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UGA to open at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23
No full textThe University of Georgia will delay opening on Thursday, Jan. 23 until 10 a.m. The delayed start will provide campus operations teams with additional time to address isolated slick spots. Even with the delay, we realize that some members of our campus community may face unique challenges for travel depending upon their location. Employees are encouraged to contact their direct supervisors to discuss flexible arrangements in these circumstances; likewise, students should contact their professors. 1/22/25 7:01 PM School of Law updates to UGA to Open at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025
This means School of Law buildings will be closed until 10 a.m. We will look to reschedule any events and activities to be held before 10 a.m. on January 23 when operations return to normal. For those organizing or hosting events during this period, please reach out to any scheduled guests and registered attendees to ensure they are aware of UGA’s closure.
The Law Library will open at 10 a.m.
Regarding classes: Consistent with the University\u27s guidance, each faculty instructor will determine whether to hold their classes and in what format, depending on the scheduled start and end times for their classes. This is for several reasons, including accreditor rules and institution-wide demands on IT staff and other staff who may be personally affected by weather-related matters.
Regarding clinic operations before 10 a.m.: The same closure applies, with one caveat as described. Under no circumstances should students be required to appear in person on campus (or anywhere else) before 10 a.m. Nor, as a general matter, should clinical faculty or staff come to campus or the clinic offices downtown before 10 a.m. That said, we understand that clinical faculty or staff may have certain ethical duties to clients or courts that must be adhered to. If such matters can be rescheduled or conducted remotely, that should be the first course of action. If not, clinical faculty and staff may work in person unless conditions prevent safe travel.
Whom should I contact if I have questions? Students with class-specific questions should contact their professors. Students with more general questions should contact Dean Dennis or Ms. Tickles. Employees should contact their direct supervisors, most of whom are on the School of Law’s Crisis Response Group.
Please remain mindful of treacherous travel conditions and keep your devices charged. Stay warm and safe!
The safety of our community is always our #1 priority, and the law school\u27s standing crisis response team remains in frequent communication regarding potential inclement weather events and the effects they may have on law school operations and on those in our community who are living in and/or traveling through the weather’s path.
In these situations, please remember: Your primary source for emergency news and information relating to the University of Georgia is emergency.uga.edu. As information emerges from emergency.uga.edu and other official UGA communications, the law school will update its own homepage and social media platforms based on that information. As necessary, the law school will send separate emails to students, staff and faculty regarding law-school-specific impacts of any university-wide decisions. We will also utilize ugaLAWalert for texting law-school-specific messaging (see below). School of Law faculty, staff and students are invited to sign up for a one-way texting notification system by following these instructions: Text “ugaLAWalert” to 877-804-2955. Please note that you must chose to opt in to this service, and you can opt out at any time. Please remember this texting feature does NOT take the place of our uga.edu email address that serves as the primary form of emergency notification. In summary, the law school generally follows UGA’s lead when it comes to inclement weather and other crises. Please rely on UGA sources first, knowing the law school will supplement those as needed
The Fringe Musician, the 360 Deal, and a New Look at Copyright and Competition in Music
Full text linkThis article is guided by two questions: (1) How well does the law actually protect musicians from market exploitation? (2) What new perspectives and legal strategies can better secure their bargaining power and financial wellbeing? Copyright and antitrust are not mutually exclusive in music or in any other industry, yet there are important lessons to be learned from comparing how the musician’s prominence in each doctrine does and doesn’t correlate to what its laws can really do for different members of that creator class. Stakeholders frequently cast copyright as an essential necessity for “everyone in the music industry,” but this article probes that ‘music needs copyright’ narrative with the more focused question of whether musicians need copyright—and, if so, which ones? Thanks to Donald Passman’s diligence updating his “industry bible,” All You Need to Know About the Music Business, it is possible to trace copyright’s function in musicianlabel negotiations over the past thirty years. Among other exploitative bargaining practices, these guidebooks chronicle how record companies actually deemphasized copyright in a sudden push for ‘360 deals’ demanding other pieces of musicians’ income. Ultimately, this article argues that antitrust, not copyright, could have been called upon to stop that anti-musician development, if regulators had only thought to clamp down on the record companies’ market power as purchasers of musical copyrights. When we remember that, we offer ourselves a means of monitoring and putting a name to any anticompetitive movements in musician-label negotiations—even if we can’t go back in time to stop the proliferation of the 360 deal
A New Curveball: An Analysis of the Current NIL Battle That is Destabilizing the Landscape of College Athletics
Full text linkOn June 21, 2023, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law and found unlawful the organization’s restrictions on education-related benefits schools could offer student-athletes. This ruling marked the official beginning of the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) boom throughout college athletics. Presently, the NCAA has failed to develop uniform regulations that conform to the standards set by the Supreme Court and appease the nationwide educational institutions. As a result, states have drafted various bills and laws to regulate NIL contracts throughout their jurisdiction. Foreseeably, this has created an air of uncertainty around NIL and the negative impacts it may have on student-athletes. Throughout this note, I explain the legislative history of the NCAA, the current state of NIL regulation through select NCAA policies and state legislation, and tackle some concerns that sit at the forefront of the NIL conversation. Ultimately, I will attempt to demonstrate the fragility of the future of collegiate athletics and its contingency upon the response to NIL. This takes the form of a few proposed measures of regulation that I believe could be helpful for the NCAA and useful for ensuring an equitable environment for all student-athletes
The End(s) of Bankruptcy Exceptionalism: Purdue Pharma and the Problem of Social Debt
Full text linkThe Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in the controversial chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization of opioid-maker Purdue Pharma ends the use of nonconsensual third-party “releases,” which discharge (eliminate) liabilities of non-debtors who may share liability with a corporate debtor. Although the majority opinion is correct that the Bankruptcy Code does not permit this, it failed to recognize the problematic exceptionalism of the lower courts which approved those releases or the “social” qualities of Purdue Pharma’s mass tort liability.Bankruptcy exceptionalism has been a contested concept since it emerged over fifteen years ago, and reflects a willingness to bend the rule of law in order to maximize economic recoveries. But the statutory exceptionalism rejected by the Purdue Pharma majority is not its only form. This Article shows that in bankruptcy, the Court has also tolerated “structural exceptionalism,” a willingness to permit deviations from constitutional rules, standards, norms, and values when in tension with insolvency proceedings that involve significant public interests. Seen this way, Purdue Pharma seemed an ideal candidate for a broadly exceptionalist ruling: The company’s mass torts played a unique role in a public health crisis that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.The significant prebankruptcy misconduct of Purdue Pharma and its insiders who sought the release created a kind of “social debt,” a subset of mass tort liability reflecting serious misconduct. Although the precise boundaries are unclear, the defining features of social debt are its moral gravity and scale, here liability for drug-marketing fraud, which translates poorly into dollars. Other examples of social debt include large-scale liability for sexual assault and the crisis of gun violence. The noneconomic demands of social debt are in tension with the economic aspirations of bankruptcy exceptionalism. The Purdue Pharma majority neither recognized this tension nor ended the use of chapter 11 to resolve mass tort liability, an increasingly attractive but problematic substitute for (exception to) ordinary litigation. Justice Kavanaugh’s flawed but “emphatic” dissent fully embraced bankruptcy exceptionalism without acknowledging the extraordinary power he would vest in bankruptcy judges to resolve social debt.The important question is not whether to end bankruptcy exceptionalism—all agree that bankruptcy courts must have some flexibility and can play an important role in resolving mass tort liability—but the ends that it serves. We use this framework to anticipate the next points of conflict in the wake of Purdue Pharma. We offer guidance on ways that courts and Congress can balance economic goals of maximizing recoveries with noneconomic concerns presented in social debt bankruptcies, including on what constitutes “consent” to a third-party release and the problematic incentives of privatized fiduciaries who run these cases
Surveillance as Retaliation
Full text linkEmployers have a myriad of technologies at their disposal to help them surveil their employees, and they deploy these technologies for several reasons. Some of these reasons—e.g., monitoring time and attendance, ensuring compliance with occupational safety standards, protecting against certain data disclosure, etc.—are legitimate. Others are not. Chief among the illegitimate reasons is monitoring employees in retaliation for reporting alleged employer misconduct internally or externally. Just as terminating, demoting, or transferring an employee constitutes an adverse action for retaliation claims, subjecting an employee to surveillance because the employee has engaged in protected activity is also an adverse action. Courts and federal administrative agencies have condemned this practice. However, information asymmetries between employees and employers, coupled with a legal analytical framework for retaliation claims out of step with the evolution of surveillance technologies, produce anemic enforcement of antiretaliation laws and provide noncompliant employers with a competitive advantage.
This article examines how heightened surveillance of employees after they engage in protected activity perpetuates retaliation, exacerbates preexisting racial and gender surveillance disparities, and promotes other employment abuses under existing legal frameworks. The article proposes judicial and legislative interventions that will help deter employers from engaging in retaliatory surveillance and aid courts and administrative agencies in detecting and remedying retributory employer conduct
Public Constitutional AI
Full text linkWe are increasingly subjected to the power of AI authorities. Machine learning models now underpin algorithmic markets, determine whose speech is amplified or restricted, shape government decisions ranging from resource allocation to predictive policing, and influence our access to information on critical issues such as voting and public health. As AI decisions become inescapable, entering domains such as healthcare, education, and law, we must confront a vital question: How can we ensure that AI systems, which increasingly regulate our lives and make decisions that shape our societies, have the authority and legitimacy necessary for effective governance?
To secure AI legitimacy, we need to develop methods that engage the public in the project of designing and constraining AI systems, thereby ensuring that these technologies reflect the shared values and political will of the communities they serve. Constitutional AI, proposed and developed by Anthropic AI, represents a step towards this goal, offering a model for how AI might be brought under democratic control and made answerable to the common good.
Just as constitutions limit and guide the exercise of governmental power, Constitutional AI seeks to hardcode explicit principles and values into AI models, rendering their decisionmaking more transparent and accountable. What sets Constitutional AI apart is its commitment to grounding AI training in a clear, human-understandable “constitution.” By training AI to adhere to principles legible to both humans and machines, this approach aims to foster trust and stability in the development of these increasingly powerful technologies.
However, I argue that Constitutional AI, in its current form (developed by a private corporation seeking to create universally applicable constitutional principles), is unlikely to fully resolve the crisis of AI legitimacy due to two key deficits: First, the opacity deficit, which suggests that the inherent complexity of AI systems undermines our ability to reason out their decisionmaking. Second, the political community deficit, which suggests that AI systems are grounded in abstract models rather than in human judgment, lacks the social context that legitimizes authority.
To remedy these deficits, I propose Public Constitutional AI, a framework that involves the public in drafting an AI constitution that must be used in the training of all frontier AI models operating within a given jurisdiction. By transforming the AI constitution from a technical solution devised by engineers into a product of significant citizen involvement, Public Constitutional AI mitigates the opacity deficit. It does so by rendering the principles and values governing AI systems more transparent and accessible to the forms of public discourse and contestation essential to democratic legitimacy. Moreover, by grounding the development of AI principles in the social context and shared experiences of a particular political community, Public Constitutional AI helps bridge the gap between the abstract logic of algorithms and the situated, contextual judgments that legitimize authority in a democracy, thereby mitigating the political community deficit
Protecting “Learned Hands”: Table Saw Injuries, the SawStop Saga, and How Our Design Defect Doctrine Is Disincentivizing Safety
Full text linkThe American judicial system has been grappling with the grisly realities of industrial carnage for over one hundred years. From Justice Cardozo’s storied expansion of manufacturer liability to the regulatory explosion of the 1960s, our nation has struggled to balance the personal freedom of consumers with the dangers of modern machinery. The winding morass of products liability law has afforded plaintiffs some degree of protection from the wily manufacturer, but most would agree that advancements in safety technology have prevented more consumer harm than any tort claim or cause of action.
Despite the unquestionable utility of safety advancements, analysis of our design defect doctrine suggests that our products liability framework might be disincentivizing our greatest weapon against preventing plaintiff harm: the adoption of safety technology. One example from the table saw industry suggests that the current framework incentivizes manufacturers both to resist safety adoption and to recruit resistance amongst its fellow manufacturers. By adopting a burden-shifting scheme in cases where such industry meddling has taken place, our design defect doctrine would be better equipped to incentivize safety adoption and dissuade industry meddling among powerful manufacturers
