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Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Re-Imagining Tomorrow: A Technology, Innovation Law, And Ethics Symposium On Addictive Technology And Children, Margaret Chon

Seattle University Law Review

In this Foreword, Professor Margaret Chon introduces Seattle University's Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) program, the 2024 TILE Symposium, and Dr. Gaia Bernstein’s Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.

Keynote Address: The Movement To Protect Kids From Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein

Seattle University Law Review

In this keynote address, I describe my personal journey starting with a school outreach program I created in 2017 to address technology overuse among kids. While I initially advocated for self-help methods, I grew to recognize that the tech industry bore responsibility. This realization led me to write Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, which focused on collective action to pressure the tech industry to redesign its addictive products.

I then describe the movement to control addictive technologies and protect kids, which has gained momentum since the end of the pandemic. This movement combines grassroots parent activism with legal-political action. …

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Seattle University Law Review

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all …

Responding To Digital Addiction, Ned Snow

Seattle University Law Review

In Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, Professor Gaia Bernstein calls our attention to the growing problem of digital addiction. Digital addiction may sound like something out of a science-fiction novel or something that does not raise the same sort of real-life practical concerns as are present in a physical health crisis or an economic decline. But as Bernstein presents the evidence, we learn that the consequences of digital addiction can be just as harmful as a serious disease or a financial depression. Cognitive development disorders, anxiety, emotional depression, social isolation, and other mental health ills can be debilitating—as much …

The Ai Doppelgänger Dilemma: Cloned Voices In The Music Industry, Elizabeth Shields

Seattle University Law Review

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been an influx of “voice clones”—deep-learning algorithms that create synthetic speech to realistically mimic human voices. Celebrities and, in particular, music artists, have been subjected to the proliferation of AI voice clones on social media platforms like TikTok and streaming platforms such as Spotify. Despite music utilizing AI voice clones having amassed much popularity, this technology can be harmful and highly invasive to musicians whose livelihoods often depend on their distinct voices. While legal scholars have attempted to articulate various rights that could protect a person’s voice, individuals are largely …

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …

The Empirical Double Standard: Opinion Surveys Across The Civil-Criminal Divide, Kay L. Levine, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Across different legal domains, liability doctrines recognize the value of community input. But do courts truly listen to the community's voice when deciding these sorts of cases? This study is the first to explore how courts treat community opinion survey evidence across both civil and criminal law. To that end, we comprehensively examine trademark, false advertising, patent, antitrust, obscenity, death penalty, and Fourth Amendment search cases.

Our research uncovers a significant asymmetry: courts readily admit survey evidence in civil proceedings but systematically exclude it in criminal cases. This asymmetry does not appear to stem from structural differences between civil and …

Properly Partitioning Prejudice: Analyzing Mixed Brady And Napue Claims, Patrick Scariano

Fordham Law Review

Due process affords criminal defendants the right to receive evidence possessed by the government that would aid in their defense. This right was codified in Brady v. Maryland. Brady’s lesser-known ancestor is Napue v. Illinois, which gave defendants the right to a new trial if the government knowingly offered perjured testimony in their original trial. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that these rights are critical to support verdicts worthy of confidence necessary to ensure due process.

Unfortunately, defendants victimized by misconduct are often affected by multiple violations of their rights. Courts have developed ways to examine …

Evidence Quiz With Answers And Explanations: Propensity, Frank Rosenblatt

Journal Articles

This quiz tests basic concepts of character, propensity, and impeachment using the Federal Rules of Evidence.

The Case For Abolishing The Civil Character-Evidence Rule, Steven Goode

Brooklyn Law Review

The Federal Rules of Evidence were enacted fifty years ago. The Advisory Committee charged with drafting the rules successfully reformed a good number of common-law rules and failed in its attempts to reform others. But it did not even attempt significant reform of one of the most troublesome rules—the character-evidence rule. Indeed, it declined to seriously consider even a very modest proposal to reform the way the character-evidence rule applies in civil cases. Those espousing change, it declared, “have not met the burden of persuasion.” This Article takes up that challenge. I argue that Rule 404’s categorical exclusion of character …

Proving The Future In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Expert opinion about dangerousness—the risk of reoffending—is commonly introduced at sentencing, criminal commitment proceedings, and some types of pretrial detention hearings. This Essay argues that the rules governing the admissibility of scientific evidence should apply to this testimony and that, on that assumption, such evidence must be (1) “material” (logically relevant, empirically generalizable, and epistemologically germane), (2) “probative” (a measure of accuracy, which is more stringent when the evidence is from an expert), (3) helpful to the factfinder (through promoting “incremental validity”), and (4) presented in a non-prejudicial manner (i.e., in a way that minimizes the possibility it will be …

The Nyc Office Of Administrative Trials And Hearings: Forty-Five Years Of Delivering Impartial Adjudications And Providing Access To Justice, Asim Rehman

Cardozo Law Review

It was an honor to deliver the 2024 Uri and Caroline Bauer Memorial Lecture at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and to follow in the footsteps of the many legal luminaries who have delivered this lecture before. Given their chosen professions, it may be fair to assume that Uri Bauer was a believer in the rule of law and Caroline Bauer was a believer in government. Accordingly, I would like to talk about those two topics as they relate to the work of the New York City Office of Administrative Trials & Hearings (OATH). First, after a general …

The Future Of Money: How The Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies And Finance, Sohini Banerjee Ms, Pratik Datta Mr

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

The book ‘The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance’, written by Eswar Prasad, and published in 2021 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, is timely and thought-provoking. It provides a bird’s eye view of the noteworthy developments in finance in the past few decades, and predicts that we are on the verge of an even more dramatic transformation having significant economic, political, and social ramifications. For this reason, it is richly deserving of a review. This paper aims to critically analyse the same.

The Right To Receive Information: Conceptual Problems, Shrutanjaya Bhardwaj Mr

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

This article studies the “right to receive information” or the “right to know”, a judicially-recognised right under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. It attempts to show, through an analysis of judgments of the Supreme Court and High Courts, that the right rests on a shaky philosophical foundation and that there are inconsistencies in how the right is judicially treated in terms of its structure and content.

First, the article questions the logic that the “right to know” is implicit in Article 19(1)(a) merely because it makes the exercise of free speech more meaningful. Such a logic was authoritatively rejected by …

Antitrust Concerns Vis-A-Vis Disruptive Innovation – Takeaways For Competition Commission Of India, Sudhanshu Kumar Dr, Garima Gupta Ms

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

In the era of innovation, market dynamics have evolved demanding a more nuanced analysis of market competition. Innovation in digital economy does promise new products and services but it can be an amiable reality only if it is directed towards ensuring consumer welfare and a free markets space for players. Since digital markets attract innovators and disruptors, it is important for antitrust regulators to differentiate between efforts directed towards value-creation and ones aimed at destroying or impeding the same. This paper aims at theorizing around the idea of ‘disruptive innovation’ and its implications for competition policy for India. The paper …

Continuing Discrimination In The Times Of Technology: Women, Work, Algorithms And Law In India, Sejal Chandak Ms

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Human societies are discriminatory. So, it has been an unrelenting effort to eliminate what divides us. While there have been leapfrog developments in this regard, we need to consider newer challenges now that technology is taking over public and private spaces. The author, in this article, discusses gender-based algorithmic discrimination in workplaces and argues that there is an urgent need to enforce laws for regulating algorithmic discrimination. India is in a precarious position. It has been consistently faring poorly when it comes to the gender gap in work. It lacks a comprehensive and codified anti-discriminatory law; and lacks laws to …

Conceptualising India’S Safe Harbour In The Era Of Platform Governance, Vasudev Devadasan Mr.

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

The push for greater regulation of online platforms has led to calls to re-evaluate the statutory immunities granted to online intermediaries for hosting unlawful third-party content (i.e., safe harbour). This paper argues that greater accountability for online platforms need not interfere with existing (and indeed strengthened) safe harbour protections. However, to achieve this outcome, legislators must recognise the difference in enforcement approaches between secondary liability and platform governance regimes. This paper argues the types of obligations that can be imposed as pre-conditions to safe harbour are different from those that can be imposed as direct statutory obligations. This is because …

Infiltrating The Black Box: Expanding The No-Impeachment Rule To Protect Defendants From Pervasive Juror Bias, Jordan Whitfield

Arkansas Law Review

In the United States, a criminal defendant is entitled to “a fair trial but not a perfect one, for there are no perfect trials.” However, defendants are also guaranteed the right to an impartial jury. While perfection within a jury is “an untenable goal,” a system that allows for juror bias during deliberations to go undetected threatens a defendant’s most crucial constitutional rights. Thus, when juror bias threatens to interfere with a defendant’s rights to a fair trial and impartial jury, there is a prevalent need for the judicial system to step in and mitigate the effects of juror bias. …

Identifying The Guilty, Protecting The Innocent: Amending The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Address Admissibility Of Eyewitness Identification, Louisa M. A. Heiny

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Mistaken eyewitness identification is among the most common factors in wrongful conviction cases. Indeed, hundreds of innocent defendants have been convicted for a crime they did not commit, their fate sealed by an eyewitness who convincingly, but mistakenly, testified, “That’s the one!”

Scientific researchers have documented the fallibility of eyewitness identification for decades. Their collective work has produced recommendations for eyewitness identification reform, focusing on procedural problems most likely to result in mistaken identification. The law in this area, however, has not kept pace with the science. Rather than representing a cohesive series of safeguards against inaccurate eyewitness identifications, federal …

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

The Challenge That The Advent Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai) Tools Poses To The Procedures For Determining The Existence Of The Preliminary Facts That Condition The Admissibility Of Items Of Evidence, Edward J. Imwinkelried

Marquette Law Review

“[A]d quæstionem facti non respondent judices; . . . ad quæstionem juris not respondent juratores.” Judges do not answer questions of fact; jurors do not answer questions of law.

The jury is a central institution in the American level infrastructure. The Sixth and Seventh Amendments elevate the jury trial right to constitutional status. Of course, when a judge presides at a jury trial, the question that naturally arises is the division of decision-making labor between judge and jury. In the past few decades, the Supreme Court’s Apprendi v. New Jersey line of authority has expanded the jury’s authority to decide …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Seattle University Law Review

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

The State has always regulated the intra-firm communications that make corporate governance possible, most commonly by mandating disclosures of information by a corporation to its shareholders. Some such laws are labeled “securities regulation,” but securities regulation is a broad category that extends to speech by actors who are outside the corporate enterprise as well. Also, the conventional securities regulation category does not capture all such laws; other examples, including informationforcing mandates, can be found in state corporate law. This Article uses the term “corporate governance speech” to describe the communications among shareholders, directors, and officers through which corporate governance is …

Dark Accounting Matter, Colleen Honigsberg

Seattle University Law Review

Physicists calculate that approximately 85% of the matter in the universe is composed of “dark matter” that “does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is therefore difficult to detect.” The S&P 500 currently trades at a price-to-book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80% appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

Some “dark accounting matter” is composed of factors commonly described as components of “ESG.” Human capital, for example, is an intangible asset …

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …