Law Commons^™

Artificial Intelligence & Defamation Law: An Excuse To Do Away With The Infamously Controversial Section 230?, Kathryn Binder

UC Law Journal

With the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in various aspects of our lives, it is not surprising that it has become a subject of legal disputes and controversy. In 2023, an individual filed the first defamation lawsuit against AI company, OpenAI, for its ChatGPT service, leaving many to speculate how the court will proceed. This Note assesses the viability of defamation actions against generative AI platforms and their broader effect on defamation law. Particularly, this Note considers how courts may characterize these platforms and how specific characterizations could further the controversy over an already polarizing and hotly debated piece …

Contract Quality Feature Extraction Using Llm, Aaron C. Washington

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the potential insights generated from linguistic complexity measurements and large language model (LLM) based assessments on the quality of contract documents. By combining structured True/False prompts with log-probability analysis and ambiguity scoring, the study introduced novel contract-quality assessment methods. Results support a feature-driven approach to contract evaluation, one that offers automated, scalable insights for triaging risk and improving drafting practices. These assessment methods contribute to the growing field of legal natural language processing by offering modular tools for effective contract analysis.

Belonging Against The Odds: Exploring Restorative Justice Practices As Pathways To Foster Belonging In New York City Transfer Schools, Miguel Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S. education system perpetuates structural inequities that disproportionately affect Black students with the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPPL) criminalizing them through Zero-Tolerance policies. Transfer schools are often a last resort for students pushed out of traditional schools provide a lens to examine the impact of Restorative Justice Practices (RJP) and Black student representation on belonging. This quantitative dissertation study analyzes secondary data from the NYC Department of Education using multivariate models to explore the relationship between RJPs and sense of belonging (SOB). Model 1 found that discussing feelings and emotions at school (Tier 1 RJP) had the strongest association with SOB …

Tort Law Heterodoxy In China, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Eva Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Chinese courts routinely ask defendants to pay damages without evidence of negligence while relying on concepts such as fairness, substantive justice, or discretion. This chapter examines how Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel fair or just in cases where they refer to those ideas. Analysis of a dataset of 10,000 judicial decisions in personal injury cases suggests that Chinese courts refer to these concepts when they impose liability on two types of parties: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. By assigning legal responsibility in these cases, Chinese courts acknowledge traumatic harm, …

The Changing Architecture Of Trust, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Trust has always been vital to the healthy functioning of financial markets and the stability of the financial institutions. The mix of public and private institutions that undergird this trust, however, can vary. Often these forces are ignored or taken for granted until something goes wrong. With a marked turn toward deregulation taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic, against a backdrop of central banks having played a very active role intervening to allay distress, it is a good time to revisit these fundamentals. This essay examines the importance of trust, how it is created, how it can be …

Menstrual Math: The Price Of Bleeding, Gabrielle Langston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project examines the landscape of menstrual equity in the United States through a data storytelling lens, focusing on state-level policies regarding taxation and access to menstrual products. The analysis explores which states impose sales tax on menstrual products, if state schools provide free menstrual products, and which states ensure access for incarcerated individuals using publicly available datasets from advocacy groups. Additionally, there is an investigation into potential correlations between the gender wage gap and states that tax menstrual products, shedding light on economic and policy disparities.

Through its data visualizations, this project aims to provide a clear, although not …

Looking For The Public In Public Law, Nikhil Menezes, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The “public” is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary public law. Everywhere, in that the term is constantly invoked to justify and explain existing arrangements. Nowhere, in that serious attempts to identify a relevant public and elicit its input are few and far between. Scholars and officials depict the U.S. public as playing myriad roles in governance — checking, guiding, approving, repudiating—without offering an account of how public preferences are formed or how they exercise influence on questions of interest.

This Article seeks to identify and call attention to the foundational dilemmas underlying this disconnect, to clarify their normative contours and …

How Domestic Institutions Shape The Global Tech War, Anu Bradford, Eileen Li, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States (U.S.), China, and the European Union (EU) are engaged in a national security-driven economic competition over advanced technology. Many scholars and commentators focus on the external dimension of this geopolitical contest; that is, they describe the strategic choices by each actor in terms of geopolitical realities, threat perceptions, and relative power. However, this Article brings to the fore the internal dimension of the global tech war. We argue that each player’s strategy in the tech war is a function of its internal features, including basic constitutional powers, domestic legal institutions, and the relationships between the government and …

Addressing Missingness In Serialized Bureaucratic Data: The Case Of Chinese Courts, Xiaohan Wu, Margaret Roberts, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Amarnath Gupta, Luke Sanford

Faculty Scholarship

Courts around the world are putting their data online, making information about caseloads, parties, and decisions available to the public. Yet, this data is far from complete, and often only reflects a portion of courts’ dockets. We offer and validate a set of tools for leveraging serialized bureaucratic data from courts to estimate the proportion of cases available to the public and the time courts take to make decisions. Using data from more than 3,000 courts in China, our methods allow us to assess patterns of missingness in court data across provinces and cities by type of case and to …

The Administrative State's Second Face, Emily R. Chertoff, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

We often assume that there is one administrative state, with one body of administrative law that governs it. In fact, the administrative state has two distinct faces: one turned toward regulation and benefits distribution, and one turned toward physical force and surveillance. The two faces are growing further apart under the Roberts Court, which has hemmed in the first face with decisions like Loper Bright while showing solicitude for national security and law enforcement agencies.

This Article delineates the two faces of the administrative state. It provides a descriptive account of the second face and the distinctive administrative law that …

Litigating National Security In The Wto Era, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

From one dispute between 1948 and 1994, there have now been 14 requests for a panel establishment (based on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Article XXI – the exception for national security) during the World Trade Organization (WTO) era (1995–now). The majority of them ended up in the issuance of a panel report, all of which were issued after 5 April 2019. As the WTO Appellate Body has been dysfunctional as of November 2019, no appellate report has been issued. Appeals have been lodged, but as there is no Appellate Body to entertain them, they were lodged …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Proxy Voting Choice, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an early attempt at understanding what voluntary pass-through voting could mean for the marketplace. I first provide an overview of my argument in my 2018 Journal of Corporation Law article and the events that followed. I then survey passthrough voting initiatives that have taken hold at three asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. I then conclude with some preliminary observations about how voting choice is likely to affect the proxy voting landscape and outline open questions.

Law Enforcement Privilege, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

You can’t question a secret you haven’t been told. The criminal legal system depends on fair and open proceedings to expose and regulate unlawful and unconstitutional police conduct through the courts. If police can use claims of secrecy to systematically thwart criminal defendants’ access to evidence, judicial review will fail. And yet that is exactly what is happening under a common-law doctrine called the “law enforcement privilege.” The privilege empowers police and prosecutors to rely on the results of secret investigative methods while withholding information from the defense about how those methods work. It risks perpetuating unconstitutional conduct, enabling wrongful …

Presidential Supremacy Over Administrative Agencies, Gary Gensler, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, the public has long benefited from the role played by administrative agencies with a degree of autonomy from the White House, each agency with distinct duties and authorities to implement the law as set out by Congress.

In its first hundred days, the second Trump administration has moved rapidly to centralise control over all administrative agencies, including so-called independent agencies, which have long operated at a greater remove from the White House than ‘executive’ agencies like the Department of State and the Department of Commerce. The administration is asserting an interpretation of the Constitution known as …

The Financial Sector And Global Dollar System, Gary Gensler, Lev Menand, Joshua Younger

Faculty Scholarship

The second Trump administration’s approach to financial markets and institutions mixes familiar deregulatory policies with a range of other policies (financial and non-financial) that are largely without precedent and may lead to significant structural change in the long term. Combined, these policies have the potential to affect the financial sector in at least four ways. First, they could threaten the foundations of the global dollar system – mutual cooperation, trust, and interdependency, both between the producers and consumers of financial instruments and among the nations that constitute the dollar bloc. Second, they may undermine financial stability by loosening prudential standards, …

Competence-Competence, Delegation, And The Aaa/Icdr Rules, Christopher R. Drahozal, George A. Bermann, Jack J. Coe Jr., Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

In 2021 and 2022, the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) amended their arbitration rules to address a “potential controversy” said to be caused by the Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial and Investor-State Arbitration. The “potential controversy” is over whether the rules providing that arbitrators have “the power to rule on [their] own jurisdiction” should be interpreted as delegation clauses — that is, as “clearly and unmistakably” delegating exclusive authority to resolve jurisdictional challenges to the arbitrators instead of the court. Most courts have so interpreted the rules.

By contrast, the …

The Moving Pieces Of Corporate Disclosure: Truth, Falsity, And Half-Truths In Between, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The half-truth doctrine is made operational in the common statutory and rule-based admonitions in the securities laws (particularly Rule 10b-5) not to omit “material fact[s] necessary in order to make . . . statements made . . . not misleading . . . .” It cabins the temptation to exploit the privilege of nondisclosure through what has been called “artful paltering.” Unfortunately, the evolution of the half-truth doctrine has become more of a poor stepsister than a muscular companion. It carries less than a full load in the complex ecosystem that exists for public company disclosure today. And it is …

From Contamination To Consequence: Tracing Donna Lake’S Human Environmental History, Dean Kyne

Sociology Faculty Publications

The Donna Reservoir and Canal System (Donna Lake) in Texas has been a persistent source of environmental contamination for over a century, exposing surrounding communities to dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Originally built for agricultural irrigation, the system became a recreational fishing site before PCB contamination was discovered during public health investigations in the 1990s. This study examines patterns of demographic vulnerability, evaluates remediation efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and explores residents’ ongoing challenges related to toxic exposure. Using publicly available demographic data, EPA reports, and previous health assessments, the study analyzes variations in community characteristics …

The Activists’ Choice: Ballot Initiatives As A Step Towards Pro-Choice Efforts, Levi C. Mahler

Culture, Society, and Praxis

Following the overturn of Roe V. Wade, many U.S. state legislatures failed to implement abortion rights that satisfy the general population. When the public disapproves of legislative law, some U.S. states allow citizens and activists the right to pursue a ballot initiative. With enough voter signatures, these ballots can turn into new laws. However, with ballot initiatives being a multi-step, lengthy process, what ultimately pushes activists to pursue this path? My research analyzes this novel intersection of political science and sociology fields to contribute to the current lack of literature on activists' decisions to pursue ballot measures for abortion rights. …

Delaware Supreme Court Clarifies Standard Of Review For Advance Notice Bylaw, Robert S. Reder, Noah Nance

Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc

Delaware’s high court resolves “confusion” by distinguishing “validity” and “enforceability” challenges

An Old Law With New Tricks? The Prospects And Pitfalls Of Using The Antiquities Act Of 1906 To Shape Climate Policy On Federal Lands, Chick Hallinan

Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc

The Antiquities Act of 1906 empowers the president to declare a national monument on federally owned land, subject to constraints. As physical hazards enhanced by climate change endanger historically or biologically valuable objects and places, the Act can shape climate policy on federal land—extending the designation to new tracts and enhancing protections on existing monuments. This Note contends that climate change qualifies as a threat to federal public lands sufficient to trigger presidential authority to proclaim a national monument. Still, any such proclamation must account for the constitutional and statutory restraints that have some gravity on the president’s power to …

[2025 Honorable Mention] Racial Marginalization And Pesticide Exposure In Monterey County, Haleigh Fagundes

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This paper examines the concept of environmental racism in the context of harmful pesticides and their disproportionate use in prominently Hispanic communities. These communities continue to face the consequences of exposure despite their activism. The concept of environmental patriotism, as proposed by Anne Todd in Communicating Environmental Patriotism: A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement (2013), is incompatible with the data that supports the existence of environmental racism. In this piece Todd argues that channeling the pride one feels for their country is an effective way of promoting environmental efforts amongst individual citizens. The data to be presented denies …

Folder 80, Order Of The Coif, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 81, Peabody Survey, Usc Purpose, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 82, Peeples Medal, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 83, Post Graduate Employment, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 84, Practice Court, Brown Vs. Hazelton, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 85, Hutson Vs. E. I. Dupont De Nemours, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 86, Professors, Faculty, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.

Folder 87, Professors, Reports, James Nelson Frierson

Frierson, James Nelson (1920-1946)

No abstract provided.