Law Commons^™

Artificial Intelligence As Evidence, Paul W. Grimm, Maura R. Grossman, Gordon V. Cormack

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

This article explores issues that govern the admissibility of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications in civil and criminal cases, from the perspective of a federal trial judge and two computer scientists, one of whom also is an experienced attorney. It provides a detailed yet intelligible discussion of what AI is and how it works, a history of its development, and a description of the wide variety of functions that it is designed to accomplish, stressing that AI applications are ubiquitous, both in the private and public sectors. Applications today include: health care, education, employment-related decision-making, finance, law enforcement, and the legal …

Ostrich With Its Head In The Sand: The Law, Inventorship, & Artificial Intelligence, Ben Kovach

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

As artificial intelligence (AI) system’s capabilities advance, the law has struggled to keep pace. Nowhere is this more evident than patent law’s refusal to recognize AI as an inventor. This is precisely what happened when, in 2020, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that it will not accept an AI system as a named inventor on a patent.

This note explores untenable legal fiction that the USPTO’s ruling has created. First, it explores the current state of AI systems, focusing on those capable of invention. Next, it examines patent law’s inventorship doctrine and the USPTO’s application of that …

Foreword: Law + Computation: An Algorithm For The Rule Of Law And Justice?, Daniel W. Linna Jr.

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

The Legislative Recipe: Syntax For Machine-Readable Legislation, Megan Ma, Bryan Wilson

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

Legal interpretation is a linguistic venture. In judicial opinions, for example, courts are often asked to interpret the text of statutes and legislation. As time has shown, this is not always as easy as it sounds. Matters can hinge on vague or inconsistent language and, under the surface, human biases can impact the decision-making of judges. This raises an important question: what if there was a method of extracting the meaning of statutes consistently? That is, what if it were possible to use machines to encode legislation in a mathematically precise form that would permit clearer responses to legal questions? …

Deepfake Privacy: Attitudes And Regulation, Matthew B. Kugler, Carly Pace

Northwestern University Law Review

Using only a series of images of a person’s face and publicly available software, it is now possible to insert the person’s likeness into a video and show them saying or doing almost anything. This “deepfake” technology has permitted an explosion of political satire and, especially, fake pornography. Several states have already passed laws regulating deepfakes, and more are poised to do so. This Article presents three novel empirical studies that assess public attitudes toward this new technology. In our main study, a representative sample of the U.S. adult population perceived nonconsensually created pornographic deepfake videos as extremely harmful and …

Article Iii And The Political Question Doctrine, Scott Dodson

Northwestern University Law Review

Courts and commentators have often sourced the political question doctrine in Article III, a repository of other separation-of-powers doctrines applicable to the federal courts. Rucho v. Common Cause, a blockbuster political question case decided in 2019, explicitly tied the doctrine to Article III. But the historical development of the doctrine undermines the depth of that connection. Further, sourcing the doctrine in Article III leads to some very odd effects, including leaving state courts free to answer federal political questions. This Article argues that the source of the political question doctrine is in substantive law, not in Article III. Such …

New Federalism And Civil Rights Enforcement, Alexander Reinert, Joanna C. Schwartz, James E. Pfander

Northwestern University Law Review

Calls for change to the infrastructure of civil rights enforcement have grown more insistent in the past several years, attracting support from a wide range of advocates, scholars, and federal, state, and local officials. Much of the attention has focused on federal-level reforms, including proposals to overrule Supreme Court doctrines that stop many civil rights lawsuits in their tracks. But state and local officials share responsibility for the enforcement of civil rights and have underappreciated powers to adopt reforms of their own. This Article evaluates a range of state and local interventions, including the adoption of state law causes of …

Class Arbitration Waivers Cannot Be Found Unconscionable: A Pervasive And Common "Mis-Concepcion", Emma Silberstein

Northwestern University Law Review

In 1925, Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) as a means of quelling judicial hostility towards arbitration agreements, providing a mechanism for the enforcement of such agreements. The Supreme Court’s treatment and application of the FAA has evolved over time, and in recent decades the FAA has been massively extended to cover not only arm’s-length commercial transactions, but consumer and employment contracts as well. The Supreme Court, its previous hostile stance long forgotten, has created a policy of favoring arbitration and striking down many an argument that may interfere with that policy. In particular, the Court solidified its position …

Business Information And Nondisclosure Agreements: A Public Policy Framework, Rex N. Alley

Northwestern University Law Review

Trade secret law, as codified in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, gives businesses in nearly every U.S. jurisdiction a uniform, clearly defined right to protect secret and valuable business information from misappropriation. But how can businesses protect information that, while potentially useful, falls short of the legal definition of a trade secret? Businesses often require their employees to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to protect this category of information, which this Note refers to as “confidential business information” or “CBI.” These CBI NDAs are often drafted so broadly that, read literally, they would encompass every piece of information an employee learns …

Redeeming Justice, Terrell Carter, Rachel López, Kempis Songster

Northwestern University Law Review

Approximately three decades ago, two of us, Terrell Carter and Kempis Songster, were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that this sentence, effectively an order to die in prison, represented a legal determination that we were irredeemable. In this Article, with insights from our coauthor and friend, human rights scholar Rachel López, we ask: What does it mean for the law to judge some human beings as incapable of redemption? Isn’t the capacity for change core to the human condition, and shouldn’t that be reflected in the law?

This Article …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Northwestern University Law Review

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy’s appeal has grown beyond those authors’ wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Man Camps And Bad Men: Litigating Violence Against American Indian Women, Ana Condes

Northwestern University Law Review

The crisis of sexual violence plaguing Indian Country is made drastically worse by oil-pipeline construction, which often occurs near reservations. The “man camps” constructed to house pipeline workers are hotbeds of rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking, and American Indian women are frequently targeted due to a perception that men will not be prosecuted for assaulting them. Victims have little recourse, facing underfunded police departments, indifferent prosecutors, and a federal government all too willing to turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence.

This Note proposes a litigation strategy for tribes to address the crisis and compel federal action. Litigation …

Identifying The Most Democratic Institution To Lead Criminal Justice Reform, Harry B. Dodsworth

Northwestern University Law Review

American criminal justice is in crisis, and most scholars agree why: unduly severe laws, mass incarceration, and disproportionate effects on minority groups. But they don’t agree on a solution. One group of scholars—known as the “democratizers”—thinks the answer is to make the criminal justice system more democratic. According to democratizers, layperson participation and local democratic control will impart sensibility into criminal justice reform. In short, a transfer of power away from distant lawmakers and toward local communities, which would craft their own criminal codes and elect their own prosecutors. This argument assumes that more local means more democratic—but what if …

Stepification, Mitchell Chervu Johnston

Northwestern University Law Review

Multistep tests pervade the law to the point that they appear to be a fundamental feature of legal reasoning. Famous doctrines such as Chevron or qualified immunity take this form, as do more obscure doctrinal formulas. But surprisingly, these doctrinal formulations as a class are relatively new. The reality is that the intellectual moment that gave rise to Chevron was one in which multiple older doctrines that relied on multifactor balancing were replaced by new tests formulated as multistep inquiries in which each step was a discrete inquiry.

This Article provides the first historical and normative account of this phenomenon—which …

Winter Is Here: The Impossibility Of Schrems Ii For U.S.-Based Direct-To-Consumer Companies, Vanessa Zimmer

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

In this paper, Vanessa Zimmer exposes the precarious position of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) companies that are physically located in the United States but still subject to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) under Article 3(2) because they offer goods or services to European consumers online. Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and supplementary measures have dominated privacy conversions in the year since the European Court of Justice invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework with its Schrems II decision.

However, Zimmer argues that the greater issue for U.S.-based DTC companies is the lack of clarity over what constitutes an international, or restricted, transfer …

Comparative Limitations On Abortions: The United States Supreme Court V. The European Court Of Human Rights, Sunaya Padmanabhan

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Note compares the balancing tests implemented by the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights to determine the legal status of abortion within their jurisdictions. This Note will argue that the Supreme Court’s balancing test better protects a woman’s legal path to an abortion because it A) limits states’ restrictions to specific categories and B) regulates the extent to which states can restrict a woman’s pre-viability abortion.

This Note will also examine the ways in which each court’s abortion jurisprudence substantively restricts a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, even where legal avenues to the …

With Unanimity And Justice For All: The Case For Retroactive Application Of The Unanimous Jury Verdict Requirement, Kara Kurland

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Until the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, non-unanimous jury verdicts were constitutional and utilized in two states: Louisiana and Oregon. The Ramos decision not only declared the practice of non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional, but it also emphasized the essential nature of jury verdict unanimity in criminal trials throughout American history and legal jurisprudence. A year later, in Edwards v. Vannoy, the Court considered retroactive application of Ramos. Utilizing the test created in Teague v. Lane that assessed the retroactivity of new rules of criminal procedure, the Court announced that, despite the essential nature of the unanimous jury …

City Of Los Angeles V. Lyons: How Supreme Court Jurisprudence Of The Past Puts A Chokehold On Constitutional Rights In The Present, Peter C. Douglas

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The United States today has refocused its attention on its continuing struggles with civil rights and police violence—struggles that have always been present but which come to the forefront of the collective consciousness at inflection points like the current one. George Floyd—and uncounted others—die at the hands of the police, and there is, justifiably, outrage and a search for answers. Although the reasons why Black and Brown people are disproportionally subject to unconstitutional police violence are manifold, one reason lies in the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons. While many scholars have criticized the Burger …

This Must Be Our Place: Protectionism And Foreign Investment In Kazakhstan’S Farmland, Kristi Lew

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

No abstract provided.

Removing Police From Schools Using State Law Heightened Scrutiny, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article argues that school police, often called school resource officers, interfere with the state law right to education and proposes using the constitutional right to education under state law as a mechanism to remove police from schools.

Disparities in school discipline for Black and brown children are well-known. After discussing the legal structures of school policing, this Article uses the Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) theoretical framework developed by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri to explain why police are unacceptable in schools. Operating under the premise that school police are unacceptable, this Article then analyzes mechanisms to …

Bridging Separate Worlds— Application Of Human Rights Law In Investment Treaty Arbitration, Raymond Yang Gao

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

With the proliferation of investor-state treaty arbitration, international investment law has been increasingly caught in a “legitimacy” crisis, with concerns looming large over resultant disruptive effects on human rights. Amid existing scholarship seeking to recalibrate the balance between investment protection and public interests, what is relatively undertheorized is a public international law dimension. In this regard, this Article explores the role of human rights law in integrating human rights considerations into investment tribunals’ decision-making, bridging the normative divide between international investment law and human rights. It makes three contributions. First, it systemizes the normative tensions and potential conflicts between international …

Offshore Wind Development In The Great Lakes: Accessing Untapped Energy Potential Through International And Interstate Agreement To Overcome Public Trust Concerns, Jordan Farrell

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Offshore wind energy development in the Great Lakes presents an immense opportunity for distributed generation of renewable energy; however, this potential has thus far remained untapped. One significant barrier to why there has not yet been such wind energy development in the Great Lakes is the public trust doctrine. This doctrine generally stands for the principle that a state cannot convey its submerged lands to a private party. However, there remains much legal uncertainty with regards to the doctrine. Courts and scholars have struggled to determine with any certainty the origins and grounding of the doctrine and the limits it …

Second Amendment Animus, Jacob D. Charles

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The State's Monopoly Of Force And The Right To Bear Arms, Robert Leider

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of The Second Amendment In A Time Of Lawless Violence, Nelson Lund

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Two Rights Make A Wrong: Armed Assembly Under The First And Second Amendments, Michael C. Dorf

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Second Amendment In A Carceral State, Alice Ristroph

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Guns Threaten The Public Sphere: A New Account Of Public Safety Under Heller, Joseph Blocher, Reva B. Siegel

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Resilience Of Substantive Rights And The False Hope Of Procedural Rights: The Case Of The Second Amendment And The Seventh Amendment, Renée Lettow Lerner

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Second Amendment Equilibria, Darrell A.H. Miller

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.