmakers advocate the weighing of
costs and benefits as an element of rational regulation. The
cost-benefit revolution is a technocratic coup, however, if …

Bail And Mass Incarceration, Samuel Wiseman

Georgia Law Review

It is widely known that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, and the causes and ramifications of mass incarceration are the subject of intense study. It is also increasingly widely recognized that the high rates of pretrial detention, often linked to the use of money bail, are unjust, expensive, and often counterproductive. But, so far, the links between money bail, pretrial detention, and mass incarceration have been largely unexplored. Our criminal justice system relies primarily on plea bargains to secure convictions at a relatively low cost. And, as shown by recent empirical work, the …