Science and Technology Law Commons^™

A Beginner's Guide To Cryptocurrencies: Explaining The Technologies Behind Cryptocurrencies, How The United States Taxes And Regulates Them, And Offering Changes To The Existing Taxation And Regulation Schemes, J. Merritt Francis

Law Student Publications

The United States federal government has attempted to use its existing regulatory and taxation schemes to regulate and tax cryptocurrencies, while many individuals are still unsure as to what cryptocurrency really is. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Future Trading Commission have both asserted their jurisdiction over cryptocurrency, resulting in unclear guidance for developers in the cryptocurrency space and a failure to adequately protect investors. Further, the Internal Revenue Service taxes cryptocurrency like a security rather than a currency, which disincentivizes adopting cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Nevertheless, although cryptocurrencies are taxed like securities, there are tax …

Learning From Mistakes: A Guide To Expanding The Oversight Board, Kevin Frazier

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

More than 4.4 billion people use social media. A few platforms attract a significant number of those users—for example, 2.9 billion people use Facebook, 2.3 billion use YouTube, and 1.2 billion use WeChat. How these major platforms govern themselves with respect to content moderation has an impact on billions of users and may lead to policy changes across other platforms that affect billions more. That is why it is so important to analyze Meta’s Oversight Board—an independent body created for the purpose of “promot[ing] free expression by making principled, independent decisions regarding content on Facebook and Instagram by issuing recommendations …

New Frontiers In Technology: Can Traditional Intellectual Property Rights Laws Be Adapted And Applied To Nfts?, Mariyah S. Wakhariya

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

A decade ago, ‘NFTs’ were rarely heard of or known to anyone, unless they worked in or kept up with the tech world. However, they are not new - they have been around for almost two decades. Their popularity has grown over the past few years. ‘NFT’ stands for ‘non-fungible token’. An NFT is a digital file with a unique identity that is verified on a blockchain and is therefore not interchangeable - i.e., a kind of crypto asset, like an authentication certificate for digital artifacts. In theory, NFTs can represent almost any real or intangible property. These days, it …

Role-Reversibility, Ai, And Equitable Justice — Or: Why Mercy Cannot Be Automated, Stephen E. Henderson, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles

A few years ago, we developed the concept of “role-reversibility” in AI governance: the idea that it matters whether a party exercising judgment is reciprocally vulnerable to the effects of judgment. This idea, we argued, supplies a deontic reason to maintain certain spheres of human judgment even if (or when) truly intelligent machines become demonstrably superior in every utilitarian sense. While computer science remains far from that holy grail, generative AI is raging through systems as diverse as healthcare, finance, advertising, law, and academe, making it imperative to further shore up our claim. We do so by situating role-reversibility within …

Cyber Sit-Ins: Bringing Protest Online By Modernizing The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, Blair V. Robinson

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Naïve Realism, Cognitive Bias, And The Benefits And Risks Of Ai, Harry Surden

Publications

In this short piece I comment on Orly Lobel's book on artificial intelligence (AI) and society "The Equality Machine." Here, I reflect on the complex topic of aI and its impact on society, and the importance of acknowledging both its positive and negative aspects. More broadly, I discuss the various cognitive biases, such as naïve realism, epistemic bubbles, negativity bias, extremity bias, and the availability heuristic, that influence individuals' perceptions of AI, often leading to polarized viewpoints. Technology can both exacerbate and ameliorate these biases, and I commend Lobel's balanced approach to AI analysis as an example to emulate.

Although …

Toward Stronger Data Protection Laws, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Development Of Digital Mass Surveillance In Norway: The Emergence Of A Surveillance State?, Iris Nguyên Duy

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Need For Curtains Of The Soul: Privacy Versus Transparency In The Instrumented World Of Algorithmic Artificial Intelligence, Michael Martin Losavio

FIU Law Review

We approach a privacy singularity in pervasive data collection and inference that may reveal all about our lives. While privacy might not yet be dead, we struggle to maintain its shield for personal autonomy. Part of this contemporary challenge comes from the massive data sets generated every day everywhere. And then the powerful analytics that reveal all. This is further challenged by efforts at data transparency that may reveal too much of one’s life. Preservation of privacy, if we deem it important enough to preserve, must have a robust set of technical and legislative implementations on collection, storage, transmission and …

Calculated Privacy: Tech Meets Law & Law Meets Tech, Tobias J. Oechtering, Sara Saeidian, Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

America’S Fraught Relationship With Privacy, Russell L. Weaver

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Evolving Privacy Protections For Emerging Machine Learning Data Under Carpenter V. United States, Emily Nicolella

FIU Law Review

The Fourth Amendment’s third-party doctrine eliminates an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy in information they willingly turn over to third parties. Government scrutiny of this information is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment and is therefore not given constitutional protections. In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court created an exception to the third-party doctrine. In Carpenter, a case involving the warrantless use of cell site location information (CSLI) in a criminal investigation, the Court held that individuals do have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding CSLI. According to Chief Justice Roberts, despite the necessary …

Search And Seizure Budgets, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This article proposes a new means of restraining police power: quantitative limits on the number of law enforcement intrusions—searches and seizures—that may occur over a given period of time. Like monetary constraints, search and seizure budgets would aim to curb abusive policing and improve democratic oversight. But unlike their monetary counterparts, budgets would be indexed directly to the specific police activities that most enable escalation and abuse. What is more, budgets are a tool that finds support, conceptually, in the American framing experience. The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to require procedural limits, such as probable cause, on specific …

Understanding Criminal Justice Innovations, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Burgeoning science and technology have provided the criminal justice system with the opportunity to address some of its shortcomings. And the criminal justice system has significant shortcomings. Among other issues, we have a mass incarceration problem; clearance rates are surprisingly low; there are serious concerns about wrongful convictions; and the system is layered with racial, religious, and other biases. Innovations that are widely used across industries, as well as those directed specifically at the criminal justice system, have the potential to improve upon such problems. But it is important to recognize that these innovations also have downsides, and criminal justice …

The Disrupted Path To Becoming Easy, Breezy, Beautiful: How Companies Are Deceiving Consumers With Their Animal Testing Products, Wendy Chao

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence In Legal Advocacy, Elissa Germaine

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of AI in our personal and professional lives has entered the public consciousness over the past several months. The legal profession and the securities industry are no exception. This article begins to explore the use of open source generative AI in legal advocacy, and the related ethical implications for securities arbitration practitioners.

Studies have corroborated the impact of AI on the legal profession that many of us have been seeing in practice or hearing and reading about. A Goldman Sachs study predicted that the legal profession will be one of the most likely areas to be impacted …

The Power Of Influence: Standardizing The Influencer Marketing Industry Through Alternative Dispute Resolution, Michele Lehat

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

No abstract provided.

Where Is Negotiation In Hybrid Warfare?, Art Hinshaw, Adrian Borbely, Calvin Chrustie

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The question of what negotiation has to do with hybrid warfare was the starting point for Project Seshat, a project gathering a global group of academics and practitioners from many walks of life. Their shared interest is in exploring what the fields that fit generally within the concepts of "security" and "dispute resolution" have to offer each other in the context of hybrid warfare grey zone conflict, and how these two "sets" of fields interconnect. In trying to better understand what hybrid warfare is, how it works, and how best to respond to it, negotiation and dispute resolution academics have …

A Theory Of Interests In The Context Of Hybrid Warfare: It's Complex, Cynthia Alkon, Sanda Kaufman

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

In the 2020 British TV series The Undeclared War, the Russians launch a series of attacks against the United Kingdom that destabilize key sectors in the UK and (spoiler alert) almost end in a full-scale conventional war. In this fictionalized account, the UK only considers fighting back against cyber warfare with cyber warfare. There is no negotiation. Despite knowing who is responsible for these attacks (the Russian government), negotiation is never even considered.

Improving New York City's Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate For Public Sector Workers: A Collaborative Framework For Labor-Management Relations In High Impact Circumstances, Chelsea Hill

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

No abstract provided.