Science and Technology Law Commons^™

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 …

Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Converting Buildings Is Hard: Why Seattle’S Municipal Government Should Streamline Commercial-To-Residential Conversions, Tyler M. King

Seattle University Law Review

The conversion of commercial buildings into housing is a promising solution to the growing housing crisis in many urban areas. However, despite its potential benefits, the process of repurposing commercial spaces is often stymied by complex zoning codes, high conversion costs, and bureaucratic hurdles. This Article argues that the local and state governments in Seattle should adopt more streamlined policies and offer greater incentives to developers to facilitate these conversions. By reforming zoning regulations and providing targeted financial support, municipalities can reduce the barriers to conversion and unlock the potential of underutilized commercial properties. This article examines the legal and …

Getting Money Out Of Politics By Putting Money Into Politics: A Few Modest Proposals To Reform Seattle’S Democracy Voucher Program, Decker O’Donnell

Seattle University Law Review

Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program offers an unconventional response to the growing influence of money in American elections: rather than restricting political spending, it seeks to amplify the participation of ordinary voters by providing publicly funded vouchers that residents may assign to participating candidates. This Article examines the program’s development, operation, and constitutional foundation within the modern campaign-finance framework established by Buckley v. Valeo and subsequent Supreme Court decisions. It argues that democracy vouchers provide a constitutionally viable means of broadening participation in campaign financing while mitigating the influence of wealthy donors. The Article identifies two weaknesses in the current system: …

Legal Malpractice In Washington: Use Of The Rules Of Professional Conduct, Angelo Tadrous

Seattle University Law Review

Legal malpractice claims are difficult to prove. They are difficult to prove because many jurisdictions require that a plaintiff prove that, but for the lawyer’s misconduct, the client would have fared better. Thus, in a malpractice suit, a plaintiff must try a case within a case. Despite this difficulty, many jurisdictions prohibit the use of the Rules of Professional Conduct when litigating a malpractice case. Washington State is one of these jurisdictions. The Washington Supreme Court held in Hizey v. Carpenter that the Rules of Professional Conduct may not be referred to during trial. This Note argues that this prohibition …

Who Decides The Dead? Interpreting Washington’S Disposition Of Remains Statute, Wyatt Young

Seattle University Law Review

Washington’s disposition-of-remains statute, RCW 68.50.160, is designed to honor a decedent’s expressed wishes regarding the control and disposition of their body after death. Yet recent litigation reveals a critical gap between the statute’s intent-centered design and its practical enforceability. In Larotonda v. Blackburn, a trial court acknowledged that irreparable harm would occur if a decedent’s burial wishes were ignored but nonetheless denied relief on the grounds that the individual designated to carry out those wishes lacked standing. The result was a legal paradox: a statute that recognizes decedent autonomy in theory but withholds any meaningful mechanism for its enforcement …

Sandbox Fictions, Douglas Sarro

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Regulatory sandboxes are designed to give firms space to offer novel products and services to consumers on a trial basis, under an interim, tailor-made regulatory regime. Ideally, this leaves regulators better placed to understand how rules ought to be modified to accommodate new, socially beneficial offerings on a more permanent basis. But little is known about sandboxes’ implications for consumers. Will they reduce barriers to entry for innovative offerings that do a better job of serving consumer needs? Or will they lead regulators to compromise on consumer protections, allowing low-quality or even fraudulent offerings to flow into the markets they …

Reimagining International Investment Law For The Age Of Minerals, Taylor Nchako

Washington and Lee Law Review

New technologies––from artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicles to medical devices and consumer electronics––demand an ever-increasing amount of minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper. The United States requires these aptly named “critical” minerals to develop AI infrastructure, advance the clean energy transition, and remain economically competitive. As technology continues to advance at an astonishing pace, the U.S. has grown increasingly interested in securing critical minerals from sources in Africa. To obtain critical minerals, the U.S. must utilize investment treaties in its business dealings with African countries. At the same time, international investment law has garnered increased attention due to a …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Legal Scholarship In An Age Of Social Media, Miriam Cherry

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

This symposium essay will offer insights into how legal scholarship—and the law—are changing in a time of social media. Platforms or their names may change, but the immediacy and connection that they offer, for better or worse, here to stay. The argument amounts to two sides of the same coin. Social media can raise the salience of an issue, story, or event, and in doing so, may provide information that helps to inform our work as legal scholars. The converse is also true: legal scholarship also needs to study social media. This essay takes each point in turn.

Should I Supersede Or Should I Go: Individual Protection And Private Company Interests In Implementing A Federal Biometric Privacy Law, Jessica Oshanani

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Section I of this Note will define and discuss biometrics. Section II will discuss key biometrics legislation and Section III will explain the impact of BIPA on other state biometric privacy laws.

Next, Section IV will explain the impact of biometric privacy violations and separate controlling state laws on individuals, while Section V will explain the impact of biometric data laws on private companies.

Section VI will identify potential federal laws on the horizon, then Section VII will explain the concept and application of preemption.

Finally, Section VIII will discuss the benefits of administrative agency overview, and Section IX …

Green Technology And International Patents: Incentivizing Innovation Or Blocking Access?, Matteo Rizzi

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

As the global climate crisis intensifies, the transition to clean energy technologies has become an urgent priority for the world's largest carbon dioxide emitters: China, the United States, and India. This Note examines how patent law can serve as a critical instrument in accelerating that transition. The patent system’s core quid pro quo grants inventors exclusive rights in exchange for public disclosure, creating powerful incentives for innovation. Yet the law’s failure to require active use of patented technologies has enabled a range of anticompetitive behaviors, including patent trolling, patent warehousing, and the accumulation of dormant patent portfolios, that allow proprietary …

Colliding Interests: Solving The Space Debris Crisis Through Us-China Cooperation, Grace E. Mannion

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

As human activity in outer space accelerates, the accumulation of space debris in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) presents an increasingly urgent threat to global infrastructure, economic stability, and the future of space exploration. This Note examines the regulatory and geopolitical challenges underlying the space debris crisis, with particular attention to the fragmented nature of existing international legal frameworks. Current regimes, including the Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Convention, establish broad principles of cooperation and liability but fail to meaningfully address the rapid growth of orbital debris driven by both state and commercial actors. Focusing on the United States and …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

How The Dod Discourages Military Families From Seeking Mental Health Counseling, Christina Welch

Seattle University Law Review

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) administration of the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) presents significant barriers to mental health care access for military spouses and children. This paper explores how the EFMP, though designed to support military families with special needs, inadvertently creates barriers to mental health treatment. Military family members often do not seek mental health treatment to avoid the program's mandatory enrollment requirements. Military family members often view enrollment in the program undesirable because enrollment can restrict the pool of potential future duty assignment locations that are available to service members.

The lack of comprehensive data collection by …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead