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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Promise And Limits Of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, And The Techlash, Salomé Viljoen Sep 2021

The Promise And Limits Of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, And The Techlash, Salomé Viljoen

Articles

In response to widespread skepticism about the recent rise of “tech ethics”, many critics have called for legal reform instead. In contrast with the “ethics response”, critics consider the “lawfulness response” more capable of disciplining the excesses of the technology industry. In fact, both are simultaneously vulnerable to industry capture and capable of advancing a more democratic egalitarian agenda for the information economy. Both ethics and law offer a terrain of contestation, rather than a predetermined set of commitments by which to achieve more democratic and egalitarian technological production. In advancing this argument, the essay focuses on two misunderstandings common …


The Case For Banning (And Mandating) Ransomware Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Adam B. Shniderman Aug 2021

The Case For Banning (And Mandating) Ransomware Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Adam B. Shniderman

Law & Economics Working Papers

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly pervasive and disruptive. Not only are they shutting down (or at least “holding up”) businesses and local governments all around the country, they are disrupting institutions in many sectors of the U.S. economy — from school systems, to medical facilities, to critical elements of the U.S. energy infrastructure as well as the food supply chain. Ransomware attacks are also growing more frequent and the ransom demands more exorbitant. Those ransom payments are increasingly being covered by insurance. That insurance offers coverage for a variety of cyber-related losses, including many of the costs arising out of …


Illegal Sex Toy Patents, W. Nicholson Price Ii May 2021

Illegal Sex Toy Patents, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Reviews

In Patenting Pleasure, Professors Sarah Rajec and Andrew Gilden highlight a surprising incongruity: while many areas of U.S. law are profoundly hostile to sexuality in general and the technology of sex in particular, the patent system is not. Instead, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has over the decades issued thousands of patents on sex toys—from vibrators to AI, and everything in between. This incongruity is especially odd because patent law has long incorporated a doctrine that specifically tied patentability to the usefulness of the invention, and up until the end of the 20th century one strand of that …


Problematic Interactions Between Ai And Health Privacy, W. Nicholson Price Ii Mar 2021

Problematic Interactions Between Ai And Health Privacy, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Law & Economics Working Papers

The interaction of artificial intelligence (“AI”) and health privacy is a two-way street. Both directions are problematic. This Article makes two main points. First, the advent of artificial intelligence weakens the legal protections for health privacy by rendering deidentification less reliable and by inferring health information from unprotected data sources. Second, the legal rules that protect health privacy nonetheless detrimentally impact the development of AI used in the health system by introducing multiple sources of bias: collection and sharing of data by a small set of entities, the process of data collection while following privacy rules, and the use of …


Designing Legal Experiences, Maximilian A. Bulinski, J.J. Prescott Feb 2021

Designing Legal Experiences, Maximilian A. Bulinski, J.J. Prescott

Book Chapters

Technological advancements are improving how courts operate by changing the way they handle proceedings and interact with litigants. Court Innovations is a socially minded software startup that enables citizens, law enforcement, and courts to resolve legal matters through Matterhorn, an online communication and dispute resolution platform. Matterhorn was conceived at the University of Michigan Law School and successfully piloted in two Michigan district courts beginning in 2014. The platform now operates in over 40 courts and in at least eight states, and it has facilitated the resolution of more than 40,000 cases to date. These numbers will continue to grow …


How Much Can Potential Jurors Tell Us About Liability For Medical Artificial Intelligence?, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Sara Gerke, I. Glenn Cohen Jan 2021

How Much Can Potential Jurors Tell Us About Liability For Medical Artificial Intelligence?, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Sara Gerke, I. Glenn Cohen

Articles

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly entering medical practice, whether for risk prediction, diagnosis, or treatment recommendation. But a persistent question keeps arising: What happens when things go wrong? When patients are injured, and AI was involved, who will be liable and how? Liability is likely to influence the behavior of physicians who decide whether to follow AI advice, hospitals that implement AI tools for physician use, and developers who create those tools in the first place. If physicians are shielded from liability (typically medical malpractice liability) when they use AI tools, even if patient injury results, they are more likely …


Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Arti K. Rai Jan 2021

Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Arti K. Rai

Articles

Artificial intelligence and machine learning represent powerful tools in many fields, ranging from criminal justice to human biology to climate change. Part of the power of these tools arises from their ability to make predictions and glean useful information about complex real-world systems without the need to understand the workings of those systems.


Persuasion About/Without International Law: The Case Of Cybersecurity Norms, Steven R. Ratner Jan 2021

Persuasion About/Without International Law: The Case Of Cybersecurity Norms, Steven R. Ratner

Book Chapters

International law on cybersecurity is characterized by at best a thin consensus on the existence of rules, their meaning, and the desirability and content of new rules. This legal landscape results in a unique pattern of argumentation and persuasion by states and non-state actors both in advocating for a regulatory scheme for cyber activity and in reacting to malicious cyber acts. By examining argumentation in the absence of a generally agreed legal framework, this chapter seeks to provide new insights into the motivations for and effects of international legal argumentation in shaping debates and behavior. After describing the legal landscape …