Law Commons^™

Regulating Manipulative Design Is Not Preempted By Cda 230 Or The First Amendment, Brett Frischmann, Peter Ormerod

Faculty Publications

For over two decades, there has been a heated debate among legal scholars, activists, judges, and others about the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A persistent theme in those debates has been hyperbolic claims about the necessity of immunity from state laws for digital tech platforms and fearmongering that anything less than maximum immunity will destroy the Internet.

This Article argues that states retain considerable discretion to regulate digital platforms’ design and engineering decisions. We argue that manipulation, engineered behavior, and even habituation and normalization of engineered behavior by digital platforms are content-agnostic harms attributable to …

What The Supreme Court Didn’T Answer About Trump’S Section 301 Tariffs |, Marc L. Busch, Barry Appleton

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Rocha V. State Of Nevada, 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 48 (Jul. 02, 2026), Rocco Marino

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

A petitioner may file a new petition for judicial review of an adverse agency ruling following a district court’s remand of the matter and final administrative proceedings.

Clark V. Marin, 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 47 (July 2, 2026), Francesca Manz

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Nevada Supreme Court held that contingency fees are incurred as work is performed, requiring NRCP 68 attorney-fee awards to exclude pre-offer work, and that a judgment debtor’s claims against an insurer become assignable when final judgment is entered.

Lytle Trust Et Al V. Gerry R. Zobrist & Jolin G. Zobrist Family Trust Et Al, 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 50 (July 2, 2026), William Mcadorey

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Under NRS 22.100(3), attorney fee awards under the lodestar method are generally calculated using the billed rate the prevailing party is actually charged, absent distinct circumstances.

An Evaluation Of The “Police Response To Uncrewed Aircraft Systems Operations” Online Training Program, Anthony Galante, Leila Halawi

Publications

This study evaluates the impact of the “Police Response to Uncrewed Aircraft Systems Operations” online training program of officers from the Daytona Beach Police Department (DBPD). By measuring the effectiveness of the training through pretest and posttest assessments and considering variables such as educational background, length of service, and rank, this research underscores the training’s potential to enhance UAS response capabilities. Employing a self-selection sampling method, the study engaged 82 voluntary participants from the DBPD, revealing significant improvement across all groups in UAS knowledge and confidence levels. Despite limitations, these findings offer compelling evidence of the training’s efficacy and advocate …

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

Trial By Fire: Disaster Justice And Lessons Learned, Clifford Villa

Faculty Scholarship

Disaster Justice reflects the intersection of environmental justice and disaster law. The study of disaster justice is becoming increasingly essential as disasters become more frequent and devastating in the face of accelerating climate change. Disaster law is marked by statutes such as the federal Stafford Act and by theory such as the “disaster cycle” of readiness, response, and recovery. Environmental justice recognizes that the distribution of harms such as bad air or water quality may be distributed inequitably among groups such as low-income populations or racial minorities. In similar fashion, the adverse impacts of disasters may also be distributed inequitably …

Nevada Legal History: Trailblazing Nevada African American Attorneys, Bryan K. Scott

External Articles & Tributes

No abstract provided.

Made In America, Hidden By Ai: Ai Shopping Chatbots Reveal How Amazon And Walmart Hurt American Manufacturers And Deceive Shoppers, Erie Meyer, Zachary Harris

Center for Law and the Economy

This article investigates the capabilities of two AI shopping agents — Alexa for Shopping and Sparky, operated by Amazon and Walmart respectively — to identify country of origin for products on their respective platforms and flag potential “Made in USA” misrepresentations — where products with “Made in USA” in their title or listing have another country or “imported” listed as their country of origin. This article finds that (1) Amazon and Walmart have the technical capability to detect and flag “Made in USA” fraud; (2) “Made in USA” fraud appears to be common on both Amazon and Walmart; (3) Amazon …

Information For Submitting Articles To Law Reviews & Journals, Allen Rostron, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

The following are two charts useful for the law review/journal article submission process. The first chart contains information gathered from the journals' websites about the following topics: Methods for submitting an article (such as by e-mail, Scholastica, or regular mail); any special formatting requirements; how to request an expedited review; and how to withdraw an article after it has been accepted for publication elsewhere. Where it is announced, the chart includes whether a journal accepts submissions by students from other law schools.

Are You Smarter Than A 1l?, Jennifer L. Dubetz

Law Faculty Scholarship

Do you ever wonder “what in the library is obvious to law students but not to me and conversely, what is obvious to me but not to law students?”

I decided to find out by sitting in on some of the 1L Introduction to Legal Research classes.

This turned out to be a valuable experience in which I increased my ability to use the library’s print and digital offerings, learned how class formats and technology have changed in the years since I was a student, and I developed a good understanding of what a research plan and log are and …

Active Limited Partners Flunk Functional Test, Karen Burke

UF Law Faculty Publications

In 1977, Congress enacted section 1402(a)(13), which exempts limited partners "as such" from self-employment tax on their share of partnership income. A half century later, active investment management professionals have claimed limited partner status to avoid self-employment tax on investment management fees, seemingly standing this anti-abuse rule on its head. While the Treasury twice issued proposed regulations to clarify and modernize the definition of a limited partner, these attempts encountered a firestorm of protest. The Tax Court's controversial Soroban decision rejected claims that state-law limited partners are automatically exempt from self-employment tax, holding that a functional analysis is required to …

Can Laws Be Flexible? Rethinking Legislation For Innovation, Nicholson W. Price Ii, Nick K. Schneider, Ariel Dora Stem, Jochen K. Lennerz

Articles

Agile legislation adapts principles from agile software development to lawmaking, emphasizing iteration, multi-stakeholder feedback, and embedded revision. We outline this learning-oriented governance model using three case studies: Germany’s stepwise digital health legislation, the EU AI Act, and U.S. FDA user-fee reauthorization. These examples highlight legislative designs that enable structured generation of real-world data and evidence during implementation, informing regulatory interpretation and iterative refinement in rapidly evolving technological domains.

The Coming Privatization Of Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

For more than a century, American corporate law has revolved around a simple competitive premise: State governments supply corporate law while companies choose their state of incorporation, and the market rewards the state offering the best corporate law product. Delaware’s longstanding market dominance (especially for public companies) is often explained through the confluence of its unusually attractive institutional package: expert judges, extensive precedent, a specialized bar, an enabling statute, and a legislature that — at least traditionally — treats corporate law as something to be calibrated technocratically rather than politicized.

Illusory Copyright And The Private Censorship Of Art History, Peter J. Karol

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article makes a simple but in its own way startling claim: much 20th century U.S. visual art is not protected by copyright. These works were regularly “published” when they were first exhibited for sale in commercial galleries, often marketed through contemporaneous illustrated catalogs, almost always without copyright notice of any kind. They were thereby placed in the public domain. What is remarkable is the extent to which this reality has been ignored by artist estates and foundations and other art industry players. They operate on the incorrect, self-serving and generally unexamined assumption that most 20th century American art is …

The Contested Contingent Constitution: Plutocrats, Right-Wing Populists, And Labor Rights In The U.S., Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional labor rights have long been negligible in the United States. Now, with the ascendance of Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism, even statutory labor rights are under threat. Yet there is an apparent paradox: While the Trump Administration seeks to declare the NLRB unconstitutional and has decimated federal workers’ rights, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement rose to power in part by invoking the plight of the American worker. The more populist wing of the American Right does not expressly challenge the constitutionality of labor law. Indeed, some right-wing populists urge an expansion of labor rights, emphasizing such goals as …

Universal Injunctions And The Executive-Judicial Relationship In America, Jeremy Kang

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines a specific type of legal controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with the judicial branch. Central to the matter is the concept of universal injunctions: how a federal court can enjoin even non-parties to a case from behaving in certain ways.

The history of universal injunctions, from pre-Enlightenment England to modern America, is initially discussed. Then special attention is given to their use against President Donald Trump in particular, culminating in the Supreme Court curtailing them, and district court judges ignoring the high court’s ruling. Finally, previous examples of conflict between the American executive and judicial branches …

Mapping Minority Investigative Powers In Congress, David Rapallo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Shut down the Senate . . .” “Roll over and play dead . . .” In the first hundred days of President Donald Trump’s second term, these were the rallying cries of two far ends of a debate among Democrats about how to respond to the administration’s unprecedented actions. This debate, which rages on today, has been marked by a lack of specificity about the various oversight tools available to members of the minority party in Congress, particularly when they investigate whether the Executive Branch is faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. Scholarship too has focused little on the full …

From Chainsaws To Courtrooms: Corporate Climate Litigation And Deforestation In Brazil, Maria Antonia Tigre, Mariana Barbosa Cirne

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Corporate climate litigation has emerged as one of the most dynamic and high profile tools for addressing the private sector’s role in the climate crisis. While much of the scholarship and public debate has centered on cases in the United States and Europe, litigation targeting corporations in the Global South — particularly Brazil — has grown rapidly, both in volume and significance. Brazil now ranks among the world’s top jurisdictions for corporate climate damage claims. These suits have pioneered methods for quantifying climate damages, often from illegal deforestation, and have tested the reach of the civil liability regime in novel …

Demographic Trends And Far-Right Party Support In Europe: The Role Of The Cordon Sanitaire, Maxwell Curry

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines whether cordons sanitaires, institutional exclusionary arrangements common in Western and Central Europe on the part of mainstream political actors aimed to prevent far-right political parties perceived as posing a threat to liberal democratic order from entering into governing coalitions or otherwise participating in mainstream political life, condition the relationship between immigration-related demographic change and support for far-right political parties. Contemporary scholarship has extensively examined the relationship between immigration and support for far-right political parties, but comparatively little research has examined the institutional factors that potentially condition such a relationship. In an analysis of parliamentary election data …

State Policy And Regulatory Approaches To Sustainable Aviation Fuel Across The United States, Somtochukwu Attamah, Mary Johnson, Lara Fowler, Michael D. Helbing

Faculty Scholarship

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) represents a critical lever for achieving near-term decarbonization of the aviation industry. SAF can be manufactured for “drop-in” use in existing aircraft and fueling systems, allowing manufacturers to achieve lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) savings relative to standard jet fuel. However, U.S. policy is still disjointed: federal incentives are accompanied by diffuse state efforts, which means uneven market-based feedback and investment risk. After outlining the federal policy context, this Article conducts a comparative analysis of SAF-related policy frameworks across the fifty states. This includes a variety of government solutions offered in the form of enacted and proposed …

Can The Epa Withdraw The Endangerment Finding?, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

The Trump administration has made repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases the centerpiece of its environmental deregulation agenda. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the US, and more,” proclaimed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin when announcing the agency’s plan to reconsider the finding in March 2025. Since then, the agency has followed through, pushing endangerment finding repeal ahead of other, more traditional, deregulatory efforts. While politically popular with parts of President …

An Abundant Lack Of Introspection, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

In this review Jonathan Adler critiques Abundance authors Klein and Thompson's analysis of how regulation is holding back progress in decarbonization, America's housing supply crisis, and innovation. While agreeing with the authors' assessment that regulation policy is hampering efforts in these areas, Adler objects to the book's proposals for improving regulatory bottlenecks, arguing the authors of Abundance refuse to acknowledge the role of market institutions in creating abundant supply or to admit the fault in their assumption that the failures of centralized government decision making can be repaired while maintaining centralized government decision making.

This abstract has been constructed from …

#Metoo Vs. Anti-Dei, Nicole Porter

Faculty Publications

Nine years ago, the entire country was talking about the #MeToo movement, which can be credited with the unseating of hundreds of powerful men and changing the way we talk about and address sexual harassment in the workplace. In 2026, continued progress of the #MeToo movement might be threatened by a new movement-the Trump Administration's attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. This article discusses the ways in which the #MeToo movement conflicts with the anti-DEI movement. Specifically, it addresses how employers will respond to pressure to dismantle DEI programs, offices, and training, and how those responses will affect …

Owning The Al Revolution, George S. Georgiev

Articles

No abstract provided.

Bodies In The Beds: How Reits, Private Equity Firms, And County Hospitals Monetize Nursing Home Residents As Real Estate Acquisitions, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Nursing home residents have become monetized targets of real estate acquisitions. Established in 1960, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) were envisioned as allowing individuals to invest in commercial real estate without owning properties. That seemingly innocuous investment idea has led to the growth of a behind-the-scenes empire of little-understood conglomerates of REITs buying up nursing homes and other healthcare facilities across the country. Capitalizing on tax-exempt income incentives, exploiting “triple-net” leasebacks, funneling profits through subsidiaries, and shielding ownership and assets from the liability of operations, the corporatized owners extract cash from facilities and leave harm in their wake. And to …

Patent Regime Shift And Firm Innovation Strategy: Evidence From The Second Amendment To China's Patent Law, Tony W. Tong, Wenlong He, Liang Chen, Zi-Lin He, Jiangyong Lu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: While changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection significantly shape firm innovation, the mechanisms driving firms' responses remain poorly understood. Leveraging the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law, which strengthens appropriability particularly for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as a natural experiment, we show that stronger IPR has mixed effects on SOEs' innovation. While SOEs increase the rate of innovation subsequent to the Amendment, they shift the direction of innovation toward more familiar areas in which they face a lesser need to adjust existing routines. This directional change suggests a quality decline in SOEs' innovation that may be attributed to …

Co-Matching: Towards Human–Model Collaborative Legal Case Matching, Chen Huang, Xinwei Yang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Jiancheng Lv, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent efforts have aimed to improve AI models in legal case matching by integrating legal domain knowledge. However, successful legal case matching requires the tacit knowledge of legal practitioners, which is difficult to verbalize and encode into models. This emphasizes the crucial role of involving legal practitioners in high-stakes legal case matching. To address this, we propose a collaborative matching framework called Co-Matching, which encourages both the model and the legal practitioner to participate in the matching process, integrating tacit knowledge. Unlike existing methods that rely solely on the model, Co-Matching allows both the legal practitioner and the model to …

Learning By Writing: Exploring Authentic Legal Learning Through Case Summaries, Ee-Ing Ong, Wei Yang Quek, Duan Ning, Magdeleine Lew

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We use authentic learning as a pedagogical framework in a collaboration between our law school and the national Supreme Court of a Southeast Asian country, which facilitates law students’ development of their legal analytical and writing skills, and helps them better bridge the gap between existing legal curricula and the needs of legal practice. Akin to a writing apprenticeship, students write summaries on selected Supreme Court judgments, with their output reviewed by faculty as well as judicial law clerks from the court. The results are published on the court’s website and circulated to other stakeholders. In the post-exercise survey, participating …