Internet Law Commons^™

The Marijuana Insurgency: Federalism And Social Reframing In Policy Reform, Matthew P. Cavedon

Seattle University Law Review

After fifty years of federal prohibition, marijuana reform efforts have won political and legal success. These victories hold lessons for anyone seeking to resist federal law without being able to directly affect it.

Victory can come from reframing an issue. For marijuana reform, social reframing—not formal legal analysis or material factors—provides the best explanation for how advocates achieved change. Their unconventional political tactics, akin to those used by insurgents in wartime, undercut federal prohibition by winning hearts and minds.

This is an analysis of the sociology of legal change. It is also the story of how ordinary Americans retook personal …

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 …

The Battle Between Open Markets And National Security: How Limiting Investments Into Foreign Technology Might Be Hurting National Security Goals, Alexandra Van Cleef

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Superpowers With Villainous Objectives: How The Executive Branch’S Immigration Enforcement “Powers” Utilize Technology To Violate Noncitizens’ Privacy, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

The United States border, for noncitizens, has a unique quality to it. Each time a noncitizen crosses that border, they are no longer private individuals. They can no longer choose to give up their information–instead, there is a forced exchange: data for entry. Who they are, what they are, and everything that connects them to the world is given up in exchange for a new life in a new land. Once the border is crossed, noncitizens no longer have the privacy that they may have known before. This Note first builds on scholarship theorizing that noncitizens do have a right …

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 …

Measuring Compliance With The California Consumer Privacy Act Over Space And Time, Jens Frankenreiter, Van Tran, Aarushi Mehrotra, Marshini Chetty, Nick Feamster, Lior Strahilevitz

Scholarship@WashULaw

The widespread sharing of consumers personal information with third parties raises significant privacy concerns. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates that online businesses offer consumers the option to opt out of the sale and sharing of personal information. Our study automatically tracks the presence of the opt-out link longitudinally across multiple states after the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) went into effect. We categorize websites based on whether they are subject to CCPA and investigate cases of potential non-compliance. We find a number of websites that implement the opt-out link early and across all examined states but also find …

Speaking Back To Sexual Privacy Invasions, Brenda Dvoskin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Many big players in the internet ecosystem do not like hosting sexual expression. They often justify these bans as a protection of sexual privacy. For example, Meta states that it removes sexual imagery to prevent the nonconsensual distribution of sexual images. In response, this Article argues that banning digital sexual expression is counterproductive if the aim is to alleviate the harms inflicted by sexual privacy losses.

Contemporary sexual privacy theory, however, lacks analytical tools to explain why nudity bans harm the interests they intend to protect. This Article aims at building those tools. The main contribution is an invitation to …

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 …

Privacy Law’S Role In An Information Economy, Sari Mazzurco

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

What do we lose when we lose our privacy? A slew of recently enacted state laws suggest that the loss of privacy is merely a loss of individual choice in the market exchange of services for personal information. This Article argues that a loss of privacy risks something greater: the collapse of complex and fluid social identity. Without privacy, individuals cannot nurture their own senses of self because they are no longer free to try on different social roles across diverse relationships. Pervasive, private data collection threatens multifaceted selfhood by eliminating the boundaries that make social roles distinct and hindering …

Data In Business & Society, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Data, it is sometimes said, is the world’s new oil. Unlike the days when information was transmitted in print form, data is transmitted at the touch of a fingertip through the click of a mouse or a push of an icon on a phone app. Algorithms and computing systems have drastically expanded the scope, speed, and volume of access and use of data for consumers. Additionally, businesses, in variety of forms, including business-to-business, business-to-consumer, online, and even brick-and-mortar, have employed data to interact with other businesses and with consumers. Data has drastically expanded in use throughout business and society, and …

Section 230 Reform, Liberalism, And Their Discontents, Mateusz Blaszczyk

Scholarly Works

The Section 230 debate is a proxy for reevaluating constitutional fundamentals. The modern right and the modern left, both attacking Section 230, have abandoned liberalism, together with free speech, public private divide, and the politics of neutrality. Instead of believing in First Amendment value pluralism, each side of the spectrum wishes to realize their own positive normative vision for the political community which, today, is largely defined in the realm of digital culture. Each side recognizes the political other as an enemy to their own utopia, wishing to control, censor, or simply become sovereign thereover. These existential politics of the …

Cyberflashing: Exposing Oklahoma’S Legal Loophole, Sara Wray

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Present And Future Of Ai Usage In The Banking And Financial Decision-Making Processes Within The Developing Indian Economy, Dr. Shouvik Kumar Guha, Bash Savage-Mansary, Dr. Navyajyoti Samanta

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

In course of this paper, the authors have soght to examine the extent to which technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) have made inroads into the banking and financial sectors of a developing economy like India. The paper begins with providing a contextual background to the adoption of such technology in the global financial arena. It then proceeds to identify and categorise the forms of AI currently being used in the Indian financial sector and also considers the different channels of operation where such technology is in vogue. The advantages of using such technology and the future goals for integrating …

Liking The Intrusion Analysis In In Re Facebook, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

In re Facebook preserved a class action brought against Facebook based on its mass collection of web browsing data. Although the plaintiffs brought several common law and statutory causes of action, I will focus on the court’s analysis of intrusion upon seclusion. This is where the case makes its greatest contribution to 21st century jurisprudence. It clears up several puzzles that had troubled the tort (and indeed my own thinking) to the great benefit of tort theory and the progress of privacy law

Integrating Nist And Iso Cybersecurity Audit And Risk Assessment Frameworks Into Cameroonian Law, Bernard Ngalim

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper reviews cybersecurity laws and regulations in Cameroon, focusing on cybersecurity and information security audits and risk assessments. The importance of cybersecurity risk assessment and the implementation of security controls to cure deficiencies noted during risk assessments or audits is a critical step in developing cybersecurity resilience. Cameroon's cybersecurity legal framework provides for audits but does not explicitly enumerate controls. Consequently, integrating relevant controls from the NIST frameworks and ISO Standards can improve the cybersecurity posture in Cameroon while waiting for a comprehensive revision of the legal framework. NIST and ISO are internationally recognized as best practices in information …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

A Trusted Framework For Cross-Border Data Flows, Alex Joel

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), in cooperation with the Tech, Law and Security Program (TLS) of the American University Washington College of Law, and with support from Microsoft, convened a Global Taskforce to Promote Trusted Sharing of Data comprising experts from civil society, academia, and industry to submit proposals for harmonizing approaches to global data use and sharing. Former US Ambassador to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and GMF Distinguished Fellow Karen Kornbluh and Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer and Corporate Vice President Julie Brill co-chaired the taskforce; TLS Senior Project Director Alex Joel …

Deep Dive Into Deepfakes—Safeguarding Our Digital Identity, Yi Yan

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Deepfake technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and with it, the potential to pose a significant threat to the digital community, democratic institutions, and private individuals. With the creation of highly convincing but entirely fabricated audio, video, and images, there is a pressing need for the international community to address the vulnerabilities posed by deepfake technology in the current legal landscape through unambiguous legislation. This Note explores the ethical, legal, and social implications of deepfakes, including issues of privacy, identity theft, and political manipulation. It also reviews existing international legal frameworks, i.e., the Convention on Cybercrime (“Budapest Convention”) and proposes a …

The Need For Cyber Resilience Of Space Assets: Law And Policy Considerations Of Ensuring Cybersecurity In Outer Space, Daniella Febbraro

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In 2018, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was the subject of a data breach where over 500 megabytes of data from a major mission system was stolen by hackers. This attack affected NASA’s Deep Space Network, prompting the United States Johnson Space Center to disconnect the International Space Station from the affected gateway due to fears that mission systems could become compromised. NASA has acknowledged that its vast online presence, which includes thousands of publicly accessible datasets, offers a large potential target for cybercriminals. The 2018 incident was one of many, with NASA experiencing more than 6000 cyberattacks from 2017-2021 alone. …

When Your Boss Is An Algorithm: Preserving Canadian Employment Standards In The Digital Economy, Fife Ogunde

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The platform or ‘‘gig” economy is a rapidly growing economy in Canada. Between 2005 and 2016, the share of gig workers among all workers in Canada rose from 5.5% to 8.2%. These include independent contractors, select freelancers and platform workers. In 2018, 28% of Canadians aged 18 and older reported making money through online platforms. Research by Payments Canada in 2021 showed gig workers as representing more than one in 10 Canadian adults with more than one in three Canadian businesses employing gig workers. As the share of platform workers in the economy has grown, so has the discussion regarding …

Slouching Toward Regulation: Assessing Bill 88 As A Solution For Workplace Surveillance Harms, Danielle E. Thompson, Adam Molnar

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Employee monitoring applications (‘‘EMAs”) are proliferating in Canada and provide employers with sophisticated surveillance tools for the monitoring of workers (e.g., on-device video surveillance, browser activity, and email monitoring). In response to concerns about these increasingly invasive surveillance practices, the Government of Ontario passed Bill 88, the Working for Workers Act, 2022, which requires all employers with 25 or more workers to have a written policy stating whether and how they electronically monitor their employees. Bill 88 marks a more explict attempt to regulate workplace surveillance in a modern digital context in Canada; however; however, an analysis of the Bill’s …