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Sackett v. EPA: When “Adjacent” Means “Contiguous” and Property Rights Eclipse Clean Water Act Protections
Full text linkDystopian Dreams, Utopian Nightmares: AI and the Permanence of Racism
Full text linkThis Essay draws connections between Octavia Butler’s Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), HBO’s Westworld, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism to highlight how the reconfiguration and transmutation of race through technological change is facilitated by corresponding shifts in legal doctrine, theory, policy, and practice. It takes the overlapping threads from these three sources, which struggle with the idea of change within larger systems of unavoidable, repetitive destruction, and ties them to the law’s role in helping to shield race through the storms of change by being similarly nimble, flexible, and perseverant. The Essay identifies a theme found in both the selected Afrofuturistic works and in tech-centered legal doctrine, regulation, and theory that illuminate the law’s role in reconstituting the fraught relationship between race and technology: the promise of utopia. The Essay explores this concept in the context of emerging debates on the function, utility, and harm of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has been promoted as the latest tool toward a transhumanist future devoid of the trappings of humanity’s biggest flaws. It proposes four emanating values, Ustopia, Sankofa, Data Justice, and Data Power, which should help guide advocacy, policymaking, and resistance in an increasingly AI dominated future. It ultimately concludes that an Afrofuturistic lens is not only important for under-standing the potential harms of AI and developing regulatory frameworks but also necessary for imagining how such technologies could serve the interests of radical Black futures. The Essay contributes to a burgeoning literature using Afrofuturism—which situates the Black struggle in persistent yet continuously changing structural disparities and power relations—as an important departure point for expressing data precarity and reimagining new modes of data protection
The Dimensions of Gameplay: Presenting an Alternative to Video Game Copyrights for Games Without Narratives
Full text linkThe Automated Fourth Amendment
Full text linkCourts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests that hang in the balance. After revealing the infirmity of current case law, this Article argues for a doctrinal shift to require assessment of policing technology reliability as part of Fourth Amendment reasonableness determinations and offers a framework that would allow courts to do so. Such a shift may prevent further erosion of privacy rights, particularly for Black, Latine, and other marginalized communities subjected to rampant Fourth Amendment abuses. Recognizing that even a necessary doctrinal shift cannot resolve every concern related to ever-growing police reliance on automated technologies to justify seizures and searches, this Article also goes beyond a focus on doctrine to recommend targeted policy interventions where Fourth Amendment intrusions do not result in criminal litigation
American Apocalypse: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy
No full textA thorough analysis of the right-wing interests contributing to the downfall of American democracy
The war on American democracy is at a fever pitch. Such a corrosive state of affairs did not arise spontaneously up from the people but instead was pushed, top-down, by six private sector special interest groups—big business, the House Freedom Caucus, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militias. In American Apocalypse Rena Steinzor argues that these groups are nothing more than well-financed armies fighting a battle of attrition against the national government, with power, money, and fame as their central motivations.
The book begins at the end of Lyndon Johnson\u27s presidency, when the modern regulatory state was born. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration ensured that everything from our air to our medicine was safe. But efforts to thwart this big government agenda began swiftly, albeit in the shadows. Business leaders built a multi-billion dollar presence in the Capitol, and the rest of the six interest groups soon followed.
While the groups do not coordinate their attacks, and sometimes their short-term goals even conflict, their priorities fall within a surprisingly tight bullseye: the size and power of the administrative state. In the near-term, their campaigns will bring the crucial functions of government to a halt, which will lead to immediate suffering by the working classes, and a rapid deterioration of race relations. Over the long-term, as the prevalence of global pandemics and climate crises increase, an incapacitated national government will usher in unimaginable harm.
This book is the first to conceptualize these groups together, as one deconstructive and awe-inspiring force. Steinzor delves into each of their histories, mapping the strategies, tactics, and characteristics that make them so powerful. She offers the most comprehensive story available about the downfall of American democracy, reminding us that only by recognizing what we are up against can we hope to bring about change.https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1141/thumbnail.jp
