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Scientific and Technical Expertise After Loper
No full textIntro by Meghna
Sapna Kumar, Scientific and Technical Expertise After Loper Bright
Discussant Judge Paul W. Grim
Collective Management of Copyrights and Human Rights in an Age of Technological Automation
Get PDFCollective management organizations (CMOs) across the world have remained key to the exercise and enforcement of copyrights and neighbouring rights of individual creators notwithstanding the rapid development of digital technologies and their decentralizing potential. This chapter provides an up-to-date legal analysis on the role and activities carried out by CMOs vis-à-vis the protection of creators’ rights as international human rights. By scrutinizing key treaty provisions and interpretative documents, the analysis reveals how a human rights framework supports numerous functions performed by CMOs. However, significant conflicts may arise from certain practices and policies of CMOs concerning, for example, mandatory membership, promotion of national culture, and automated rights management systems. The chapter showcases how a human rights framework provides guidance to states and non-state actors to prevent or at least mitigate these conflicts and to inform future legal developments reforms to modernize the legal rules on in this area
Access to Algorithmic Justice: Defending a Right to Expert Assistance for Indigent Defendants
Get PDFPragmatic Textualism
No full textTraditional textualism instructs judges to adhere to a statute\u27s linguistic meaning and reject as irrelevant its interpretive consequences. Justice Scalia famously contrasted his restrained textualist judge with Mr. Fix-It, a judge who inappropriately weighs consequences. Today, however, textualists increasingly embrace consequentialist reasoning. This Article documents this undertheorized shift and the emerging textualist efforts to justify it, including Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett\u27s arguments for nonliteralism and judicial sensitivity to context. This Article critiques these efforts: Modern textualist theory lacks a compelling explanation for its newfound reliance on interpretive consequences.
Next, we offer a novel theory of the linguistic role for interpretive consequences in determining word meanings. The theory, which we term the bounded indeterminacy theory, is an aspect of a broader theory of pragmatic textualism. Pragmatic textualism seeks to explore how context informs the linguistic meanings of statutes. The bounded indeterminacy theory explains one aspect of context-specific interpretation, which is that interpretive consequences help determine the linguistic meanings of statutory terms.
We test the bounded indeterminacy theory, presenting an empirical study to assess whether and how ordinary people (N = 2,185) integrate consequences into their understanding of linguistic meaning. An empirically supported bounded indeterminacy theory provides various benefits to legal interpretation theory and practice. It offers a superior explanation for some of the Court\u27s recent interpretations, demonstrates the interconnectedness of textualism and purposivism, supports some of the Court\u27s current interpretive principles but not others, and illustrates the near obsolescence of the absurdity doctrine
Incubators of Innovation: Finding a Place for Title IX in Religious Charter Schools
No full textSince the early 1990s, many people across the country have embraced charter schools as incubators of innovation. Charter schools are publicly funded, tuition-free, K–12 schools that have more flexibility than traditional public schools in curriculum, staffing, and more. With this flexibility, charter schools constantly test new approaches, aiming to inspire educational reform.
In recent years, some have begun calling for a new kind of charter school: the religious charter school. In May 2025, the Supreme Court deadlocked in Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board v. Drummund, a case involving St. Isidore, the nation\u27s first explicitly religious charter school. For the time being, St. Isidore is not permitted to operate. But because the current Court has consistently held favorably for religious litigants in education cases, advocates for religious charter schools have not lost hope. Instead, they expect a more favorable result from the Court in the coming years that would permit religious charter schools nationwide.
With religious charter schools come a host of constitutional issues and concerns about students\u27 rights. One relevant concern is Title IX’s Religious Exemption. The Religious Exemption shields religious schools from students\u27 Title IX claims—and the breadth of protections under the Religious Exemption has expanded in recent years. Accordingly, this Note proposes changes in how Congress, OCR, and courts construct and apply the Religious Exemption to protect students in religious charter schools. After all, if advocates for religious charter schools want to provide students meaningful opportunities to learn alongside people who share their faith, they must also protect those students from sex-based harassment and unreasonable discrimination
Perfect Strangers: Improving Access to Justice by Regulating Third-Party Litigation Funding and Forced Arbitration
No full textThe rising cost of litigation and the Supreme Court\u27s expansion of forced arbitration leave vast swaths of consumers and civil rights plaintiffs without an adequate path to the only forum with the independence to fairly decide controversies: courts. This access-to-justice gap presents an opportunity for third parties seeking to profit from litigation to provide funding to support plaintiffs\u27 litigation costs in exchange for an interest in the judgement or settlement. But third-party litigation funding mostly benefits businesses, and it does not help plaintiffs overcome forced arbitration. Many who acquire third-party funding realize that they are victims of a new form of aggressive and underregulated subprime lending. Moreover, several cases involving third-party funding reveal conflicts of interest resulting from funding agreements. This Note shows how harms from third-party funding and forced arbitration lead to both material abuses of consumers and a lack of transparency in dispute resolution. Congress must corral these twin harms to prevent further erosion of courts\u27 perceived legitimacy. Joining current proposals for regulation of third-party litigation funding and restrictions on forced arbitration will enable Congress to cut through the gridlock and restore the reputation of federal courts by opening the doors to claimants
The International Risk Governance Council: Reflections on a 20-Year Experiment in Support of Improved Risk Governance
No full textThe International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) was a nonprofit foundation, based first as an independent, freestanding Swiss foundation in Geneva from 2003 to 2012, and then affiliated with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne from 2012 to 2023. IRGC\u27s mission was to identify and improve the governance of emerging and systemic risks that have, or could have, impacts on human and environmental health, the economy and society, and overall sustainability. In this paper, we recount IRGC\u27s history, describe its many reports, workshops, and conference activities (including tables referencing the many published products), and provide six brief case histories of accomplishments and insights on work IRGC has done on solar radiation management, small modular reactors, synthetic biology, autonomous vehicles, resilience and systemic risks, and international comparison of risk governance. The paper concludes with some brief observations about the impact of IRGC\u27s work and notes the continuing need for a neutral convening entity that can perform a role similar to that of IRGC