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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage
The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
First Amendment doctrine is becoming disembodied—increasingly detached from human speakers and listeners. Corporations claim that their speech rights limit government regulation of everything from product labeling to marketing to ordinary business licensing. Courts extend protections to commercial speech that ordinarily extended only to core political and religious speech. And now, we are told, automated information generated for cryptocurrencies, robocalling, and social media bots are also protected speech under the Constitution. Where does it end? It begins, no doubt, with corporate and commercial speech. We show, however, that heightened protection for corporate and commercial speech is built on several “artifices” - …
Autonomous Corporate Personhood, Carla L. Reyes
Autonomous Corporate Personhood, Carla L. Reyes
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Several states have recently changed their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses—businesses operated entirely through computer code. A variety of international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks— and a model law—for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the …
Sanctifying Secrecy: The Mythology Of The Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege, Elizabeth G. Thornburg
Sanctifying Secrecy: The Mythology Of The Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege, Elizabeth G. Thornburg
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This article surveys the traditional justifications for giving corporations the benefit of attorney-client privilege. It rejects both moral and utilitarian explanations and argues that, far from being beneficial or benign, the privilege actually does great harm to the truth-seeking function of litigation and imposes tremendous transaction costs on the litigants and on the judicial system as a whole.