Science and Technology Law Commons^™

How The Internet Unmakes Law, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

Sandbox Boundaries, Hilary J. Allen

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Around the world, subnational and national regulatory sandboxes are being adopted in an effort to promote fintech innovation. These regulatory sandboxes seek to do so by rolling back some of the consumer protection and prudential regulations that would otherwise apply to firms trialing their financial products and services in the sandbox. While sacrificing such protections in order to promote innovation is problematic, such sacrifice may nonetheless be justifiable if, by working with innovators in the sandbox, regulators are educated about new technologies in a way that enhances their ability to effectively promote consumer protection and financial stability in other contexts. …

'Rifled Precision': Using E-Discovery Technology To Streamline Books And Records Litigation, Joshua A. Manning

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In 1993, the Delaware Supreme Court urged stockholders to use the "tools at hand" to flesh out complaints in derivative lawsuits. The plaintiffs' bar got the message. In the years since that proclamation, the Delaware Court of Chancery has seen dramatic increases in so-called Section 220 litigation-stockholders exercising their statutory right to inspect a company 's books and records. As Delaware courts have made it harder for stockholders to challenge merger transactions, this trend has only intensified. Due to increased filings, as well as other structural hurdles, these "summary proceedings" have begun to drag, with many requiring full trials. Because …

Disability And Design, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

When scholars contemplate the legal tools available to policymakers for encouraging innovation, they primarily think about patents. If they are keeping up with the most recent literature, they may also consider grants, prizes, and taxes as means to increase the supply of innovation. But the innovation policy toolkit is substantially deeper than that. To demonstrate its depth, this Article explores the evolution of designs that help people with disabilities access the world around them. From artificial limbs to the modern wheelchair and the reshaping of the built environment, a variety of legal doctrines have influenced, for better and for worse, …

Digging Into Algorithms: Legal Ethics And Legal Access, Carla L. Reyes, Jeff Ward

Faculty Scholarship

The current discussions around algorithms, legal ethics, and expanding legal access through technological tools gravitate around two themes: (1) protection of the integrity of the legal profession and (2) a desire to ensure greater access to legal services. The hype cycle often pits the desire to protect the integrity of the legal profession against the ability to use algorithms to provide greater access to legal services, as though they are mutually exclusive. In reality, the arguments around protecting the profession from the threats posed by algorithms represent an over-fit in relation to what algorithms can actually achieve, while the visions …

Accountability, Secrecy, And Innovation In Ai-Enabled Clinical Decision Software, Arti K. Rai, Isha Sharma, Christina Silcox

Faculty Scholarship

This article employs analytical and empirical tools to dissect the complex relationship between secrecy, accountability, and innovation incentives in clinical decision software enabled by machine learning (ML-CD). Although secrecy can provide incentives for innovation, it can also diminish the ability of third parties to adjudicate risk and benefit responsibly. Our first aim is descriptive. We address how the interrelated regimes of intellectual property law, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, and tort liability are currently shaping information flow and innovation incentives. We find that developers regard secrecy over training data and details of the trained model as central to competitive …

Inflection Points In Technology Law: An Introduction To Volume 16, Issue 1, Bryan H. Choi, Guy Rub

Publications

No abstract provided.

Software As A Profession, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Recent Renaissance In Privacy Law, Margot Kaminski

Publications

Considering the recent increased attention to privacy law issues amid the typically slow pace of legal change.

Regulatory De-Arbitrage In Twenty-First Century Cures Act's Health Information Regulation, Craig Konnoth

Publications

Health data regulation can be thought of at two levels. First, the micro- level of regulation has to do with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Second, the macro-level concerns the networks on which EHRs are transmitted. The micro- and macro-levels of regulation interact. For example, EHRs need to be configured so that they can be transmitted on mandated networks. As a result, the lines do sometimes blur.

That said, the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures) clearly takes a dual approach to regulation. Cures was passed in December 2016 on a bipartisan basis. Its mandate was to address health data regulation at …

Autonomous Vehicles: Regulatory Challenges And The Response From Germany And Uk, Antonios E. Kouroutakis

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Smart Contracts And The Limits Of Computerized Commerce, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies have sparked considerable interest among legal scholars in recent years, and a growing body of scholarship focuses on whether smart contracts and cryptocurrencies can sidestep law and regulation altogether. Bitcoin is famously decentralized, without any central actor controlling the system. Its users remain largely anonymous, using alphanumeric addresses instead of legal names. Ethereum shares these traits and also supports smart contracts that can automate the transfer of the Ethereum cryptocurrency (known as ether). Ethereum also supports specialized "tokens" that can be tied to the ownership of assets, goods, and services that exist completely outside of the …

Big Data Prosecution And Brady, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Prosecutors are joining the big data revolution, adopting “intelligence-driven” strategies to target crime patterns. Centralized big data systems now track offenders, places, and groups allowing prosecutors to link crimes by time, place, associations, or other connections. Adding to these types of formalized, structured databases are growing sources of raw, unstructured big data from digital surveillance technologies like video cameras, police body cameras, and automated license plate readers. The prosecutors of the future will sit on a wealth of valuable investigative insights – all searchable and potentially relevant for a more aggressive and proactive investigation strategy.But as helpful as these new …

Implementing User Rights For Research In The Field Of Artificial Intelligence: A Call For International Action, Sean Flynn, Michael W. Carroll

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Last year, before the onset of a global pandemic highlighted the critical and urgent need for technology-enabled scientific research, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched an inquiry into issues at the intersection of intellectual property (IP) and artificial intelligence (AI). We contributed comments to that inquiry, with a focus on the application of copyright to the use of text and data mining (TDM) technology. This article describes some of the most salient points of our submission and concludes by stressing the need for international leadership on this important topic. WIPO could help fill the current gap on international leadership, …

Brief Fof The R Street Institutte, Public Knowledge, And The Niskanen Center As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan, Meredith F. Rose

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

The Java SE declarations of this case are simply a language of commands. As an application programming interface, or API, they exhibit features common to any language: a structured vocabulary and grammatical syntaxes, which a computer system understands as instructions to perform predefined tasks. What Oracle accuses as infringement is “reimplementation,” namely the building of a system, in this case Google’s Android platform, that repurposes the same words and syntaxes of the Java declarations.

Transnational Government Hacking, Jennifer Daskal

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Nonexcludable Surgical Method Patents, Jonas Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A patent consists of only one right: the right to exclude others from practicing the patented invention. However, one class of patents statutorily lacks the right to exclude direct infringers: surgical method patents are not enforceable against medical practitioners or health care facilities, which are the only realistic potential direct infringers of such patents. Despite this, inventors regularly file for (and receive) surgical method patents. Why would anyone incur the expense (more than $20,000 on average) of acquiring a patent on a surgical method if that patent cannot be used to keep people from using the patent?

The traditional answer …

Tinkering With Circuit Conflicts Beyond The Schoolhouse Gate, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.