Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Exporting Equity: Lessons From The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Shanthi Elizabeth Senthe

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Credit functions as a fundamental gateway to economic mobility; however, questions arise regarding the legal and societal implications when an individual is denied access to such credit. In theory, fair lending principles dictate that equal access to credit is a legal right. The premise is reasonable but becomes convoluted when consumer credit is clouded by lender bias, resulting in credit discrimination. This Article presents a comparative perspective revealing a jurisdictional difference in legislation affecting equal access to credit between the United States and Canada. Specifically, this Article will focus on the American Equal Credit Opportunity Act (hereinafter ECOA) and …

Big Business As Gun Control, David B. Kopel, George A. Mocsary, Bhav Ninder Singh

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Gun control increasingly bypasses direct legislative enactments by co-opting the commercial marketplace. Financial institutions and insurers often face regulatory pressures, frequently articulated through vague notions of “reputational risk,” to terminate or restrict services for lawful firearms businesses and advocacy groups. The debanking tactic, seen in initiatives such as Operation Choke Point, can deny essential financial products to firearm owners, merchants, and organizations, curtailing the practical exercise of constitutionally protected rights. Simultaneously, government agencies sometimes pursue warrantless data collection from bank records and merchant category codes, building profiles of lawful purchasers and eroding privacy and due-process norms.

Social media platforms compound …

Ghosting The Crowd, Andrew A. Schwartz

Washington and Lee Law Review

Crowdfunded companies are legally bound to provide investors with an annual report—but most don’t. This “ghosting of the crowd” violates federal securities laws and raises the risk of opportunism by entrepreneurs, who are more prone to misbehave if no one is watching. Most ominously, it threatens the very viability of the investment crowdfunding market, as investors who are ghosted by one company are less likely to invest in another.

This Article reports on the embarrassing record of noncompliance with the annual report rule imposed by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS”) Act of 2012 and Regulation Crowdfunding, and proposes a …

Legal Market Decartelization, Milan Markovic, Nuno Garoupa

Faculty Scholarship

American lawyers’ grip on the legal market is receding. Scholars and policymakers increasingly agree that the public has little to lose and potentially much to gain from legal market decartelization - the weakening of the lawyers’ monopoly over the legal services market. Harkening to deregulatory initiatives abroad and in Arizona and Utah, reformers contend that removing restrictions on the corporate delivery of legal services and unauthorized practice of law will slash costs and expand access to justice.

Drawing on economic theory and recent market developments, this Article offers a cautionary rejoinder. Understandable concerns about cartelization and lawyer rent-seeking have led …

Debt Tokens, Andrea Tosato, Diane Lourdes Dick, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

The worlds of crypto and bankruptcy have collided. Once-prominent, fast-growing, and even politically influential platforms for trading cryptocurrencies have imploded spectacularly. Gone are the glossy advertisements, celebrity endorsements, and proclamations that blockchain operates as a law unto itself. Instead, insolvent crypto businesses—including the crypto exchange giant FTX—find themselves in bankruptcy court, no different from any other failed enterprise. These bankruptcies reveal a startling reality: individual investors who placed their trust in these platforms have been stripped of their digital assets. In their stead, they hold hard-to-collect claims against these defunct platforms.

Amid the chill of the crypto winter, bankruptcy has …

We The People... Deserve Fair Taxes, Doron Narotzki, Tamir Shanan

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

In a world where economic inequality is deepening, tax law has emerged as one of the most powerful tools for shaping social justice. This Article explores how progressive taxation serves not only as a fiscal mechanism but as a reflection of societal values and the moral obligations of wealth. With legal methodologies such as Purposivism, Originalism, and Living Constitutionalism providing different interpretative lenses, this Article delves into the crucial discourse surrounding income, tax avoidance, deductions, and wealth taxation.

Through an analysis of real-world tax policies and legal precedents, the Article examines how these methodologies either perpetuate or challenge the current …

Pay Transparency Laws Clear As Mud: A Discussion Of And Proposal For The Pay Transparency Legislation In Colorado And New York, Emily Hall

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that while pay transparency laws in Colorado and New York represent progress, they fall short of achieving true pay equity because they do not require employers to disclose the factors influencing salary ranges. The author advocates for amendments to these laws, including mandatory annual pay audits and the disclosure of factors and their weights used in determining salary ranges, to enhance transparency and fairness in negotiations.

Corporate Evolution, Omari Scott Simmons

Cardozo Law Review

Political entrepreneurs have declared war on environmental, social, and governance policies ("ESG"), going so far as to attempt to criminalize ESG-influenced investing. They seek a return to some real or imagined past. They amplify and elevate their efforts into mainstream public discourse. They pursue extraordinary goals and tactics to disrupt and even dismantle institutional structures, norms, and established processes. The contemporary anti-ESG backlash is not simply a battle over corporate purpose and the dueling perspectives of shareholder primacy versus stakeholderism or disputes concerning sustainable investment and operational strategies. It reflects aggressive political entrepreneurship and the tension between competing narratives: stasis, …

Equity And Clarity: The Impact Of Tyler V. Hennepin County On Property Taxation And Homeowners’ Rights, Analy Feigel

Cardozo Law Review

This Note explores the implications ofthe U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County, which significantly impacts property taxation and foreclosure laws. The Court ruled that property owners are entitled to surplus proceeds following a tax foreclosure, setting a new precedent by deeming it unconstitutional for governments to retain surplus proceeds without just compensation. Tyler clarified property rights under the Fifth Amendment, affirming that owners have a constitutional right to the surplus value of their foreclosed properties, even if local statutes do not explicitly allow it.

Further, this Note also addresses unresolved issues following Tyler's ruling, including how the …

Against Monetary Primacy, Yair Listokin, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

To reduce inflation, the Federal Reserve (Fed) raises interest rates. But every month with high interest rates increases the risk of a devastating recession. Recessions impose not only short-term pain in the form of widespread unemployment but also lifelong harm for many, as vulnerable workers and those who start their careers during a downturn never fully recover. Yet hiking interest rates is the centerpiece of U.S. inflation-fighting policy. When inflation is high, the Fed raises interest rates until inflation is tamed, regardless of the consequent sacrifices. We call this inflation-fighting paradigm “monetary primacy.” Despite its great risks, monetary primacy has …

The Digitalization Of Insolvency Proceedings, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Despite the international divergences existing in the design of insolvency law, there is a common feature of insolvency proceedings that, to a greater or lesser extent, is somehow universal: insolvency proceedings are generally costly and lengthy processes. For that reason, it is not surprising that a significant body of the literature on insolvency law deals with different mechanisms to make insolvency proceedings more efficient. This article examines how technology can contribute to that goal. To that end, it starts by reviewing how countries are deploying, or can deploy, technology in different aspects and stages of insolvency proceedings and how such …

Property Rights In Digital Assets Under Uniform State Laws In The United States, Benjamin Geva

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Re-Imagining Tomorrow: A Technology, Innovation Law, And Ethics Symposium On Addictive Technology And Children, Margaret Chon

Seattle University Law Review

In this Foreword, Professor Margaret Chon introduces Seattle University's Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) program, the 2024 TILE Symposium, and Dr. Gaia Bernstein’s Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.

Keynote Address: The Movement To Protect Kids From Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein

Seattle University Law Review

In this keynote address, I describe my personal journey starting with a school outreach program I created in 2017 to address technology overuse among kids. While I initially advocated for self-help methods, I grew to recognize that the tech industry bore responsibility. This realization led me to write Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, which focused on collective action to pressure the tech industry to redesign its addictive products.

I then describe the movement to control addictive technologies and protect kids, which has gained momentum since the end of the pandemic. This movement combines grassroots parent activism with legal-political action. …

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Seattle University Law Review

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all …

Responding To Digital Addiction, Ned Snow

Seattle University Law Review

In Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, Professor Gaia Bernstein calls our attention to the growing problem of digital addiction. Digital addiction may sound like something out of a science-fiction novel or something that does not raise the same sort of real-life practical concerns as are present in a physical health crisis or an economic decline. But as Bernstein presents the evidence, we learn that the consequences of digital addiction can be just as harmful as a serious disease or a financial depression. Cognitive development disorders, anxiety, emotional depression, social isolation, and other mental health ills can be debilitating—as much …

The Ai Doppelgänger Dilemma: Cloned Voices In The Music Industry, Elizabeth Shields

Seattle University Law Review

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been an influx of “voice clones”—deep-learning algorithms that create synthetic speech to realistically mimic human voices. Celebrities and, in particular, music artists, have been subjected to the proliferation of AI voice clones on social media platforms like TikTok and streaming platforms such as Spotify. Despite music utilizing AI voice clones having amassed much popularity, this technology can be harmful and highly invasive to musicians whose livelihoods often depend on their distinct voices. While legal scholars have attempted to articulate various rights that could protect a person’s voice, individuals are largely …

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …