Volume 73
Symposium, The Internet and the Law: Legal Challenges in the New Digital Age
Symposium Cosponsored with the Center for Litigation and Courts and the National Civil Justice Institute
“The Internet and the Law: Legal Challenges in the New Digital Age”
UC Hastings Law, November 6–7, 2021
Preface
Gerson H. Smoger Volume 73, Issue 5, i-ii
Foreword
Scott Dodson Volume 73, Issue 5, iii-iv
Selling Antitrust
Herbert Hovenkamp Volume 73, Issue 6, 1621-1636 Antitrust enforcers and its other defenders have never done a good job of selling their field to the public. That is not entirely their fault. Antitrust is inherently technical, and a less engaging discipline to most...
Prosocial Antitrust
Amelia Miazad Volume 73, Issue 6, 1637-1696 Antitrust law is at the center of today’s public debate. It has even emerged as a rare unifying force, with bipartisan promises to combat the concentration of economic power. Meanwhile, the business community is grappling...
Stockholder Politics
Roberto Tallarita Volume 73, Issue 6, 1697-1760 In the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder support for proposals on political, environmental, ethical, and social issues, from climate change and employee diversity to animal welfare and...
Does One Size Fit All? Why Our Genes Show the Need for Tailor-Made Solutions
Jack Haisman Volume 73, Issue 6, 1761-1790 Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2003, millions of consumers and medical professionals have swarmed the field of medical genetics, seeking to peer into the crystal ball and see what their own, or their patients’,...
Limiting the Use of the Categorical Approach and Setting a Statute of Limitations for Deportation
Viridiana Ordonez Volume 73, Issue 6, 1791-1830 The United States relies, in part, on certain criminal convictions to determine which noncitizens are deportable. The specific types of criminal convictions subjecting an individual to deportation proceedings are found...
Of Robolawyers and Robojudges
Joshua P. Davis Volume 73, Issue 5, 1173-1202 Artificial intelligence (AI) may someday play various roles in litigation, particularly complex litigation. It may be able to provide strategic advice, advocate through legal briefs and in court, help judges assess class...
The Constitutionality of Mandating Editorial Transparency
Eric Goldman Volume 73, Issue 5, 1203-1232 This Article explores the underappreciated constitutional problems that arise when regulators compel Internet services to disclose information about their editorial operations and decisions (what the Article calls “mandatory...
Cutting-Edge Evidence: Strengths and Weaknesses of New Digital Investigation Methods in Litigation
Alexa Koenig and Lindsay Freeman Volume 73, Issue 5, 1233-1254 The increased use of digital technologies in daily life has led to a steep rise in the introduction of highly technical evidence and expert witness testimony in criminal and civil litigation. The growing...
Protecting Free Speech and Due Process Values on Dominant Social Media Platforms
Dawn Carla Nunziato Volume 73, Issue 5, 1255-1304 Dominant social media platforms have been increasingly perceived as engaging in discrimination against conservative and right-wing viewpoints. Trump’s deplatforming, coupled with the platforms’ recent removal of Covid-...
The Coming Connected-Products Liability Revolution
Robert S. Peck Volume 73, Issue 5, 1305-1326 Technological innovation begets legal revolution. And tort law, as a creature of the common law, makes the most profound doctrinal leaps and does so more rapidly than any other area of law when technology changes our...
Products Liability in the Digital Age: Online Platforms as “Cheapest Cost Avoiders”
Catherine M. Sharkey Volume 73, Issue 5, 1327-1352 Products liability in the digital age entails reckoning with the transformative shift away from in-person purchases at brick-and-mortar stores to digital purchases from e-commerce platforms. The epochal rise of the...
The Law of Pseudonymous Litigation
Eugene Volokh Volume 73, Issue 5, 1353-1460 When may parties in American civil cases proceed pseudonymously? The answer turns out to be deeply unsettled. This Article aims to lay out the legal rules (such as they are) and the key policy arguments, in a way intended to...
Institutional Choice for Software Safety Standards
Bryan H. Choi Volume 73, Issue 5, 1461-1480 The pursuit of software safety standards has stalled. In response, commentators and policymakers have looked increasingly to federal agencies to deliver new hope. Some place their faith in existing agencies while others...
Regulating Social Media in the Free-Speech Ecosystem
Anuj C. Desai Volume 73, Issue 5, 1481-1510 Social media is just one part of the broader free-speech ecosystem. Social media regulation thus only regulates one part of that ecosystem. To evaluate social media regulation thus requires an understanding of the role...
The GDPR as Privacy Pretext and the Problem of Co-Opting Privacy
Neil Richards Volume 73, Issue 5, 1511-1538 Privacy and data protection law’s expansion brings with it opportunities for mischief as privacy rules are used pretextually to serve other ends. This Essay examines the problem of such co-option of privacy using a case...
A Parallel Infodemic: Multifaceted Approaches to Online Public Health Mis- and Disinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Erin Hutchins Volume 73, Issue 5, 1539-1562 During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities congregated in online spaces more than ever before. While some people found solidarity online, many others found snippets of false information regarding COVID-19’s origin,...
It’s Time for California to Enact Employment Protections for Medical Cannabis Patients
Kevin Murphy Volume 73, Issue 5, 1563-1592 California law allows an employer to refuse to hire an applicant or discharge an employee for consuming medical cannabis in order to treat a serious medical condition, even if an individual consumes cannabis at home during...
From Schoolhouse Gate to Locker Room Door: The Student Athlete’s Constitutional Right to Protest at a Public University Does Not Stop at the Hardwood
Katharine Waters Volume 73, Issue 5, 1593-1620 The Supreme Court has not faced a case involving the public university student athlete’s right to protest during game day events, such as during the pre-game warm up, the national anthem, and game play itself. Protests...
Untangling Right from Wrong in Insanity Law: Of Dogs, Wolves & God
Kate E. Bloch Volume 73, Issue 4, 947-974 In almost all U.S. jurisdictions, a qualifying mental illness that prevents an accused from distinguishing right from wrong can provide support for a determination of legal insanity. Nonetheless, “wrongfulness” remains a term...
Dikos Nitsaa’igii-19 (“The Big Cough”): Coal, COVID-19, and the Navajo Nation
Warigia M. Bowman Volume 73, Issue 4, 975-1040 “Our Nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had...
Regulating Marginalized Labor
Mary Hoopes Volume 73, Issue 4, 1041-1098 Farmworkers are one of many vulnerable groups who exist largely in the shadows of the law. While there is a relatively robust regulatory framework that ostensibly governs the conditions under which they work, it is highly...
Mass Criminalization and Racial Disparities in Conviction Rates
Erin E. Meyers Volume 73, Issue 4, 1099-1144 A staggering number of Americans experience criminal justice contact each year, ranging from arrest to long-term incarceration. One 2014 Wall Street Journal report estimated that approximately one in three Americans are...
The Extraction Industry in Latin America and the Protection of Indigenous Land and Natural Resource Rights: From Consultation Toward Free, Prior, and Informed Consent
Kylah Staley Volume 73, Issue 4, 1145-1172 Resource extraction and exploitation threaten the survival of Indigenous and tribal peoples, who are amongst the most marginalized communities in the world. This is both a human rights issue and an environmental issue. There...
The Political Economy of Foreign Sovereign Immunity
Maryam Jamshidi Volume 73, Issue 3, 585-666 The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) prohibits civil litigation against foreign states, their agencies, and instrumentalities unless one of several enumerated exceptions to immunity applies. The most important of...
Studying Nonobviousness
Jason Rantanen, Lindsay Kriz & Abigail A. Matthews Volume 73, Issue 3, 667-722 Many scholars have observed that an empirical study is only valid to the extent it is reliable. Yet assessments of the reliability of empirical legal studies are rare. The closest most...
Thirteenth Amendment Echoes in Fourteenth Amendment Doctrine
Christopher W. Schmidt Volume 73, Issue 3, 723-772 This Article argues that to better understand the historical development of Fourteenth Amendment antidiscrimination doctrine, we should look to the Thirteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment was drafted in...
Trade Secrecy and Innovation in Forensic Technology
Eli Siems, Katherine J. Strandburg & Nicholas Vincent Volume 73, Issue 3, 773-820 Trade secrecy is a major barrier to public scrutiny of probabilistic software tools that are increasingly used at all stages of the criminal system, from policing and investigation...
Identifying and Countering Fake News
Mark Verstraete, Jane R. Bambauer & Derek E. Bambauer Volume 73, Issue 3, 821-860 Fake news presents a complex regulatory challenge in the increasingly democratized and intermediated on-line information ecosystem. Inaccurate information is readily created by...
Dropping the Other Shoe: Personal Jurisdiction and Remote Technology in the Post-Pandemic World
Jenny Bagger Volume 73, Issue 3, 861-918 As the question of how new technology factors into the personal jurisdiction analysis remains unresolved, the vast increase in the reliance on remote technology that the COVID-19 pandemic spurred urges a definitive answer. Even...
Avatar and Derivative Works: Harmonizing the Interests of Creators and Consumers
Reina Shinohara Volume 73, Issue 3, 919-946 As we spend more of our days online, we are seeing a shift in content moving towards a progressively simulated reality. The virtual worlds of video games and other online communities have become a norm for many, with an...
When Hospitals Sue Patients
Isaac D. Buck Volume 73, Issue 2, 191-232 “The biggest crime you can commit in America is being sick.” Grimly demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals serve as the central hub of American health care. Increasingly exercising market power, setting clinical...
Weaponizing Culture to Undermine International Women’s Rights
Lan Cao Volume 73, Issue 2, 233-300 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”) remains an emblem of hope and change in a world filled with continuing human rights violations. Its promise, enshrined in 1948, is as relevant then as it is now—that the...
A New Prescription for the Opioid Epidemic: 360-Degree Accountability for Pharmaceutical Companies and Their Executives
Rebecca A. Delfino Volume 73, Issue 2, 301-370 We can no longer ignore this—a national crisis resulting in almost one million American deaths, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, ravaging the health care system, and devastating state and local communities. This...
Liberty and Democracy Through the Administrative State: A Critique of the Roberts Court’s Political Theory
Blake Emerson Volume 73, Issue 2, 371-436 The values of liberty and democracy repeatedly arise in recent Supreme Court opinions on administrative law. The conservative Justices have argued that the power vested in government agencies threatens individual freedom and...
Dismantling the Master’s House: Establishing a New Compelling Interest in Remedying Systematic Discrimination
Chris Chambers Goodman and Natalie Antounian Volume 73, Issue 2, 437-474 This Article proposes a new compelling interest to justify affirmative action policies. Litigation has been successful, to a point, in preserving affirmative action, but public support of the...
Taking Stock: Open Questions and Unfinished Business Under the VAWA Amendments to the Indian Civil Rights Act
Jordan Gross Volume 73, Issue 2, 475-528 The primary statutory tool for federal regulation of Tribal court criminal procedure is the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA). ICRA replicated most of the procedural protections in the Bill of Rights applicable to the...
Saving the Sinking Ship: How the United States Can Create an Effective Content Moderation Policy by Looking Abroad
Zhi Yang Tan Volume 73, Issue 2, 529-558 Each day, the world creates another 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, with most of it being accessible by the average person through the smartphone they carry in their pocket. That data may often take the form of informative new...
Dispute Resolution Commercial Transactions Along the Belt and Road: Creating Fair and Consistent Judgments
Sara Zokaei Volume 73, Issue 2, 559-584 For over forty years, China has promulgated national policies of opening-up and cooperation with other nations. Over the past eight years, China has been expanding its efforts to uphold these policy goals via the Belt and Road...
The Psychology of Secret Settlements
Gilat Juli Bachar Volume 73, Issue 1, 1-48 The #MeToo movement called attention to the use of non-disclosure clauses in settlement agreements as a tool to silence victims of sexual wrongdoing by repeat offenders such as movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and Olympic gymnast...
The Federal Response to COVID-19: Lessons from the Pandemic
Nancy J. Knauer Volume 73, Issue 1, 49-104 When the first suspected human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus was reported in January 2020, the United States had in place an elaborate set of pandemic disaster and response plans that spanned hundreds of...
What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There: Why U.S. Commercial Space Policy Must Lie in an Independent Regulatory Agency
Gerardo Inzunza Higuera Volume 73, Issue 1, 105-158 This Note addresses the need for a comprehensive, centralized independent agency designated solely for the management of commercial space activities. The current commercial “space rush” promises unimaginable...
How Can I Ever Repay You? The Borrower’s Dilemma and a Tax-Based Solution to the Student Debt Problem
Kate Souza Volume 73, Issue 1, 129-160 The growing cost of higher education relative to wage growth means that college is no longer the sure path to financial security it once was. While the cost of tuition ballooned over the past several decades, government funding...
The United States’ Ineffective Response Towards Hong Kong’s National Security Law
Justine Yu Volume 73, Issue 1, 161-190 The city of Hong Kong has undergone a dramatic political shift in recent years. Once known as a safe haven for freedom of speech and expression,[1] HK is now a place where anti-Communist Party views are suppressed under the...