Science and Technology Law Commons^™

The End Of Unmeasured Exploitation: How A.S.M., C.A.S., And S.I.A. Challenge Digital Attention Capitalism, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

Digital attention capitalism generates value through the capture and monetization of human attention, yet it has historically lacked standardized mechanisms for measuring attention-related harm. This paper argues that the Attention Safeguard Models (A.S.M.), Cognitive Attentional Standards (C.A.S.), and Sociological Impact Assessment (S.I.A.) collectively challenge this system by introducing an integrated framework for classifying, measuring, and evaluating digital attention harm and its societal consequences. C.A.S. provides standardized measurement of digital attention harm, A.S.M. identifies and classifies patterns of attentional disruption and manipulation, and S.I.A. evaluates broader impacts on institutions, communities, civic engagement, education, social cohesion, and inequality. Together, these systems transform …

From Scrolls To Algorithms: A Critical Analysis Of Generative Ai, Digital Preservation, And Ranganathan’S Normative Philosophy, Madhu K S

Book Chapters

The paper discusses the developments in human information access across three historical paradigms including physical scarcity, digital abundance, and synthetic algorithmic mediation with Generative AI. History is discussed with the philosophical aspects of Floridi’s Philosophy of Information, Christine Borgman’s Digital Scholarship Framework, and S R Ranganathan’s Normative Library Science. This conceptual paper explores the transition from finding documents to creating answers with AI it has changed human thinking and reliability on information. This transition has changed how people believe and trust the source of information. This paper looks at the material ethics regarding how commercial large language models (LLM) are …

Police Surveillance And The Perils Of Techno-Solutionism, Prithika Balakrishnan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article charts domestic law enforcement’s use of video surveillance, beginning in the backlash to the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, continuing through the War on Terror and, more recently, in the context of the post-George Floyd public critiques of policing. The undergirding philosophy of policing’s embrace of surveillance technology is techno-solutionism, the view that all complex social situations can be simplified to measurable data primed for quick-fix, unbiased, algorithmic answers. While technology may have initially been adopted by police to respond to specific problems, it has changed the problems themselves, altered the array of potential solutions, and …

Think Twice Before You Sign! An Experiment On A Cautionary Function Of Contractual Formalities, Monika Leszczynska

Faculty Scholarship

Contractual formalities, such as handwritten signatures, have long been viewed as serving a cautionary function that protects individuals from entering ill-considered agreements. With the rise of digital contracting, it is uncertain whether online forms of assent can play the same role. In an incentivized laboratory experiment, four modes of contract confirmation were compared: clicking “OK,” typing one’s name, entering a PIN code (analogous to a qualified e-signature), and handwritten signing. The study examined how these methods affect choices between smaller–sooner and larger–later rewards. Results show that participants were more impulsive when confirming by clicking “OK” or typing their name than …

Ai Slop, Jessica Silbey, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The term “AI slop” has become popular to describe the output of generative AI systems seen as voluminous, low quality, or the result of little effort. When AI-generated music and videos flood platforms, they are called slop. Peer-reviewed journals and legal tribunals are drowning in low-quality and low-reliability AI slop submissions.  Employees are seen to be producing mountains of slop in their reports and communications with each other. The term has inertia and heft, and the phenomenon has significant consequences. Most of them are not good.

But the boundaries of “AI slop” and its usefulness in policy discussions are not …

Scientific Uncertainty As Political Aggression: A Manifesto For Those Who Value Science And Want To Save It From State And Corporate Control, Stephen Demeo

Publications and Research

A manifesto is an opportunity to publicly express strongly held beliefs about a topic that is personally important to an author. It is analytical as it is creative. “Scientific Uncertainty as Political Aggression” is a manifesto that intersects science and politics. It urges those interested in science to examine two different but related topics: scientific uncertainty in measurement—what it is, how it is determined, why it’s important— and the magnification of uncertainty through legal and linguistic tactics used by right-wing politicians and politically supported corporations.

For some time now, the Republican Establishment has cast excessive doubt on scientific findings through …

Ai Privilege And The Legal Services Crisis, Andrea Roth, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

Recently, San Francisco public defenders were so overburdened that they risked jail for contempt rather than take on more cases. Wyoming and New Mexico public defenders have done the same, while other states have been sued for underfunded, ineffective public defender systems. Meanwhile, some people accused of low-level crimes have no lawyer whatsoever, making critical decisions about pleading guilty or trial strategies on their own, and being subject to pretrial detention, significant fines, and collateral consequences like deportation and sex offender registration. Even outside the criminal system, low-income people face evictions, family separations, deportations, and more with inadequate legal assistance. …

Lessons Learned For The Independent Panel For Evidence For Action Against Amr From Previous International Science Panels: Stakeholder Views From The 2025 Lagos Workshop, Iruka N. Okeke, Anthony Mcdonnell, Ayodele A. Akinyele, Javier Guzman, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

In September, 2024, the UN General Assembly assigned the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) the task of establishing an Independent Panel for Evidence for Action against AMR (IPEA). To promote stakeholder views and input around the constitution and functioning of this Panel, which could feed into the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat’s consultation process, we independently commissioned seven papers to examine the lessons that could be learned from other high-level scientific panels. We then convened 85 stakeholders, primed with the background papers. The Workshop, held in Lagos, Nigeria in April, 2025, drew representation from around the world, particularly low-income or …

Who’S The Lawyer Now? Professional Identity In A Genai World, Aric K. Short

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping the legal profession and, more fundamentally, lawyers’ professional identities. As AI systems increasingly perform tasks traditionally associated with legal practice, the article argues that technological competence and adaptability have become essential components of professional identity formation. It contends that lawyers must move beyond viewing AI as merely a tool for efficiency and instead confront the ways in which it is transforming expectations of competence, professional responsibility, and legal expertise.

The article further explores what may remain uniquely human in legal practice as AI capabilities expand. It argues that practical wisdom, …

Patent Regime Shift And Firm Innovation Strategy: Evidence From The Second Amendment To China's Patent Law, Tony W. Tong, Wenlong He, Liang Chen, Zi-Lin He, Jiangyong Lu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: While changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection significantly shape firm innovation, the mechanisms driving firms' responses remain poorly understood. Leveraging the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law, which strengthens appropriability particularly for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as a natural experiment, we show that stronger IPR has mixed effects on SOEs' innovation. While SOEs increase the rate of innovation subsequent to the Amendment, they shift the direction of innovation toward more familiar areas in which they face a lesser need to adjust existing routines. This directional change suggests a quality decline in SOEs' innovation that may be attributed to …

Can Laws Be Flexible? Rethinking Legislation For Innovation, Nicholson W. Price Ii, Nick K. Schneider, Ariel Dora Stem, Jochen K. Lennerz

Articles

Agile legislation adapts principles from agile software development to lawmaking, emphasizing iteration, multi-stakeholder feedback, and embedded revision. We outline this learning-oriented governance model using three case studies: Germany’s stepwise digital health legislation, the EU AI Act, and U.S. FDA user-fee reauthorization. These examples highlight legislative designs that enable structured generation of real-world data and evidence during implementation, informing regulatory interpretation and iterative refinement in rapidly evolving technological domains.

There Is No Free Benchmark: An Institutional View Of Legal Ai Benchmarking, Neel Guha, Andy K. Zhang, Christine Tsang, Christopher D. Manning, Julian Nyarko, Daniel E. Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Despite substantial excitement around the use of AI in law, little information exists on the performance and associated risks of the domain’s widely marketed tools. Recent work, for instance, has demonstrated the significant potential for “hallucinations” — wherein models make up facts, law, and precedent — leading Chief Justice Roberts to spotlight this risk in his annual report on the judiciary. We argue that there is a need for public AI benchmarking in law. First, relative to other AI application domains, the legal AI ecosystem lacks legibility — there is little information about the design and performance of many commercial …

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

Expanding The Cognitive Attentional Standards Platform Through Artificial Influence Assessment (Aia): Rationale, Development, And Measurement Design, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how individuals access information, make decisions, and interact with digital environments. The Cognitive Attentional Standards Platform (C.A.S.) was developed to assess attention related harms, cognitive safety, digital autonomy, and platform influence across digital systems (Clark, 2026). However, the growth of generative AI, conversational agents, and algorithmic decision support technologies has introduced new forms of influence that may not be fully captured by existing assessment domains. This paper proposes the Artificial Influence Assessment (AIA) as an expansion of the C.A.S. framework designed to measure AI mediated influence on cognition, behavior, autonomy, and information processing. Drawing on …

Algorithmic Tax Ownership, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Dmitry Erokhin

Articles

Tax ownership is a crucial concept for determining tax liabilities, compliance, and enforcement. However, neither the courts nor the IRS has provided clear guidance on how to analyze it. Since the Supreme Court first outlined a twenty-six-factor test for determining tax ownership in Frank Lyon Co. v. United States in 1978, this multifactor test has remained largely unchanged, and there has been no further guidance from the courts or the IRS to this day. Even tests with shorter lists of factors only add to the confusion regarding compliance and enforcement, as there is no clarity on which factors are most …

The Corporate Restructuring Machine: Introducing An Open Platform Approach To Workouts, Horst Eidenmüller, Jared Mayer

Articles

Out-of-court corporate reorganizations, or “corporate workouts,” allow dispersed investors with differing interests to coalesce and strike deals to successfully reorganize distressed companies. Corporate workouts, however, suffer from a host of well-known problems, creating “process fragility.” Current bargaining dynamics limit the instances in which corporate workouts can be used, narrow the kinds of deals that can be made, and invite opportunistic and other socially costly behavior. Yet the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is here; how can it help parties navigate corporate workouts?

In this Article, we argue that AI is well situated to help increase the efficiency of corporate workouts. Based …

Ai Suppression: E-Discovery Software And Brady, Jason Hartline, Liren Shan, Alec Sun, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

Prosecutors regularly rely on AI e-discovery software, known as technology assisted review (TAR) tools, to sort and prioritize digital evidence. These tools implicate constitutional concerns: they can either risk suppressing or help to surface exculpatory and impeachment evidence that prosecutors must disclose under the Brady due process rule. Yet doctrine, agency guidance, and scholarship offer virtually no direction on their use.

This Article examines how TAR affects Brady compliance. Using computer science simulations on synthetic data sets, we show that TAR can either hide or help to expose Brady evidence, depending on how it is configured and the configurations of …

The Impact Of Ai Companions On Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

People of all ages and backgrounds regularly use AI companions — virtual friends, lovers, and confidantes powered by artificial intelligence. As a new form of relationship, this development poses novel doctrinal and policy questions for family law. As a doctrinal matter, what does child neglect look like when a parent delegates caretaking to an AI companion? How should standards for elder neglect adapt to the widespread use of robotic caregivers? Should lawmakers impose mandatory reporting requirements on therapy bots if children share experiences of abuse or neglect? And can people designate an AI companion as a health care proxy? As …

Hipaa Coverage Of Pre-Processed Neural Telemetry From Brain-Computer Interface Implants, Yurie Lee

Cornell Law Library Cantwell Prize for Exemplary Student Research Papers

Brain-computer interface implants allow patients with degenerative neurological conditions to control robotic limbs or electronic devices through neural commands alone and suppress Parkinson's tremors or seizures in real time. These implants record neural signals millisecond-by-millisecond from electrodes implanted in the brain.

Nevertheless, BCI manufacturers have argued that this data falls outside the scope of HIPAA's Privacy Rule. Existing legal scholarship also seems to have accepted this as true.

This paper challenges that conclusion. It rebuts and considers manufacturers’ counterarguments, concluding that patients have a right to their pre-processed neural telemetry under HIPAA's right-of-access provision.

Operational Responsibility In Ai Governance: A User-Centric Liability Framework, Zhengyang Chen

Faculty Publications

Who bears responsibility when artificial intelligence systems cause harm? This question has become central to AI ethics and governance. Most existing approaches focus on developers, yet this faces serious practical and theoretical problems. Drawing on tort law, agency law, and philosophy of technology, this paper argues that AI should be understood as an instrument whose outputs remain the responsibility of human operators rather than developers. We call this 'user-centric governance.' Placing accountability with deployers promotes public trust by creating clear lines of responsibility, a concern that governance approaches have often overlooked. It preserves democratic accountability by keeping human actors answerable …

How Ai Destroys Institutions, Woodrow Hartzog, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt within a hierarchy of authority and a framework for roles and rules, while maintaining legitimacy for the knowledge produced and the actions taken. Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo. This happens through the machinations of interpersonal relationships within those institutions, which broaden …

Metrics Not Thresholds: How To Regulate Ai And Other Expert Methods For Use In Criminal Investigations And Proceedings, Rebecca Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

Should regulators set performance thresholds for AI tools used in the criminal legal system? This Article draws on U.S. evidence law for guidance. Its answer is ... don’t. Instead of gatekeeping with ex ante performance thresholds, regulators should require or incentivize metrics of reliability that can be clearly communicated to end-user decisionmakers.

Tear Down The Wall: Why Requiring The Fda And The Pto To Share Information Will Improve The Decision-Making Of Both Agencies, Robin C. Feldman, Gideon Schor

Faculty Scholarship

An invisible wall separates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). This wall blocks inter-agency communication, depriving the PTO of information relevant to patent applications and depriving the FDA of information relevant to drug-approval applications. Consequently, it is too easy for a drug company to tell the PTO ‘our drug is new’ (in hopes of speeding a patent grant) while telling the FDA ‘our drug is not new’ (in hopes of speeding drug approval). Better communication between the FDA and PTO would increase agency accuracy by preventing inconsistent representations, and would increase …

Ai Mistakes: "Confabulation" And Abduction, Not "Hallucination", Stephen M. Mcjohn, Ian Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

"Hallucination" has become the common term for errors by AI systems, yet it implies a misleading analogy to human perception. LLM's process tokens. They do not have conscious experience or conscious perception. A hallucination is an experience, and (to our knowledge, to date) LLM's do not experience anything. This paper suggests that legal scholars follow the lead of a small number of AI researchers who have suggested that "confabulation" is a more accurate term, a metaphor grounded in psychology. People confabulate when they unknowingly invent spurious explanations or facts. We then take this terminological question and stretch it into a …

Professor Jacob Noti-Victor Accepted To 2026 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Professor Jacob Noti-Victor was selected to present his paper, Copyright Litigation After Generative AI, at the 2026 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Chosen through a competitive double-blind review process, his paper examines how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping copyright litigation and proposes procedural reforms to address emerging legal challenges.

Labour Law, Technology, And The Attack On The Rules-Based-Order, Valerio De Stefano

Conference Papers

This paper argues that current debates on artificial intelligence and algorithmic management at work are also debates about private power, managerial prerogative, and democracy. It situates recent attacks by major technology companies and their political allies on the European Union and other rule-based international institutions within a broader struggle over who should regulate technology and govern society. It contends that the anti-democratic turn of parts of the tech world is closely connected to authoritarian ideas about work, hierarchy, and obedience. The workplace is one of the principal sites where authority is exercised, surveillance normalised, and habits of subordination formed, with …

Advice For Incorporating Ai Tools Into Your Legal Practice, Celia Bigoness, Robert A. Mackenzie, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We have been speaking with many lawyers and law students about using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. We are struck by the fact that many of them have not been experimenting much, if at all, with the tools that are available to them - although many acknowledge that their clients are increasingly integrating generative AI into their businesses. We have been integrating a lot of these tools into our own professional lives, and here are some tips to help lawyers and law students get comfortable with AI tools that can help them, in big ways and …

China Samr’S Review Process In Cross-Border Technology M&A, Gabriel A. Paknia

Honors Scholar Theses

China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) holds discretionary authority over the merger review process. This paper examines whether SAMR's review of technology and semiconductor transactions since the governing body's inception in 2018 reflects political-economic incentives beyond what competitive harm analysis alone would explain. The paper is broken into three core pillars: accessing SAMR's regulatory code to identify how flexibility to exercise discretion is codified, scrutinizing SAMR's full adverse outcome record for overrepresentation of technology and semiconductor deals, and deconstructing a semiconductor megamerger to illustrate those mechanisms with the backdrop of real time geopolitical events. I find that technology and …

Code And Consequences: How Fraud Detection Algorithms Criminalize Welfare, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates the growing use of automated fraud detection systems in public benefits programs, focusing on how these technologies have intensified the surveillance and criminalization of low-income individuals. Across the globe, government agencies deploying fraud detection algorithms have wrongfully accused thousands of people of committing fraud, with devastating consequences, including bankruptcy, job loss, and psychological trauma. These algorithmic systems operate as opaque “black boxes,” fueled by historical biases against the poor and largely unaccountable to the individuals they affect. Meanwhile, the private vendors that develop the algorithms reap massive profits from unfulfilled promises of efficiency and cost savings.

The …

Slurry-As-A-Service: A Modest Proposal On Scalable Pluralistic Alignment For Nutrient Optimization, Rachel Hong, Yael Eiger, Jevan Hutson, Os Keyes, William Agnew

Articles

Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) faithfully represent the diversity, nuance, and conflict inherent in human values. In this work, we study a high-stakes deployment context—mulching—where automated systems transform selected individuals into nutrientrich slurry for the dual purposes of food security and aesthetic population management. Building on recent pluralistic alignment frameworks, we introduce ValueMulch™, a reproducible training, deployment, and certification pipeline for aligning mulching models (MMs) to a wide range of community norms. Through a real-world testbed spanning 32 communities, we show that ValueMulch™ improves distributional agreement with community mulching preferences …