Internet Law Commons^™

The Jawboning Cases End With A Bang Disguised By A Whimper, Derek E. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Jawboning is government enforcement through informal channels, where the underlying authority is in doubt. Government actors at all levels have increasingly deployed this tactic to pressure Internet platforms to suppress disfavored speech. Internet jawboning debuted at the Supreme Court in two cases (National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo and Murthy v. Missouri) in 2023. Although the Court disposed of both cases on procedural and standing grounds, rather than offering a new methodology for evaluating jawboning, the opinions offer examples of what a successful jawboning claim looks like and what an unsuccessful claim lacks. Thus, jawboning as a …

Shareholder Primacy Versus Shareholder Accountability, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

When corporations inflict injuries in the course of business, shareholders wielding environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) principles can, and now sometimes do, intervene to correct the matter. In the emerging fact pattern, corporate social accountability expands out of its historic collectivized frame to become an internal subject matter—a corporate governance topic. As a result, shareholder accountability surfaces as a policy question for the first time. The Big Three index fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, responded to the accountability question with ESG activism. In so doing, they defected against corporate legal theory’s central tenet, shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy builds …

Verses Turned To Verdicts: Ysl Rico Case Sets A High-Watermark For The Legal Pseudo-Censorship Of Rap Music, Nabil Yousfi

Seattle University Law Review

Whichever way you spin the record, rap music and courtrooms don’t mix. On one side, rap records are well known for their unapologetic lyrical composition, often expressing a blatant disregard for legal institutions and authorities. On the other, court records reflect a Van Gogh’s ear for rap music, frequently allowing rap lyrics—but not similar lyrics from other genres—to be used as criminal evidence against the defendants who authored them. Over the last thirty years, this immiscibility has engendered a legal landscape where prosecutors wield rap lyrics as potent instruments for criminal prosecution. In such cases, color-blind courts neglect that rap …

Datafication, Power, And Publics In India's National Digital Health Ecosystem, Ramya Chandrasekhar

Socio-Legal Review

While evident for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the need to strengthen India’s public healthcare system. But since 2017, the solution to India’s public health woes takes the shape of the National Digital Health Ecosystem (‘NDHE’) – a digital system for the generation, use, and “frictionless” circulation of health data across healthcare actors through the use of artefacts such as health IDs, electronic health records, data standards, and federated computing architectures. These artefacts are not neutral technological systems. Rather, together with social practices, they constitute a “data infrastructure.” Seeing the NDHE as a data infrastructure allows us …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

American Star Chamber: Online Misinformation, Government Intervention, And The Intellectual Matrix Of The First Amendment, Emily E. Burton

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Just as monarchs and clerical authorities struggled to respond to seditious and heretical writings enabled by the invention of the printing press, twenty-first century governments are experiencing a similar information revolution as a result of the digital age and a rising tide of what the United States has labeled online misinformation. Like the printing press, the Internet has enabled the spread of information at an exponentially lower cost and an exponentially higher speed as it extends the ability to publish thoughts and opinions to an increasingly diverse array of individuals. Although this was largely celebrated during the first two decades …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

Overseeing The Administrative State, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reduced the regulatory power of the Administrative State. Pending cases offer vehicles for the Court to go still further. Although the Court’s skepticism of administrative agencies may be rooted in Constitutional principles or political expediency, this Article explores another possible explanation—a shift in the nature of agencies and their regulatory role. As Pritchard and Thompson detail in their important book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was initially skeptical of agency power, jeopardizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s ambitious New Deal plan. The Court’s acceptance …

The Sec, The Supreme Court, And The Administrative State, Paul G. Mahoney

Seattle University Law Review

Pritchard and Thompson have given those of us who study the SEC and the securities laws much food for thought. Their methodological focus is on the internal dynamics of the Court’s deliberations, on which they have done detailed and valuable work. The Court did not, however, operate in a vacuum. Intellectual trends in economics and law over the past century can also help us understand the SEC’s fortunes in the federal courts and make predictions about its future.

A Hard Pill To Swallow: The Abysmal Mental Health Standards Of Detained Immigrant Children In The United States, Rama Bankesly

Seattle University Law Review

After setting foot into the U.S., unaccompanied children must learn to navigate academic and legal systems while receiving little support and carrying the heavy burden of effects of trauma on their mental health. They need access to mental health care from qualified professionals, but as this Comment will explain, they systematically fail to receive care, as can be seen in cases like Doe v. Shenandoah Valley Juv. Ctr. Comm’n. In Shenandoah, an unaccompanied child arrived in the U.S. and was placed in a facility that failed to provide remotely adequate mental health care and in fact was subjected …

Students For Fair Admissions: Affirming Affirmative Action And Shapeshifting Towards Cognitive Diversity?, Steven A. Ramirez

Seattle University Law Review

The Roberts Court holds a well-earned reputation for overturning Supreme Court precedent regardless of the long-standing nature of the case. The Roberts Court knows how to overrule precedent. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Court’s majority opinion never intimates that it overrules Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court’s leading opinion permitting race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Instead, the Roberts Court applied Grutter as authoritative to hold certain affirmative action programs entailing racial preferences violative of the Constitution. These programs did not provide an end point, nor did they require assessment, review, periodic expiration, or revision for greater …

How (Not) To Deal With The Bubble Effect In Cyberspace: The Case Of The Eu And Digital Services Act, João Tornada

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Deliberative democracies are based on an ideal process of speech and dialogue that fosters an “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” public discourse sphere. In cyberspace, social networks and search engine platforms largely operate with recommender systems that tailor content according to the users' interests and online behavior (“profiling”), thus segregating them from different points of view (“bubble effect”). While this personalization of content is particularly efficient to promote commercial goods and services, when it comes to information of common interest, especially on political matters, it undermines consensus-building dialogue and threatens democratic ideals. The theory of a free “marketplace of ideas” justifies …

Section 230 As Civil Rights Statute, Enrique Armijo

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Many of our most pressing discussions about justice, progress, and civil rights have moved online. Activists advocating for social change no longer need to be in the same physical space to connect with others who share their challenges and aspirations. But the convergence of mobility, connectivity, and technology is not the only reason why. Thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act’s (“Section 230”) immunity for online platforms, websites, and their hosts, speakers can engage in speech about protest, equality, and dissent without fear of collateral censorship from governments, authorities, and others in power who hope to silence them. …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Federal Data Privacy Regulation: Do Not Expect An American Gdpr, Matt Buckley

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Legal Representation And The Metaverse: The Ethics Of Practicing In Multiple Realities, Madeline Brom

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Badges Of Honor: Professional Conduct, Consumer Protection, And Accolades In Lawyer Advertising, Kiren Dosanjh Zucker, Bruce Zucker

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Welcome Address, Lauren Mckenzie

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Five Internet Rights, Nicholas J. Nugent

Washington Law Review

Since the dawn of the commercial internet, content moderation has operated under an implicit social contract that website operators could accept or reject users and content as they saw fit, but users in turn could self-publish their views on their own websites if no one else would have them. However, as online service providers and activists have become ever more innovative and aggressive in their efforts to deplatform controversial speakers, content moderation has progressively moved down into the core infrastructure of the internet, targeting critical resources, such as networks, domain names, and IP addresses, on which all websites depend. These …

Conviction On Interpretation, Advocate Adaptability, And The Future Of Emojis And Emoticons As Evidence, Samantha Lyons

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

The dawning of the digital age introduced new and unique interpretive quandaries for judges and litigators alike. These quandaries include (but are not limited to) misinterpretation of pictorial slang as used in instant messaging, new or collateral meanings invented by phrases paired with specific emoticons or emojis, and the existence of emojis alone as communicative accessories.

This Note analyzes how lawyers and judges have essential free reign to treat emojis as they see fit: a prosecutor can argue, even in good faith, that the inclusion of an emoji depicting an open flame means the sender knew the heroin he sold …

A New Right Is The Wrong Tactic: Bring Legal Actions Against States For Internet Shutdowns Instead Of Working Towards A Human Right To The Internet (Part 1), Jay Conrad

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

A New Right is the Wrong Tactic: Bring Legal Actions Against States for Internet Shutdowns Instead of Working Towards a Human Right to the Internet (Part 1) is the first of a two-part series dealing with an increasingly prevalent threat to human rights: State-sanctioned Internet shutdowns. Part 1 details the current tactics and impacts of Internet shutdowns and which human rights are most likely to be violated by or during a shutdown. Part 2 will address the deficiencies of advocating for Internet access to be a recognized human right as a means of combatting shutdowns. Despite the popularity of this …

Your Biometric Data Is Concrete, Your Injury Is Imminent And Particularized: Articulating A Bipa Claim To Survive Article Iii Standing After Transunion V. Ramirez, Kelsey L. Kenny

Maine Law Review

Biometric data is a digital translation of self which endures in its accuracy for one’s entire lifespan. As integral elements of modern life continue to transition their operations exclusively online, the verifiable “digital self” has become indispensable. The immutable and sensitive nature of biometric data makes it peculiarly vulnerable to misappropriation and abuse. Yet the most frightening is the unknown. For an individual who has had their digital extension-of-self covertly stolen or leaked, the dangers that lie in the technology of the future are innumerable. The Illinois legislature recognized the danger associated with the cavalier collection and handling of biometric …

The Takings Clause Does Not Prevent The United States From Supporting A Patent Waiver At The Wto But Prevents Domestic Implementation Of The Waiver, Xiang Li

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

The Biden Administration announced its support for the initiative at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend patent rights protections for COVID-19 vaccines, in the hope of providing equitable and affordable access to the vaccines to low-income countries. Since then, domestic pharmaceutical companies have been voicing vociferous opposition, claiming that “[e]liminating IP protections undermines our global response to the pandemic and compromises safety.”2 Passing a patent waiver at the WTO means eligible member countries can opt to free themselves from the obligations to enforce qualifying patents, and anyone within those countries can accordingly practice the patents without infringement liability. It …

Who Owns Data? Constitutional Division In Cyberspace, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

Privacy emerged as a concern as soon as the internet became commercial. In early 1995, Lawrence Lessig warned that the internet, though giving us extraordinary potential, was “not designed to protect individuals against this extraordinary potential for others to abuse.” The same technology can “destroy the very essence of what now defines individuality.” Lessig urged that “a constitutional balance will have to be drawn between these increasingly important interests in privacy, and the competing interest in collective security.” Lessig envisioned that creating property rights in data would help individuals by giving them control of their data. As utopian as property …

Looks Matter On Social Media: How Should Courts Determine Whether A Public Official Operates Their Social Media Account Under Color Of State Law?, John B. Tsimis

Fordham Law Review

The widespread use of social media has presented a novel legal landscape for the application of constitutionally protected rights—particularly the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. The First Amendment prohibits the government from excluding citizens from a public forum on the basis of their viewpoints. Public officials acting under color of state law similarly may not use the authority of their offices to deprive citizens of their First Amendment rights.

However, the application of this protection in the context of social media has been inconsistent across federal circuit courts. Although these courts agree that viewpoint discrimination by the government on …

Evolusi Hukum Cybercrime Dalam Perkembangan Hukum Dalam Dunia Digital, Isra Ruddin, Subhan Zein Sgn

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

This research explores the evolution of cybercrime law in the face of developments in information and communication technology (ICT) over the last few decades. The development of digital technology has provided countless benefits, but has also given rise to increasingly complex threats in the form of cyberattacks and cybercrime. The aim of this research is to investigate how cybercrime law has evolved in response to changes in ICT and how these developments have influenced the effectiveness of cybercrime law enforcement. This research also analyzes the role of cross-border cooperation in cybercrime law enforcement and how developments in international law have …

Efektivitas Pelaksanaan Pemberian Pendidikan Formal Bagi Anak-Anak Pengungsi Luar Negeri Di Kota Batam, Rina Shahriyani Shahrullah, Heru Susetyo, Lu Sudirman, Rendi Sahputra

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

The entire responsibility for all children in Indonesia lies with the government, and it extends to all children in Indonesia, not only those who are Indonesian nationals but also includes children who are refugees from foreign countries. One of the fundamental rights regulated by the laws and the Convention on the Rights of the Child ratified by Indonesia is the right to receive appropriate education (formal, non-formal, and informal education). This research aims to analyze the implementation of formal education fulfillment for refugee children in Batam City, especially those accommodated at Hotel Kolekta. Therefore, the research questions are as follows: …