Law and Society Commons^™

Competition, Comity, And Confusion: Reconciling The Ftaia’S Import Exclusion With Its Direct Effects Provision, Elliot Lam

Fordham Law Review

The debate surrounding the Sherman Act’s extraterritorial scope represents a tension between two competing objectives: protecting the U.S. economy from foreign anticompetitive conduct on one hand and respecting the sovereign authority of other nation-states on the other. Applying U.S. law abroad risks undermining sovereign authority by regulating foreign economies, though such regulation appears necessary in some cases to protect U.S. consumers.

Congress’s attempt to square these objectives through enacting the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act of 1982 (FTAIA) failed to settle the matter. The statute left courts with two new questions: how to distinguish “import” from “nonimport” commerce, and how …

When The Screen Lies: Navigating Privacy And Publicity In An Ai World, Nancy M. Menagh

Fordham Law Review

A key issue of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike was the use of generative AI in the entertainment industry and, more specifically, the creation of uncanny digital replicas of performers being used without their knowledge or consent. Since then, concerns have only intensified around the unauthorized creation and use of digital replicas and the ease with which they can be made and disseminated online. Currently, there is a patchwork of state laws that attempt to target these issues, but they have proven ineffective against the challenges presented by digital replicas.

This Note analyzes the problems digital replicas have raised in the …

Abortion Travel Restrictions Under The Dormant Commerce Clause After National Pork Producers Council V. Ross, Katherine Bartley

Fordham Law Review

Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, twelve states have banned abortion entirely, and seven states have banned abortion earlier in pregnancy than the standard set in Roe v. Wade. As abortion access dwindles, patients increasingly cross state lines to seek reproductive healthcare. In response, antiabortion state officials and lawmakers have made efforts to restrict interstate travel for abortion care.

This Note examines abortion travel restrictions under the “Dormant” Commerce Clause doctrine, which limits state laws that burden interstate commerce. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed but narrowed the judge-made doctrine in National Pork Producers Council v. …

“Shipping” Away The Captive Audience Meeting, Nathan Kakalec

Fordham Law Review

On November 14, 2024, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) overturned seventy-six years of labor law precedent by banning captive audience meetings in Amazon.com Services LLC. Captive audience meetings, mandatory meetings where employers discuss unionization with their employees, were a powerful anti-union tool used by employers to coerce their employees into rejecting unionization. The NLRB argues that captive audience meetings are inconsistent with § 7 and § 8 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Employers reject the NLRB’s assertion and contend that banning captive audience meetings infringes on their First Amendment right to communicate their views on unionization. …

Law Jobs: Professional Regulation, The Division Of Legal Labor, And Institutional Change, Emily S. Taylor Poppe

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Jewish Lawyers And The Labor Movement, Catherine L. Fisk

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

A World-Threatening Feeling: Grief, Moral Injury, And Institutional Loss In Rural Courts, Michele Statz

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Illusion Of Inclusion: The False Promise Of The New Governance Project For Content Moderation, Brenda Dvoskin

Fordham Law Review

Because private companies now control the most prominent communication platforms, the most pressing question in the field of content moderation is how to ensure that the governance of public discourse responds to public values. The prevailing approach, given that the state cannot regulate speech directly, is that state regulation can be substituted with audited self-regulation, broad stakeholder participation, and negotiated rulemaking. In this model, which this Article refers to as the “new governance model for content moderation,” companies include advocates as representatives of the public in their processes to govern online speech. Ideally, they negotiate policy goals and share responsibility …

Chronically Online: Apportioning Liability In Social Media Litigation Based On User Engagement, Rebecca Vangelos

Fordham Law Review

The average American teenager spends nearly five hours on social media every day. This result is by design: social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok deploy persuasive technologies—including infinite scroll, personalized content recommendation feeds, and dark patterns—to capture and retain teen attention. These intentional design features exploit adolescent vulnerabilities to foster social media dependency. Accordingly, a growing body of scientific evidence links the extensive use of social media to the teen mental health crisis in the United States.

Despite these negative effects, social media companies have largely evaded accountability for the harm they have caused to teens. Recent lawsuits …

Foreword, Deborah W. Denno, Erica Valencia-Graham

Fordham Law Review

This Foreword overviews an unprecedented Symposium on these wide ranging topics titled The New AI: The Legal and Ethical Implications of ChatGPT and Other Emerging Technologies. Hosted by the Fordham Law Review and cosponsored by Fordham University School of Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center on November 3, 2023, the Symposium brought together attorneys, judges, professors, and scientists to explore the opportunities and risks presented by AI, especially GenAI like ChatGPT. The discussion raised complex questions concerning AI sentience and personal privacy, as well as the future of legal ethics, education, and employment. Although the AI industry uniformly predicts ever more …

Aligning The Stars: Institutional Convergence As Social Change, Raymond H. Brescia

Fordham Law Review

In a democracy, in which the legal and constitutional systems should reflect popular will and individual and collective self-determination are the engines through which those systems are realized, what are the means by which individuals, organizations, and social movements might bring about meaningful and sustainable social change that makes that society more just, more inclusive, and more equitable? A common understanding of how social change happens, and who can bring about that change, is represented in an oft-quoted phrase, attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world: Indeed, it is the …

Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Fordham Law Review

This colloquium asks us to consider how social change is influencing the legal profession and the legal profession’s response. This Essay applies these questions to organizing around criminal injustice and the response from public defenders. This Essay surfaces the work of four innovative indigent defense organizations that are engaged with and duty-bound to the communities they represent. I call this “community responsive public defense,” which is a distinct model of indigent defense whereby public defenders look to their clients and their clients’ communities to help shape advocacy, strategy, and representation.

Methodologically, this Essay relies primarily on qualitative interviews with leaders …

Expecting Medication Surveillance, Jennifer D. Oliva

Fordham Law Review

In response to federal financial incentives and mandates, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories administer electronic prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). Federal and state policymakers justified the implementation and enhancement of ubiquitous prescription drug monitoring by contending that expansive state drug surveillance was a necessary weapon in the war against the American drug overdose crisis. As is often the case with tools designed for law enforcement surveillance, however, PDMPs have proven susceptible to mission creep. Although pioneer PDMPs were paper-based systems that limited their surveillance to a narrow class of heavily regulated controlled substances, modern …

De Jure Separate And Unequal Treatment Of The People Of Puerto Rico And The U.S. Territories, Natalie Gomez-Velez

Fordham Law Review

Current efforts to dismantle systemic racism in the United States are often met with the argument that legally sanctioned inequality is a thing of the past. Yet despite progress toward formal legal equality, racism and discrimination in the United States exist not only as the effects of past laws and systems—they exist presently in current laws and systems as well. Current U.S. law discriminates against U.S. territories and their residents with respect to citizenship status, voting rights and representation, and equal access to benefits, among other things.

This Essay examines such separate and unequal treatment using the recent case, United …

Representing Noncitizens In The Context Of Legal Instability And Adverse Detention Precedent, Nancy Morawetz

Fordham Law Review

This Essay addresses three structural aspects of immigration law that have shifted in recent years and present important challenges for delivering adequate representation. Although the Katzmann study group’s many initiatives have shored up access to counsel in immigration courts and for immigration applications, the ground has been shifting under our feet. This Essay discusses three (of many) phenomena that make it harder than ever to lawyer on behalf of noncitizens. The first is the rise of red-state lawsuits that lead to enormous unpredictability about the agency rules under which lawyers can expect to operate. The second is the individuation and …

Policy By The People, For The People:Designing Responsiveregulation And Buildingdemocratic Power, Scott L. Cummings, Doug Smith

Fordham Law Review

Policymaking in American democracy is often a process that happens to people rather than by them. This is especially the case with respect to policy that affects people with less power in low-income communities and communities of color. Urban policy, in particular, has historically been driven by business elites and white homeowners’ interests, which have shaped exclusionary policies, such as redlining and single-family zoning— etching racial and economic segregation into the fabric of city space. Even when outsider interest groups and social movement organizations gain enough power to shape the policy agenda, give input into the content of policy, and …

Choose Your Words Carefully: Reimagining Retaliatory Arrest After Nieves V. Bartlett, Ryan Hor

Fordham Law Review

In the summer of 2020, the United States experienced potentially its largest ever social movement in the protests against racial inequality. Predictably, protestors clashed with law enforcement officers, often leading to arrests. Arrested individuals could bring § 1983 retaliatory arrest claims alleging that the officers deprived them of their First Amendment right to free speech. Such claims underline the tension between two vital interests: free speech and law enforcement effectiveness. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Nieves v. Bartlett, which crafted a new framework for retaliatory arrest claims that consequently diminished a plaintiff’s chance to prevail and recover …

Liability For Ai Decision-Making: Some Legal And Ethical Considerations, Iria Giuffrida

Fordham Law Review

The creation and commercialization of these systems raise the question of how liability risks will play out in real life. However, as technical advancements have outpaced legal actions, it is unclear how the law will treat AI systems. This Article briefly addresses the legal ramifications and liability risks associated with reliance on—or delegation to—AI systems, and it sketches a framework suggesting how we can address the question of whether AI merits a new approach to deal with the liability challenges it raises when humans remain “in” or “on” the loop.

Artificial Intelligence In Pharmaceuticals, Biologics, And Medical Devices: Present And Future Regulatory Models, David W. Opderbeck

Fordham Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technologies are set to transform the pharmaceutical, biologic, and medical device industries. AI is accelerating a convergence in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and, in the health-care industry more broadly, is similar to the convergence of the media, entertainment, and communications industries.

Cda 230 For A Smart Internet, Madeline Byrd, Katherine J. Strandburg

Fordham Law Review

This Article analyzes CDA 230 liability in light of the evolution of smart services employing data-driven personalized models of user behavior. As an illustrative case study, we discuss discrimination claims against Facebook’s ad-targeting platform, relying on recent empirical studies5 and litigation documents for factual background.

Urbanism Under Google: Lessons From Sidewalk Toronto, Ellen P. Goodman, Julia Powles

Fordham Law Review

Cities around the world are rapidly adopting digital technologies, data analytics, and the trappings of “smart” infrastructure. These innovations are touted as solutions to help rationalize services and address rising urban challenges, whether in housing, transit, energy, law enforcement, health care, waste management, or population flow. Promises of urban innovation unite cities’ need for help with technology firms’ need for markets and are rarely subject to evidentiary burdens about projected benefits (let alone costs). For the city, being smart is about functioning better and attracting tech plaudits. For the technology company, the smart city is a way to capture the …

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, And Bias In Finance: Toward Responsible Innovation, Kristin Johnson, Frank Pasquale, Jennifer Chapman

Fordham Law Review

According to some futurists, financial markets’ automation will substitute increasingly sophisticated, objective, analytical, model-based assessments of, for example, a borrower’s creditworthiness for direct human evaluations irrevocably tainted by bias and subject to the cognitive limits of the human brain. However, even if they do occur, such advances may violate other legal principles.

Artificial Intelligence, Finance, And The Law, Tom C.W. Lin

Fordham Law Review

Artificial intelligence is an existential component of modern finance. The progress and promise realized and presented by artificial intelligence in finance has been thus far remarkable. It has made finance cheaper, faster, larger, more accessible, more profitable, and more efficient in many ways. Yet for all the significant progress and promise made possible by financial artificial intelligence, it also presents serious risks and limitations. This Article offers a study of those risks and limitations—the ways artificial intelligence and misunderstandings of it can harm and hinder law, finance, and society. It provides a broad examination of inherent and structural risks and …

Robot, Inc.: Personhood For Autonomous Systems?, Gerhard Wagner

Fordham Law Review

Since the invention of the steam engine, technological progress has served as a driver of innovation for liability systems. Pertinent examples include the arrival of the railway and the introduction of motor-powered vehicles. Today, the digital revolution challenges established legal axioms more fundamentally than technological innovations from earlier times. The development of robots and other digital agents operating with the help of artificial intelligence will transform many, if not all, product markets. It will also blur the distinction between goods and services and call into question the existing allocation of responsibility between manufacturers and suppliers on one side and owners, …

Power, Process, And Automated Decision-Making, Ari Ezra Waldman

Fordham Law Review

Automated decision-making systems based on “big data”–powered algorithms and machine learning are just as prone to mistakes, biases, and arbitrariness as their human counterparts. The result is a technologically driven decision-making process that seems to defy interrogation, analysis, and accountability and, therefore, undermines due process.

Gender Equality And The First Amendment: Foreword, Jeanmarie Fenrich, Benjamin C. Zipursky, Danielle Keats Citron

Fordham Law Review

Gender equality demands equal opportunity to speak and be heard. Yet, in recent years, the clash between equality and free speech in the context of gender has intensified—in the media, the workplace, college campuses, and the political arena, both online and offline. The internet has given rise to novel First Amendment issues that particularly affect women, such as nonconsensual pornography, online harassment, and online privacy. On November 1–2, 2018, the Fordham Law Review brought together scholars and practicing lawyers from around the nation to address many of the pressing challenges facing feminists and free speech advocates today. The Symposium was …

Free Speech And The Diverse University, Keith E. Whittington

Fordham Law Review

There are those who think that free speech and inclusivity on college campuses are inconsistent. The notion that the two values are in tension with one another has become a common framing for thinking about the modern campus. A Gallup-Knight Foundation poll of college students asked respondents not only whether they valued free speech or diversity but also to choose between them and indicate which was “more important for colleges.” When forced to choose, a substantial minority of students said they would prioritize inclusivity over the freedom to express “viewpoints that are offensive” on campus. Following the Gallup-Knight poll the …

Pregnancy And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Fordham Law Review

Suppose that you are pregnant and seated in the waiting room of a Planned Parenthood clinic, or maybe in a facility that advertises “Pregnant? We Can Help You.” This Essay discusses the First Amendment rules that apply to the government’s control of what you are about to hear. This Essay considers what First Amendment law, as applied to speech to pregnant women, would look like if the Court attended to the First Amendment interests of pregnant women themselves.

When Law Frees Us To Speak, Danielle Keats Citron, Jonathon W. Penney

Fordham Law Review

A central aim of online abuse is to silence victims. That effort is as regrettable as it is successful. In the face of cyberharassment and sexualprivacy invasions, women and marginalized groups retreat from online engagement. These documented chilling effects, however, are not inevitable. Beyond its deterrent function, the law has an equally important expressive role. In this Article, we highlight law’s capacity to shape social norms and behavior through education. We focus on a neglected dimension of law’s expressive role: its capacity to empower victims to express their truths and engage with others. Our argument is theoretical and empirical. We …

Income Disparity, Gender Equality, And Free Expression, Sylvia A. Law

Fordham Law Review

In the past half century, our world has experienced a radical change comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. At least five elements are key: growing disparity of human opportunity, advance of formal human rights and equality, information transformation, economic globalization, and climate change. My focus is on economic disparity and gender equality in the United States. These two issues, huge in and of themselves, interact with the other cataclysmic changes of our time.