Law Commons^™

Indiana Law’S Lubin, Sun Help Advise Kosovo Government On Country’S Cybersecurity Act, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

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 …

Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

New technologies bring with them many promises, but also a series of new problems. Even though these problems are new, they are not unlike the types of problems that regulators have long addressed in other contexts. The lessons from regulation in the past can thus guide regulatory efforts today. Regulators must focus on understanding the problems they seek to address and the causal pathways that lead to these problems. Then they must undertake efforts to shape the behavior of those in industry so that private sector managers focus on their technologies’ problems and take actions to interrupt the causal pathways. …

Facing Injustice: How Face Recognition Technology May Increase The Incidence Of Misidentifications And Wrongful Convictions, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does law enforcement use of face recognition technology paired with eyewitness identifications increase the incidence of wrongful convictions in U.S. criminal law? This Article explores this critical question and posits that the answer may be yes. Facial recognition is frequently used by law enforcement agencies to help generate investigative leads that are then presented to eyewitnesses for positive identification. But erroneous eyewitness accounts are the number one cause of wrongful convictions, and the use of face recognition to generate investigative leads may create the conditions for erroneous eyewitness identifications to take place. This is because face recognition technology is designed …

Addressing The Divisions In Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This is the text of an interview conducted in writing by Professor A. Douglas Melamed, Stanford Law School.

A Human Being Wrote This Law Review Article: Gpt-3 And The Practice Of Law, Amy B. Cyphert

Law Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence tools can now “write” in such a sophisticated manner that they fool people into believing that a human wrote the text. None are better at writing than GPT-3, released in 2020 for beta testing and coming to commercial markets in 2021. GPT-3 was trained on a massive dataset that included scrapes of language from sources ranging from the NYTimes to Reddit boards. And so, it comes as no surprise that researchers have already documented incidences of bias where GPT-3 spews toxic language. But because GPT-3 is so good at “writing,” and can be easily trained to write in …

Towards A Calibrated Trust-Based Approach To The Use Of Facial Recognition Technology, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The use of facial recognition technology has given rise to much debate relating to issues concerning privacy infringements, bias and inaccuracies of data and outputs, possibilities of covert use, the lack of data security and the problem of function creep. Certain states and jurisdictions have called for bans and moratoria on the use of facial recognition technology. This paper argues that a blanket ban on facial recognition technology would be overly precautionary without fully considering the wide range of uses and benefits of the innovation. To promote its acceptance, trust in facial recognition technology should be developed in a calibrated …

How Analogizing Socio-Legal Responses To Organ Transplantation Can Further The Legalization Of Reproductive Genetic Innovation, Myrisha S. Lewis

Faculty Publications

The Nobel Foundation emphasized the significance of genetic innovation to society, science, and medicine by awarding the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to “the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.” This Article focuses on “reproductive genetic innovation,” a term that includes cytoplasmic transfer, mitochondrial transfer, and germline or heritable gene editing techniques that are all categorized as “experimental” in the United States. These techniques all use in vitro fertilization, a legal and widely available practice. Yet reproductive genetic innovation has resulted in controversy and numerous barriers including a recurring federal budget rider, threats of federal enforcement action, and the unavailability of federal funding. …

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

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 …

Special Matters: Filtering Privileged Materials In Federal Prosecutions, Christina Frohock

Articles

This Article reviews the U.S. Department of Justice's toolbox for handling potentially privileged materials, with close attention to the evolution from filter teams to the Special Matters Unit in fraud prosecutions. Significant case opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits reveal the judiciary's diverse views on filter teams. The recent case of United States v. Esformes in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, now on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, illustrates how a filter team can fall short and draw unflattering attention to the Department of Justice. In the …

The Diffusion Of The Sandbox Approach To Disruptive Innovation And Its Limitations, Chang-Hsien Tsai, Ching-Fu Lin, Han-Wei Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Faced with the challenges posed by disruptive technologies and innovations, many countries have adopted different regulatory approaches, institutional structures, and norms to maximize benefits and mitigate risks. Among such regulatory endeavors, the regulatory sandbox, first adopted by the United Kingdom in its financial sector, stands out as a prominent mechanism to strike a balance between promoting technological innovations and ensuring market order. Given the promises of the regulatory sandbox, there has been a gradual embrace of this approach by governments across continents, arguably indicating a global norm diffusion. There is also a trans-governmental endeavor to facilitate cooperation among regulators and …

Biden Administration U.S. Space Force Policy Literature, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides details on U.S. Space Force policy literature produced by the Biden Administration during its first eight months. Includes announcements that the Biden Administration will continue this new armed services branch begun during the Trump Administration. Features congressional testimony of Biden Administration officials such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Wilson and Air Force Space Command leader General James Dickinson, the text of Space Force's 2021 Digital Force Vision document, congressionally approved FY 2022 space force budget figures, congressional committee comments and report requirements contained in emerging defense spending legislation, the emergence of collaboration between Space Force and universities such as …

The Promises And Perils Of Robo-Advisers: Challenges And Regulatory Approaches, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Artificial intelligence is changing the operation and business model of many intermediaries in financial markets. Investing through online automated platforms, known as robo-advisers, is becoming very popular worldwide. In fact, some studies estimate that robo-advisers will be managing USD 4.6 trillion by 2022. This chapter analyses the promises and perils of robo-advice, as well as the challenges and regulatory responses adopted in various countries and regions around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Singapore. It will conclude by showing that, despite the existence of various legal and challenges …

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

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 …

Searching For Accountability Under Fisa: Internal Separation Of Powers And Surveillance Law, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Designing Effective Regulation For Blockchain-Based Markets, Heather Hughes

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Effective regulation of blockchain-based markets calls for coordination among lawyers, businesses, coders, and lawmakers. How might we achieve adequate coordination and why is it important? This Article takes up these questions, using one example of an increasingly popular type of blockchain-based financial transaction: the issuance of tokens backed by off-chain assets. The objective here is not to advocate for a particular regulatory treatment for asset tokenization, but rather to use this deal type as a springboard to discuss what "effective regulation" means in the context of blockchain-enabled markets.

Blockchain & Secured Transactions Proceedings Of The 2021 Spring Conference: The Impact Of Blockchain On The Practice Of Law: Presentation 4, Heather Hughes

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Secured transactions are governed by Uniform Commercial Code Article 9. UCC Article 9 governs any extension of credit secured by personalty. If you think about it, this statute governs a massive swath of market activity: secured credit facilities, margin trading of securities, asset securitizations, and purchase money transactions for goods, I could name more. But it's a statute that's very wide ranging. Given this expansive scope, blockchain-based transaction platforms have numerous implications for lawyers who deal with secured transactions. In my brief time here, I'm going to identify just two of them.

Trust In And Ethical Design Of Carebots: The Case For Ethics Of Care, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The paper has two main objectives: to examine the challenges arising from the use of carebots as well as to discuss how the design of carebots can deal with these challenges. First, it notes that the use of carebots to take care of the physical and mental health of the elderly, children and the disabled as well as to serve as assistive tools and social companions encounter a few main challenges. They relate to the extent of the care robots’ ability to care for humans, potential deception by robot morphology and communications, (over)reliance on or attachment to robots, and the …

The Growth & Regulatory Challenges Of Decentralized Finance, Aaron J. Wright

Articles

Proceedings of the 2021 Spring Conference: The Impact of Blockchain on the Practice of Law Panel 1: The Growth & Regulatory Challenges of Decentralized Finance

Sharing Technology And Vaccine Doses To Address Global Vaccine Inequity And End The Covid-19 Pandemic, Matthew M. Kavanagh, Lawrence O. Gostin, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although COVID-19 cases are declining rapidly in the US, they have reached record highs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The nucleus of the pandemic has shifted decidedly to the global south. The South-East Asia region and Latin America now represent 75% of global weekly deaths. On June 22, the Latin America region reported more than 1 million weekly new cases and 30 000 new deaths. Latin America has the highest deaths per capita, where deaths in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru have reached 177 to 564 per hundred thousand. The Africa region has had increasing numbers …

The Rise Of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Opportunities And Challenges, Aaron J. Wright

Articles

The Author explores the nature of DAOs and highlights several areas where states and regulators can adapt existing legal regimes to potentially accommodate DAOs. Part of the Blockchain & Procedural Law seminars (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law).

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

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, …

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 …

Discourse On Digital Government And Regulation: A Bibliometric Analysis, Prakoso Bhairawa Putera, Amelya Gustina

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study aims to discuss digital government and regulation, analyzed through the bibliometric approach with the Scopus database for the last 20 years and visualized through the VOSviewer software version 1.6.16. The results indicate that the topic of e-government has become essentially prominent and has been the most discussed in the past two decades. Approximately 41.1% of digital government and regulation articles are classified under the subject area of 'Computer Science', continued by Social Sciences (18.3%), and Business, Management and Accounting (10.2%), with the majority of being 'All Open Access' (46%). The trend of publication in this field includes the …

A Literary Analysis Of The Origin Of Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Its Advancements, Philosophical, Ethical, Sociocultural, And Political Aspects; An Investigation Of The Underlying Attributes That Affect One’S Views On Hesc Research To Resolve Turkey And Brazil’S Hesc Policy, Religious, And Cultural Conflicts, Haleema Shamsuddin

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are cells derived from 5-day human embryos and are self-renewing cell lines that change into any type of cell in the body, a trait called pluripotency. hESCs have almost unlimited clinical and medical research potential. Despite the great therapeutic promise of hESC research, it comes with a controversial ethical debate due to its involvement with the destruction of the human embryo. The central argument revolves around the question of whether or not these human embryos should be ascribed equal moral status to fully developed humans. This thesis aims to analyze the origin and advancements of …

Scientific Gerrymandering & Bifurcation, Katrina F. Kuh, Megan Edwards, Frederick A. Mcdonald

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Environmental litigation must often examine the propriety of corporate conduct in areas of scientific complexity. In the second generation of climate nuisance suits, for example, allegations of corporate participation in the climate disinformation campaign are woven into plaintiffs’ claims. Toxic tort suits, currently and most notably in the Roundup and PFAS litigation, present another area of environmental litigation grappling with the legal ramifications of alleged corporate deception about scientific information. Toxic tort suits often surface allegations, and in many cases disturbing evidence, of what we term corporate “scientific gerrymandering”— corporate efforts to finesse, slow, or even mislead scientific understanding of …

Digital Readiness Index For Arbitration Institutions: Challenges And Implications For Dispute Resolution Under The Belt And Road Initiative, Allison Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Post-COVID-19, a paradigm shift has occurred in the adoption of technology in arbitration. Leading arbitral institutions have adapted quickly, highlighting the foresight of institutions who have existing technological infrastructure in place. This article proposes a ‘Digital Readiness Index’, which aims to evaluate arbitral institutions on their level of digital readiness based on five evaluative indicators. Cross referenced against Institute for Management Development (IMD’s) 2019 World Digital Competitiveness Rankings, the findings reveal synergies between an economy’s digital competitiveness and the adoption of technology in dispute resolution. To further the development of dispute resolution processes under the Belt and Road Initiative, strategic …