Science and Technology Law Commons^™

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 …

Which Place Governs A Placeless Place: Predicting Jurisdiction In The Metaverse, Morrease Leftwich

University of Miami Business Law Review

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous characterization of legal study as “prediction” takes on renewed significance as courts confront novel jurisdictional questions in blockchain cases, particularly as technological innovation accelerates and transforms the digital landscape. Among these developments is the metaverse, which combines blockchain financial technology with early visions of the internet as a distinct realm for social interaction.

Concrete problems already emerging in these immersive environments underscore the stakes: Platform‑engineered anonymity and scale make user‑to‑user harms effectively unpoliceable, what recent work calls the “veil of scale,” frustrating redress even when laws apply. Amid this difficulty in identifying bad actors, scholars have …

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 …

The Myth Of Sufficient Technological Barriers: Reevaluating The "Gates-Up-Or-Down" Analogy In Data Scraping, Yucen Zhong

Duke Law & Technology Review

In Van Buren v. United States, the Supreme Court adopted a “gates-up-or-down” analogy from physical trespass law to define “authorization” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Despite historical shifts in judicial interpretation, courts have recently relied on this binary framework to interpret authorization as it applies to online trespass. But courts have struggled to apply this binary inquiry while still accounting for complications in modern authentication technologies. When pursuing a code-based inquiry based on the gates-up-or-down analogy, courts risk oversimplifying the dynamic nature of online trespass. Such an approach fails to account for how modern authentication measures—such as …

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 …

The Last Human Question: Generative Ai's Existential Threat To Consensus And Law, Joshua Fairfield

West Virginia Law Review

The true risk of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is not that the toasters will rise up. It is that AI will be competent to perform human tasks and indifferent to human welfare. The risk is that we will be outcompeted by generative automated processes that create output similar to ours (although never the same, as this Article explains), but which need none of the outputs of the economy for food, shelter, or human flourishing. Further, a more precise and existential description of the threat is that generative AI will disrupt and crowd out humanity’s evolutionary superpower, our ability to generate agreement …

Ai And Law Milestones: From Top-Down To Bottom-Up Computational Models Of Legal Reasoning (And Back), Kevin Ashley

West Virginia Law Review

This Article introduces five research and development milestones in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law and then discusses how large language models (“LLMs”) and generative AI (“GenAI”) are affecting each of them. The milestones include legal expert systems, lessons learned in computationally modeling legal rules and statutes, knowledge-based models of legal argument, machine learning models that classify case texts and predict outcomes, and the design and evaluation of legal applications of LLMs and GenAI. These milestones illustrate how top-down knowledge-based computational models of legal expertise have rapidly given way to bottom-up models based on machine learning. Knowledge-based models explicitly …

A View Under The Hood: Duquesne Kline's Law And Computing Program, Wesley M. Oliver, Katherine L.W. Norton, Martin Mckown, David Horrigan

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Improving The Livelihood Of Individuals With Disabilities In Various Capacities, Daveon Lilly

West Virginia Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and Machine Learning (“ML”) are swiftly reshaping accessibility for individuals with disabilities, offering fresh opportunities for inclusion in education, the workplace, and daily life. This Note explores the integration of AI and ML into assistive technologies and discusses how this integration bolsters access and independence for people with various disabilities. It also examines the legal frameworks, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (“Rehabilitation Act”), that govern the implementation of these technologies and address challenges such as algorithmic bias, data privacy, and the digital divide. While AI and ML have made …

Training New Lawyers With And For Generative Ai: A Semester-Long Experiment Scaling Clinical Friction In The Doctrinal Classroom, Frank W. Volk

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Private Coverage, Public Risk: The Role Of Cyber Insurance In National Security Governance, Deborah L. Johnson

Faculty Publications

This Article explores the growing yet underexamined role of the commercial cyber insurance market in shaping the United States' approach to cybersecurity readiness. It argues that, as cyber threats against U.S. critical infrastructure and essential services increase, commercial cyber insurance has quietly come to function as a de facto governance tool in national cybersecurity. In hospitals, water and energy systems, and other public-facing sectors, policy language, underwriting questionnaires, and post-breach claims practices help define what counts as "reasonable" security, influence how organizations plan for and respond to incidents, and affect the pace and scope of recovery after an attack. Yet …

Situating Ai Within The History Of Technological Adaptation In Law, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article will first trace this history of technological disruption and adaptation in the law. It will then situate the current AI moment within this established pattern, arguing that AI’s capabilities create an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate a pedagogical shift from foundational structure to sophisticated substance. Further, it will explore AI's significant potential as an equalizer for multilingual students. Finally, it will address the legitimate risks of AI, concluding that a framework grounded in professional ethics and critical human oversight is the key to harnessing its benefits responsibly. The challenge is not to resist this new technology, but to adapt …

Augmented Advocacy: Ethical Constraints And Regulatory Gaps In Ai-Driven Legal Practice, Molly M. Rowlands

West Virginia Law Review

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (“AI”) and particularly generative AI (“Gen AI”) is reshaping the legal profession in unprecedented ways. AI-powered tools enhance efficiency, improve accuracy in legal analysis, and expand access to justice by automating research, contract review, litigation support, and predictive analytics. However, these benefits come with significant ethical, regulatory, and procedural challenges, including competency concerns and AI “hallucinations,” data confidentiality risks, algorithmic bias, and the environmental impact of AI-driven computing. This Note critically examines the evolving role of AI in legal practice and evaluates the inadequacies of existing regulatory frameworks—such as Rule 11 of the Federal …

Generative Adversarial Discrimination, Josh Fairfield

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Anti-discrimination law assumes that discrimination can be detected and rectified, that the evidentiary burden of the plaintiff can in fact be met. But the evolutionary logic of AI training causes it to target vulnerable groups, lie about reasoning, and above all resist detection. Because of hidden core prompts in generative AI systems, and how those prompts interact with the nature of AI training and deployment, AI will often actively hide discrimination rather than surface and address it. Stopping this will be difficult. At present, neither humans or AI can detect this emergent dark-pattern behavior. Without legal intervention, the broad use …

Law, Conflict, And Hybrid Warfare: A Teaching Imperative For A Changing World, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea K. Schneider

Articles

Lawyers increasingly find themselves at the frontlines of the battlefield, just not in the traditional sense. Hybrid warfare is a conflict form that combines traditional military offensive measures with nontraditional methods, including the harnessing of legal systems to achieve strategic goals. Lawyers have always been at the frontline of typical legal risk assessment, thinking about a client’s risk of liability or regulation costs generally. Now, lawyers must stand at the ready for a lot more: lawyers must be prepared for cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns using artificial intelligence, the use of court systems to suppress reporting or shield bad actors, and so …

Scraping Bad: The Case For A Unified Scraping Framework, Eunchong Moses Park

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This Note explores the growing legal and regulatory landscapes of web scraping in the United States and argues that web scraping should be regulated through a unified federal framework tailored to its unique technological and economic realities. Web scraping allows organizations to collect massive amounts of data essential to their operational needs—often without the consent of data holders. Thus, web scraping has become a powerful engine of innovation used across virtually every sector of the economy but with a serious risk to privacy and property interests. Yet the current U.S. legal framework lacks a coherent regulating structure. Courts and litigants …

Judicial Underreach: Tiktok Inc. V. Garland'S Implications For National Security And Free Speech, Olivia Sharp

Colorado Law Student Scholars

No abstract provided.

The Domestic Mirror: Tiktok V. Garland, Data Privacy, And Meaningful Free Expression, Olivia Sharp

Colorado Law Student Scholars

No abstract provided.