Science and Technology Law Commons^™

The Hard Law-Soft Law Nexus: Autonomous Vehicles As A Case Study, Gary Marchant, Chase Martins, Vrinda Gupta

Journal of Law and Mobility

The technology governance debate often focuses on the dichotomy of hard law versus soft law as competing models. Both hard law and soft law have their strengths and weaknesses. But framing soft law versus hard law as a dichotomous choice is often unrealistic—every technology will be governed by a mix of hard law and soft law. So, the more realistic questions are where hard law works best and where soft law succeeds, and how these two types of governance interact and integrate. After reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of hard law and soft law, this Article identifies six different hybrid …

Desperately Seeking Non-Judgmental Supports: Young People’S Perceptions Of Adult Responses To Technology-Facilitated Harms, Alexa Dodge, Kaitlynn Mendes, Christopher Dietzel, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Young people around the world are increasingly impacted by technologyfacilitated harms, yet research shows that teens often do not seek help from adults in their lives to deal with these harms. This article draws data from 25 focus groups with 146 young Canadians (aged 13–18) as they explain why they are reluctant to seek adult help when experiencing technologyfacilitated harms. Young Canadians consistently said that adults speak to them in ways that are judgmental, emotionally reactive, and disempowering. To make them more likely to seek help from adults, young people want adults to avoid scare tactic approaches, listen to their …

Contracting For Innovation In The Global South: Empirical Evidence From Brazil, Pablo Marcello Baquero

FIU Law Review

As innovation cycles accelerate, companies seeking to remain at the forefront of the knowledge economy increasingly partner with sophisticated firms to co-create innovation. These collaborations involving pervasive uncertainty are structured through hybrid contractual arrangements that combine features of market-based independence with those of the close coordination typical of the firm. To date, contracting for innovation has been examined primarily in the context of the Global North. In the United States, the literature has focused on the governance mechanisms that parties employ to continuously define their obligations and mitigate opportunism amid profound uncertainty. In Europe, scholarship on contractual networks or organizational …

The Deepfake Dilemma: Fake Images, Real Victims, And The Legal Void In Addressing Non-Consensual Deepfake Pornography, Elizabeth A. Safaryn

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

This Note evaluates the various legal remedies available to victims of non-consensual deepfake pornography. As deepfakes are a relatively new but rapidly advancing technology, it is difficult for the law to keep up with the mass creation and distribution of AI-generated images on the Internet. With the competing interest of constitutionally protected speech, current deepfake laws fail to address non-consensual intimate image sharing (NCII) explicitly and lack the necessary deterrent effect to curb their proliferation. With an initial background on deepfakes and machine learning, this Note then explores the strained relationship between the First Amendment and the available civil remedies …

Striving To Thrive: Balancing Digital Health Innovation And Patient Protection Under Thailand’S Legal Framework, Thidarat Liamsomboon

Theses and Dissertations

The digitalization of health care has fundamentally transformed how health care services are accessed, delivered, and experienced worldwide. Telemedicine, artificial intelligence–assisted diagnostics, electronic health records, wearables, and mobile health applications are no longer novelties, but have become a substantial part of a modern clinical practice. Although these technologies offer great prospects for making health care more accessible, reducing administrative burden, and improving the quality of care, they also pose significant legal and regulatory challenges. The rate of technological development has far outpaced Thailand’s existing legal frameworks for regulating medical practice, professional accountability, and patient protection. This regulatory “lag” has generated …

Corporate Cybersecurity Governance: Director Liability Under Europe’S Nis2 Directive And The Emerging Fiduciary Duty Of Proactive Cybersecurity Oversight, Stacey B. Barrack

American University Business Law Review

This Comment examines the implications of the European Union’s Network and Information Security 2 Directive (“NIS2”) on corporate cybersecurity governance, with a particular focus on the fiduciary duties of directors in multinational corporations operating in the United States. The NIS2 Directive, adopted in 2023 and currently being transposed into national law by EU member states, mandates that boards of directors must directly approve and oversee—and can be liable for—the cybersecurity risk management measures taken by their companies. 

This Comment delves into the intersection of NIS2 with Delaware corporate law and examines how NIS2 influences the fiduciary duty of oversight for …

Accounting For Spatial Effects And Social Norms In Making Algorithmic Law: Insights From And Applications In Urban Mobility, Jingkang Gao

Journal of Law and Mobility

This Article examines a prominent idea in the law and technology literature: that algorithms and big data can be used to make law dynamic and personalized. As currently envisioned by legal scholars, “algorithmic law” entails laws that adjust in real time to changing conditions and vary across individuals, improving welfare by tailoring legal rules and standards to personal characteristics.

This Article argues that this vision of algorithmic law is incomplete—and often counterproductive. Existing proposals treat personalization as a function of individual attributes alone, overlooking the fact that effects of individual behavior are fundamentally interactive. Individual behavior is shaped by spatial …

Copyright Eligibility For Ai Works Under United States Law, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines copyright eligibility for works that incorporate generative AI elements under United States law, explaining that such works may be protected only to the extent they contain human-authored expression.  This expression can appear as creative selection, arrangement, editing, or other expressive contributions, while unedited or autonomously generated AI output is not copyrightable. The article highlights how the U.S. Copyright Office’s registration and review system, through disclosure requirements, refusals, and public registration records, creates meaningful evidence about boundaries of copyright protection for AI-assisted works. The article contrasts this U.S. registration framework with other legal systems, including European jurisdictions such …

Hacking With Uncle Sam: Imagining A Public-Private Partnership For Active Cyber Defense, Jonathan Coleman

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Federal law makes no distinction between "good" and "bad" hackers—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalizes hacking by a private citizen in any form. While an anti-hacking statute is necessary to deter and punish cybercrime, the current law prohibits private entities from "hacking back" or, more precisely, from engaging in active defensive measures in response to a cyberattack. If these measures were legalized, they could allow private entities to assist law enforcement and reduce the financial and reputational costs of a cyber incident. Absent a change in the law, private entities are dependent on law enforcement to provide active cyber …

How To Apply Hertz Corp. V. Friend In The Age Of Remote Work, John Andrikos

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The widespread adoption of remote work in the United States has strained the workability of the nerve center test of Hertz Corp. v. Friend. This comment analyzes how federal courts have applied the nerve center test to fact patterns involving partially or fully remote corporations. Further, it proposes a novel solution to this jurisdictional problem: the Key Person Test.

Inconsistencies At The International Trade Commission And The United States Federal District Courts, Christine Dedoulis

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

This article will analyze Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, under which the International Trade Commission (Commission) conducts unfair import investigations, as it applies to patent infringement cases. Further, this article will explore different outcomes regarding parallel litigation at the Commission and District Courts, including what remedies are available and the effect of duplicative and inconsistent determinations on the patentee. In light of these comparisons, this article will provide suggestions on how to minimize inconsistencies between the Commission and District Courts, with particular emphasis on determining if some middle ground exists and if a classification system could be …

The Rise Of Biometrics And The Erosion Of Privacy: A Case Study Of Biometric Systems In Amusement Parks, Sarah A. Yarger

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis explores data privacy concerns surrounding the implementation of facial recognition technology using amusement and theme parks as a case study. With the lack of general federal guidelines, states have been left to address this rapid expansion of technology. This situation has left consumers with inconsistent protections and varied levels of liability for corporations. This thesis will explore the current gaps of legislation on legal use of facial recognition technology using amusement and theme parks as the context of focus. As this technology continues to advance and become normalized in society, the inconsistency in privacy protections amongst states suggests …

#Influencerinfractions: How Influencers Comply (Or Don’T) With Ftc Guidelines, Christopher Terry, Emma Troha, Anastasia Micich, Cecilia Lausten

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released endorsement guidelines of sponsored content in 2023, including stipulations of clear and conspicuous disclosure, to combat content disguised as original, while actually having commercial intent. This paper examines compliance with these guidelines among travel influencers on Instagram. Overwhelmingly, influencers are not properly disclosing potential commercial sponsorship in their posts, and even good faith attempts to disclose are more often than not non-compliant with the FTC’s guidelines. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Law Librarianship And Legal Information Science In The Age Of Genai, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

This article examines the relationship between law librarianship and legal information science in the age of generative AI (GenAI), arguing that closer integration between the two is essential to navigating a rapidly evolving legal information landscape. It contends that law librarianship—long grounded in stable classification systems and cognitive authority—must adopt the analytical methods of legal information science to remain effective in the digital era. Together, these fields can reinforce the rule of law by improving the organization, retrieval, and stability of legal information. The article identifies emerging subfields of legal information science that support this integration and develops several concepts …

Forget Me Not? Machine Unlearning’S Implications For Privacy Law, Jevan Hutson, Cedric Whitney, Jay T. Conrad

Articles

Generative AI systems are increasingly relied on and are already actively reshaping how we think about privacy and data protection law. Models ingest and process vast amounts of personal and sensitive data, challenging assurances of compliance with legal frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with increasing intensity. Machine unlearning is an emerging tool in practitioners’ attempts to address these challenges: the act of selectively removing or suppressing specific data, such as personal data that a data subject requests be deleted, from AI models as means of complying with legal obligations or …

The Law And Ai As An “Apex Collaborator”: Legal Frameworks For Optimized Cooperation, David S. Filippi, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance

FIU Law Review

Law fundamentally exists to enable human cooperation, providing frameworks for everything from basic contracts to complex international agreements. As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they may enable new ways that collaborative activity can occur. We posit the possibility of a new kind of AI entity: the “Apex Collaborator,” a computational system with capabilities for cooperation and partnership that are superior, in at least some ways, to those of humans. Just as apex predators shape the ecosystems in which they live through predation, Apex Collaborators would shape human-AI networks through their ability to enhance peaceful coexistence, collective problem-solving, and shared …

Owning Data: Semantic Control As Inaccess To Information, Zvikomborero Chadambuka

FIU Law Review

This Article discusses the impacts of the introduction of a data ownership scheme on access to information. It does so with reference to the distinction between data, defined as some representation of information by a specific medium (the syntactic level), and the information itself (the semantic level). With respect to data, it then looks at the difference between standard property rights and intellectual property (IP) rights, similarly assessing impacts on access to information. Private control at the semantic level is bad policy as it effects particularly serious limitations, relative to private control at the syntactic level, on the availability of …

Let’S Talk About The Biological Reality Of Sex, Baby, John Parsi

FIU Law Review

Sex is at the very core of individual identity. It affects the conception of the self and the way others view the individual. Every day, one’s sex may open and close doors, access to communities, and opportunities. Laws that define sex may affirm scientific knowledge and protect people, or threaten to unravel the facts and the reality of sex. A deep unmooring of sex is underway, and this Article aims to halt it. On day one of the current presidential term, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological …

Digital Dialectic: Why Every “Ai-Generated” Work Has A Human Author, Lea Bishop

FIU Law Review

Are ChatGPT and Midjourney tools or creators? Ownership of billions of AI-assisted creative outputs hangs in the balance. Copyright scholars have long debated whether an autonomous artificial intelligence could qualify as an author, but this remains a hypothetical question. Despite widespread application of the term “AI” to software products of the 2020s, autonomously creative artificial intelligence still does not exist. Today’s commercial AI products—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Suno, Perplexity, and Lumo—are simply the newest generation of computer software. They do not qualify as “artificial intelligence” in either the scientific or science fiction senses. They are mere …

Abuse Of Contract: A Proposal For A New Cause Of Action, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

With the growth of online commerce and the platform economy, many companies are including provisions in their online terms and conditions that extend far beyond what reasonable consumers would expect. Some terms and conditions purport to bind customers to separate contracts in future transactions that have little to do with the first contract. Other boilerplate purports to cover family members of the customer who created an account. Some retailers have argued that people shopping in their brick-and-mortar stores are subject to terms and conditions because those shoppers had at some point previously created an online account. For example, Disney argued …