Note: You Should Be Free To Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk: Applying Riley v. California to Smart Activity Trackers
By Katharine Saphner. Full text here. In 2014, the Supreme Court held in Riley v. California that law enforcement officers must obtain a warrant before searching a cell phone. Though the Court intended that this holding would provide clear guidance to law enforcement officers, it may ultimately provide even more confusion. Riley distinguishes an arrestee’s…
Continue ReadingNote: Live Long and Prosper: How the Persistent and Increasing Popularity of Fan Fiction Requires a New Solution in Copyright Law
By Brittany Johnson. Full text here. For decades, fans have written stories that extend the plotlines of popular films, novels, and television shows in a practice known as fan fiction. But with the advent of the Internet, the popularity of this practice has grown exponentially as these stories are easily posted online and accessible for free.…
Continue ReadingNote: The Shoe Doesn’t Fit: General Jurisdiction Should Follow Corporate Structure
By Seungwon Chung. Full text here. Increasingly, corporations are moving away from a centralized corporate structure toward decentralization and fragmentation of corporate functions. At the same time, the corporate general jurisdiction doctrine functions anachronistically—assuming that corporations exist solely as centralized structures. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Daimler AG v. Bauman reflects this assumption. By drawing…
Continue ReadingThe Secret History of the Bluebook
By Fred R. Shapiro & Julie Graves Krishnaswami. Full text here. The Bluebook, or A Uniform System of Citation as it was formerly titled, has long been a significant component of American legal culture. The standard account of the origins of the Bluebook, deriving directly from statements made by longtime Harvard Law School Dean and…
Continue ReadingRethinking Technology Neutrality
By Brad A. Greenberg. Full text here. Technology progresses at an increasingly rapid rate; Congressional action does not. How then should laws be drafted to keep pace with changes to the world they regulate? Scholars and legislators have overwhelmingly answered that laws should anticipate unexpected technologies through ex ante statutory inclusion. “Technology neutrality,” as this principle…
Continue ReadingRegulating Financial Change: A Functional Approach
By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. How should we think about regulating our dynamically changing financial system? Existing regulatory approaches have two temporal flaws. The obvious flaw, driven by politics and human nature (and addressed in other writings), is that financial regulation is overly reactive to past crises. This article addresses a less obvious but…
Continue ReadingFinancial Weapons of War
By Tom C.W. Lin. Full text here. A new type of warfare is upon us. In this new mode of war, finance is the most powerful weapon, bullets dare not fire, financial institutions are the targets, and almost everyone is at risk. Instead of smart bombs, improvised explosives, and unmanned drones––economic sanctions, financial restrictions, and cyber…
Continue ReadingAntitrust and the Robo-Seller: Competition in the Time of Algorithms
By Salil K. Mehra. Full text here. Increasingly firms are knitting together newly available mass-data collection, Internet-driven interconnective power, and automated algorithmic selling with their traditional supply chain and sales functions. Traditional sales functions such as competitive intelligence gathering and pricing are being delegated to software “robo-sellers.” This Article offers the first descriptive and normative study of…
Continue ReadingRegulating Employment-Based Anything
By Brendan S. Maher. Full text here. Benefit regulation has been called “the most consequential subject to which no one pays enough attention.” It exhausts judges, intimidates legislators, and scares off theorists. That need not be so. The reality is less complicated than advertised. Governments often consider intervention if markets fail to make some socially desirable…
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