Law and Technology
From Gods to Google
The First Amendment is a well-known barrier to sensible technology regulation. While scholars blame the Court’s libertarian turn, we offer another explanation: the Court’s solicitude for religious speakers. Religious-speech cases have given firms a powerful suite of deregulatory tools. This Feature draws the through line from gods to Google.
New Technologies, Old Rights: Litigating Public-Benefits Modernization
This Essay explores public-benefits agencies’ increasing reliance on technology and remote services and its impact on welfare-rights litigation. The Essay argues that the lack of direct regulation of these practices threatens benefits access. However, creative impact litigation is still a powerful tool for enforcing benefits recipients’ rights.
ARTificial: Why Copyright Is Not the Right Policy Tool to Deal with Generative AI
This Essay critiques the inadequacy of copyright law to address the challenges Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) poses. By analyzing copyright law’s frictions and inconsistent treatment of technical terms, and challenging the definitions of creativity, this Essay establishes a taxonomy of individual- and society-level rationales against using copyright to regulate GAI.
Constructing AI Speech
This Essay advocates for a “legal construction of technology” approach to AI speech, challenging the notion that technology disrupts law and emphasizing how law shapes technology based on societal value. Applying the method to four different legal constructions of AI, the authors examine AI within First Amendment jurisprudence, content moderation, risk regulation, and consumer protection, highlighting the proactive role of legal actors in aligning AI development with democratic values and norms.
How to Get the Property Out of Privacy Law
Privacy law emphasizes control over “your” data, but requiring consent for each data use is unprincipled, not to mention utterly impractical in the AI era. American lawmakers should reject the property model and use a framework that creates defined zones of privacy and clear safe harbors, irrespective of consent.
The Ethics and Challenges of Legal Personhood for AI
AI’s increasing cognitive abilities will raise challenges for judges. “Legal personhood” is a flexible and political concept that has evolved throughout American history. In determining whether to expand that concept to AI, judges will confront difficult ethical questions and will have to weigh competing claims of harm, agency, and responsibility.
Deplatforming
This Article offers a history and theory of the law of deplatforming across networks, platforms, and utilities. It shows that the tension between service and exclusion is endemic to common carriers, utilities, and other infrastructural services, including technology platforms, and that the American tradition has favored reasonable deplatforming.
Antitrust’s High-Tech Exceptionalism
Today, the digital marketplace is dominated by only a handful of tech companies. During the last two decades, American antitrust law has acquiesced to this consolidation not only by failing to evolve from its roots in smoke-stack industries, but also by giving big tech special dispensation under traditional antitrust doctrines.
Dominant Digital Platforms: Is Antitrust Up to the Task?
Consolidation through mergers and exclusionary conduct by dominant firms can harm consumers and workers and reduce innovation. Digital networks are a particular concern because of barriers to entry. While antitrust law in principle can be strengthened by evolution, new legislation would be a more rapid and certain path to reform.
Market Definition and Anticompetitive Effects in Ohio v. American Express
With high-tech industries attracting increased scrutiny, the Supreme Court’s analysis of the two-sided market in Ohio v. American Express will be a focus of antitrust litigation. This Essay argues that, despite the apparent focus on market definition, the Court’s opinion is most persuasive in its contextual evaluation of competitive effects.
The Easterbrook Theorem: An Application to Digital Markets
Frank Easterbrook argued that erroneous antitrust convictions are more costly than erroneous acquittals. We find that if he is correct, the optimal standard of proof is stronger than preponderance of evidence. Our conclusion stands in stark contrast to proposals to reduce the evidentiary burdens facing antitrust plaintiffs in digital markets.
The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface
Antitrust theory portrays data privacy as a factor, like quality, that improves with competition. This Essay argues that view, though not inaccurate, is incomplete. It offers a new account of how data privacy interests have begun to clash at the margins with antitrust law, particularly in the digital economy.
The Law of Informational Capitalism
Informational capitalism brings new dangers of surveillance and manipulation—but also of accelerating monopoly, inequality, and democratic disempowerment. Examining two important new books on the topic, this Review maps the law and political economy of informational capitalism, a domain of rising private power, to enable us better to confront it.