Law Commons^™

Optimizing Cybersecurity Risk In Medical Cyber-Physical Devices, Christopher S. Yoo, Bethany Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Medical devices are increasingly connected, both to cyber networks and to sensors collecting data from physical stimuli. These cyber-physical systems pose a new host of deadly security risks that traditional notions of cybersecurity struggle to take into account. Previously, we could predict how algorithms would function as they drew on defined inputs. But cyber-physical systems draw on unbounded inputs from the real world. Moreover, with wide networks of cyber-physical medical devices, a single cybersecurity breach could pose lethal dangers to masses of patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with regulating medical devices to ensure safety and …

Regulating Three-Dimensional Printing: The Converging Worlds Of Bits And Atoms, Lucas S. Osborn

San Diego Law Review

Three-dimensional printing (3D printing) is invading society, bringing with it the ability to “print” objects (atoms) from computer files (bits). Posting a computer-assisted design (CAD) file of an object—an illegal gun or an infringing shoe—to the Internet essentially makes the physical object available to the world. The technology portends dramatic shifts in manufacturing, trade, medicine, and more and will require a legal regime that integrates the legal concepts governing the digital and physical worlds. This Article represents the first broad descriptive and normative study of this technology and its multivalent effects on law. The Article separates truly novel legal issues …

Slides: The Costs And Benefits Of Best Management Practices: Insights From The Marcellus Shale, Timothy J. Considine

Best Management Practices (BMPs): What? How? And Why? (May 26)

Presenter: Timothy J. Considine, School of Energy Resources, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Wyoming

15 slides

Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Michigan Law Review

This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts' reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.