Loyola University Chicago, School of Law: LAW eCommons
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Statistically Speaking: Questioning the Conventional Perceptions of the Mental Health Professional\u27s Role in Child Custody Evaluations: A Review of Ira Daniel Turkat\u27s Preliminary Research
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Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard: Admissions Administrators Threaten the Future of Affirmative Action in the United States
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Improving Protection and Services for Trafficking Victims in the United States: Recommendations Based on the United Kingdom\u27s Modern Slavery Act 2015
Get PDFHuman trafficking is a form of modern slavery that occurs both internationally and within national borders. It is a multibillion-dollar criminal industry, and millions of men, women, and children have been victims of this heinous and unconscionable crime.2 Fortunately, the problem of human trafficking has finally started to receive the attention it deserves. Over the past two decades, a plethora of anti-trafficking laws have been passed at both international and domestic levels. The United States specifically has been a leader in the promulgation of anti-trafficking laws that have served as models for other nations of the world. These federal laws, however, do not adequately address victim treatment and protection services. Minors remain particularly vulnerable. For example, minors in the United States may be prosecuted for crimes they were forced to commit by their traffickers. Although many national anti-trafficking frameworks are based on the U.S. model, the United Kingdom has substantially different laws. The United States should look to the laws of the United Kingdom and incorporate those provisions that would provide better protection for human trafficking victims
Marketplace of Ideas, Privacy, and the Digital Audience
Get PDFThe availability of almost limitless sets of digital information has opened a vast marketplace of ideas. Information service providers like Facebook and Twitter provide users with an array of personal information about products, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. While this data enriches the lives of those who share content on the internet, it comes at the expense of privacy. Social media companies disseminate news, advertisements, and political messages, while also capitalizing on consumers\u27 private shopping, surfing, and traveling habits. Companies like Cambridge Analytica, Amazon, and Apple rely on algorithmic programs to mash up and scrape enormous amounts of online and otherwise available personal data to microtarget audiences. By collecting and then processing psychometric data sets, commercial and political advertisers rely on emotive advertisements to manipulate biases and vulnerabilities that impact audiences\u27 shopping and voting habits. The Free Speech Clause is not an absolute bar to the regulation of commercial intermediaries who exploit private information obtained on the digital marketplace of ideas. The Commerce Clause authorizes passage of laws to regulate internet companies that monetize intimate data and resell it to third parties. Rather than applying strict scrutiny to such proposed regulations as one would to pure speech, judges should rely on intermediate scrutiny to test statutes limiting the commercial marketing of data. Legislative reforms are needed to address the substantial economic effects of massive, commercial agglomeration of data files containing histories, daily routines, medical conditions, personal habits, and the like. To address this logarithmically expanding cyberphenomenon, Congress should temporally restrict the retention and trade in private data. Internet intermediaries should not be immune from such a restriction on private data storage. For such a policy to be effective, safe harbor provisions shielding internet intermediaries should be modified to allow for civil litigation against internet companies that refuse a data subject\u27s request to remove personal information no longer needed to accomplish the transaction for which it was originally processed
The Stakes of Smart Contracts
No full textBy consensus, smart contracts are a revolution in private ordering: They offer guaranteed enforcement, independent of the whims of territorial governments; efficient formation and interpretation; immunity from external interference; and complete deference to the parties’ wishes. Each of these claims is a myth. While smart contracts present themselves as natural and neutral, they are in fact deeply politicized. The Legal Realists tore down the foundations of smart contracts almost a century ago. Advocates for them have not solved the problems of the past—they have forgotten them.
This Article offers a new critique of the optimism about smart contracts and desirability of securing mutual agreements by code rather than law. More specifically, this Article takes aim at the assertion that smart contracts can, and should, provide an alternative to traditional contract law. It contends that advocates for smart contracts rely reflexively on deeply contested assumptions from Lochner-era legal thought, including a political commitment to “freedom of contract,” insistence on a division between “public” and “private” spheres, and a minimalist view of the state’s role in managing private law systems of contract and property. More specifically, these assumptions cause smart contract partisans to fundamentally underestimate the role of the state in maintaining a functioning private law regime. This failure to recognize the inevitable extent of state intervention in private law means that smart contracts will create novel distributions of wealth and power that are normatively suspect. Furthermore, this Article draws upon two foundational moments in Internet law—early hopes for a realm beyond territorial governance and attempts to override copyright law through technology—to demonstrate the errors that advocates and scholars alike commit based on the evanescent technological promise of this new method.
Finally, this Article demonstrates that, far from realizing a utilitarian ideal of efficiency, smart contracts are constructed without democratic oversight and governance, which are essential for a legitimate system of private law