University of California Hastings College of the Law
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The U.S. Forced Labor Import Ban: A Tool for Raising Labor Standards in Supply Chains?
No full textForced labor is rampant across global supply chains. Addressing it at individual sites of production results in a game of whack-a-mole. An effective response must target the structural drivers of the problem: the large firms at the top and middle of supply chains that pressure suppliers at the bottom to cut labor costs in order to remain competitive. In the absence of other U.S. laws that address the structural causes of forced labor, this Article argues that the forced labor import ban in section 307 of the United States Tariff Act may have the potential to be utilized by civil society organizations and the State in top-down ways to hold lead firms at the top and middle of supply chains accountable for facilitating forced labor. Additionally, it may offer a resource to bottom-up efforts by workers in supply chains and the unions that represent them to demand that both brands and suppliers take responsibility for improving working conditions.
This Article makes three contributions. First, it contends that although enforcement of section 307 to date has been sporadic and often influenced by foreign policy concerns, the U.S. government possesses the legal authority under existing statutes and regulations to target enforcement in ways that address the structural drivers of forced labor both from the top down and the bottom up. Second, it offers the only account to date of how civil society actors have used the law’s public petition mechanism and other interventions in efforts to direct government resources towards a systemic enforcement approach. Drawing on interviews with key civil society and government actors and a review of both confidential and public petitions, this Article maps advocates’ strategies and the government’s response, illustrating the government’s resistance to enforcing section 307 against lead firms at the top of supply chains and its partial openness to a structural enforcement approach at the middle and bottom. Third, it highlights the urgency of solutions to forced labor that support the exercise of freedom of association by supply chain workers. Here, it proposes a novel way for unions to draw on section 307 as leverage when they organize in supply chain contexts
Privacy and Disinformation
No full textAll three branches of the federal government have wrestled with how the law could or should regulate social media applications to mitigate the harms of disinformation. However, most proposed solutions make the same critical mistake: Lawmakers may focus on speech regulation or even economic regulation to solve for disinformation but these solutions do not actually address contemporary, technological vectors of disinformation. In today’s increasingly technologically driven global speech environment, the lynchpin for disinformation is not speech but data.
In particular, algorithmic personalization is a new, technological factor that makes disinformation especially harmful. Luckily, data protection and privacy regulation can greatly curb the impact of algorithmic personalization and, correspondingly, disinformation harms as well. These privacy regulatory solutions also do not have the negative factors that make speech and economic regulatory solutions difficult and ineffective. Thus, lawmakers would be better off moving away from speech and economic regulation to instead focus on privacy regulation to mitigate the harms of disinformation, including disinformation found on foreign-owned social media applications, like TikTok.
Legal solutions that focus on data privacy, instead of pure speech regulation or economic regulation, are better solutions for disinformation for four reasons. First, privacy regulation addresses the root of the problem for today’s disinformation: the technological factor of personalization, driven by technological developments like the internet and artificial intelligence (“AI”). Second, privacy regulations are more likely to pass constitutional muster, avoiding First Amendment roadblocks. Third, privacy regulations are likely less controversial to an American public primed to fear censorship. Finally, privacy regulations would be less likely to discriminate harshly against foreign companies, resolving international tensions around perceived economic protectionism and trade unfairness
Academic Village Finance Authority Board of Directors Meeting - Open Session Book 09/12/2025
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Incremental Innovation
No full textTransformative innovations—the ones that use new technologies to disrupt the world—command our attention. But most new products are the result of a more mundane process of incremental iterative innovation, evolving through a long series of small modifications of existing technologies. Although both kinds of innovation can result in improved safety and utility, both can also create new dangers. We tend to be more aware of this in transformative innovations (as current worries over artificial intelligence show); by contrast, dangers created by incremental iterative innovation often go unrecognized, because the process itself is easy to overlook. Policymakers and regulators need to be aware of both kinds of innovation and to consider different approaches to each if we are to reap their benefits and avoid their dangers.
Unfortunately, incremental iterative innovation has often been neglected, sometimes with devastating consequences. This is particularly true in the field of FDA-regulated medical devices, which have caused hundreds of thousands of injuries and deaths. Critics have attributed the harms caused by one particular set of devices to incremental iterative innovation, but they have failed to appreciate the full scope of this process, leading them to overlook the dangers posed by many other devices.
This Article is the first to identify the full scope of incremental iterative innovation in the medical device field. It develops a nuanced understanding of where this process is taking place and where it is creating dangers, and suggests regulatory reforms designed both to ensure safety and to support innovation. Using the device field as a case study, the Article also helps to expand our understanding of how incremental iterative innovation and regulation intersect in other contexts
The IVF Exception: Strengthening Free Exercise Challenges to Abortion Bans
No full textThe fallout of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has included two seemingly distinct but critically related dynamics. First, religiously motivated plaintiffs are filing lawsuits challenging abortion bans on free exercise grounds. These lawsuits argue, in accordance with current free exercise doctrine, that a state’s compelling interest in protecting “fetal life” is undermined by secular exceptions to abortion bans. Second, state lawmakers have been forced to confirm that their state abortion bans do not apply to in vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that regularly requires the discarding of embryos. This confluence of factors raises a critical question for religiously motivated litigants seeking to challenge abortion bans on free exercise grounds: can IVF be treated as a “secular exception” that puts pressure on states to grant religious exemptions to permit abortion?
This Article advances a novel argument: litigants can advance a stronger free exercise challenge to abortion bans by explicitly pointing out the discrepancy between how state law treats abortion and the discarding of embryos through IVF—referred to here as the “IVF exception.” In light of a high-profile February 2024 IVF decision in Alabama and pending religious freedom challenges to abortion bans in Indiana and South Carolina, this Article provides a timely and novel strategy for practitioners. The Indiana Court of Appeals considered the “IVF exception” in an April 2024 ruling and a January 2025 provider lawsuit raised the issue, too, but little academic scholarship comments on the topic. This Article provides a critical contribution to free exercise scholarship as the lawsuits challenging abortion bans on religious freedom grounds move through state courts across the country
From Murphy to the Seminole Compact: California’s Pathways to Sports Betting Legalization Without a Constitutional Amendment
No full textDerivative Data: Rethinking Market Definitions in the Age of Generative AI
No full textAntitrust law fails to keep pace with the data-driven realities of the dig- ital economy, and foundation models further exacerbate the issue. Founda- tion models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on broad datasets across different domains. While traditional antitrust frameworks fo- cus on narrow market definitions and readily observable effects, these frameworks fail to capture the anti-competitive potential of derivative data— data that is derived by a business through its operations and exerts cross- market influence—thereby fueling new forms of dominance.
Moreover, the dynamics of foundation model training data create a “Tragedy of the Data Commons,” where a few powerful actors benefit at the expense of accessible data resources. Without intervention, the control of foundation models will remain in the hands of tech conglomerates, limiting the open exchange of information and further entrenching their market power.
This paper argues that antitrust law must expand the upper bounds of liability to encompass the broader ecosystems in which data operates, rec- ognizing that the “relevant market” for market entities that collect derivative data extends far beyond the immediate product or service the entity provides to consumers. By redefining these bounds, antitrust enforcement can address the evolving challenges of foundation models and ensure that their bottom- less potential does not translate into boundless dominance by a select few