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“The Greatest Invasion in History”: The Nineteenth Century Nativist Theory Behind Trump’s 2025 Immigration Agenda
No full textCopyright, Learnright, and Fair Use: Rethinking Compensation for AI Model Training
No full textGenerative AI can rapidly output vast amounts of expressive content, some of which has great value for society. This new computational process also raises a deep question of fairness: Will the original creators of the content used to train these systems share in the value they create? The question becomes particularly urgent as the potential effects of generative AI on markets for creative works become clearer. Artists with a distinctive style may find it nearly impossible to sell their new work when very low-cost substitutes can be generated automatically. News publishers whose content can now be paraphrased by generative AI systems without violating copyright laws may lose significant advertising revenue from readers who no longer need to click through to publishers’ websites. Millions of workers may be wholly or partially displaced by generative AI trained on their works.
Numerous scholars have begun to address this issue. Some have focused on challenging generative AI providers’ claims that their ingestion of copyrighted works for training models and outputting new works is fair use. Others have conceded or bracketed the fair use question and proposed levies or compulsory licenses to compensate for these uses. We take a distinct approach, proposing a new right for copyright holders with respect to AI training using their work. This protection is appropriate given massive AI systems’ ability to process vast amounts of information far faster and less expensively than humans can. An exclusive right to license AI training, called a “learnright” for short, would enable copyright holders to claim some share in the revenues arising out of automated systems that learn from covered material.
This essay examines the rationale and potential mechanisms for implementing such laws. It explains the high degree of legal uncertainty surrounding the many current lawsuits against generative AI providers, and it proposes learnrights to complement the existing exclusive rights guaranteed to copyright holders. Given the many sources from which AI can “learn,” market mechanisms would likely permit a fair and reasonable degree of revenue sharing pursuant to copyright holders’ assertion of their learnrights. Compensation for learnrights would also redress some striking imbalances apparent in current copyright policy that favor mechanical processing of texts over human engagement with them
Does It Take Four to Tango in the Regulatory Competition for Global Listings? Comparing Regulations on Dual Class Shares among Singapore, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan
No full textWe provide a comparative analysis of regulatory competition among Singapore, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan regarding the process, purpose, and actual results of deregulating Dual-Class Share (“DCS”) structure. The comparative analysis focuses on the role of regulatory competition in the convergence or divergence of DCS-structure regulations. To attract unicorn companies and China Concept Stock (“CCS”) companies to choose public offerings in regional exchanges, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mainland China sequentially announced their amendments to listing rules, particularly in 2018, to allow public offerings of DCS-structure companies while considering their preference for the ownership structure of unicorns. We employ theories of regulatory competition and convergence to analyze the regulatory trajectories of the four jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region and how such jurisdictional competition would accelerate the transplantation of corporate governance regulations and, therefore, converge with the US permissive model in appearance. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mainland China have transplanted the DCS-structure listing regulatory framework and added shareholder protection, particular disclosure, and sunset restrictions, which converge more in concert with each other towards the US model. We also discuss why and how stubborn path dependence would bring non-convergence towards the US model for listing companies in Taiwan, which is an outlier of the regulatory competition for global listings. By analyzing this competition by supplying DCS legal products among the four jurisdictions, we enrich the regulatory competition theory and study how this competition produces formal convergence and functional divergence of DCS structures in corporate governance regulations. We contribute to the existing literature by providing a comparative view of regulatory competition among the four jurisdictions and examining the potential impact of the US-China trade war on the deregulation of the DCS structure in the Asia-Pacific region
Disclosures, Disclaimers, and Disinformation Advertising
No full textEvery regular internet user in the United States has been exposed to fake news at some point. Most of them, if not all, would agree that this problem needs a solution. Nevertheless, even as fake news has taken on unforeseen prominence in recent years, very little concrete action has been taken to curb its impact on American society. Some scholars have chalked this up to the Supreme Court’s expansive conception of the First Amendment, which makes it incredibly challenging to regulate political speech. Others posit that the problem is Section 230, which allows platforms to profit from fake news without facing any liability for third-party content. Still others see this as a failure of platforms that are fully capable of self-regulation. Until now, however, legal scholarship has largely overlooked the role of human participation in fake news. To rectify this gap, this Note explores the reasons why people believe and spread certain types of fake news, ultimately using them as a framework to propose a novel enhanced disclaimer regime that is constitutional, practical, and responsive to America’s fake news crisis
The Forgotten Fundamental Right to Free Movement
Full text linkThere is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement. This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel. The true scope of the Constitution’s protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel. Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights. This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone’s Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries. But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right—there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement.
This Article then turns to judicial discussions of movement rights, both historical and contemporary. Drawing on several previously unconnected lines of decision, this examination surfaces a vibrant picture of the fundamental right to free movement recognized by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Given its firm foundation and expansive reach, this is a right that should be applied regularly—to anti-gender-affirming-care or anti-abortion laws targeting travel, to quarantine restrictions locking down a community, and to any of the wide variety of other restrictions limiting free movement
The Failings of Post-War Japanese Antitrust Reforms
Full text linkThis paper discusses the antitrust reform measures taken during the occupation of Japan following the end of World War II. These antitrust reforms included the dissolution of the zaibatsu business groups and the adoption of the Antimonopoly Act. However, the trust-busting and antitrust measures taken by Japan failed to prevent the eventual rise of keiretsu business groups and lower the concentration of corporate ownership in Japan. The primary reasons behind this failure were the inability of the reformers to fully dismantle the zaibatsu business groups and the changing priorities of the reformers due to the growing threat of the spread of communism in Asia. Despite the shortcomings of the Japanese antitrust reforms, the existence of the keiretsu business groups within Japan did not prevent Japan from successfully democratizing, experiencing significant economic growth, or reducing income inequality
On Blockchain as a Tool Against Corporate Corruption
Full text linkOver the last decades domestic and international legal frameworks have successfully coalesced to limit corrupt behavior worldwide. However, despite their success, current regulatory tools are not sufficiently well-equipped to address corruption in modern economic settings. These mechanisms can often be too costly to implement, too cumbersome to induce compliance, politically manipulatable, and may disincentivize foreign investment and internal corporate monitoring efforts. To address such drawbacks, policymakers should consider the introduction of blockchain-based tools in developing future anti-corruption efforts.
Blockchain can serve as a foundation for structures that can make it more attractive, easier and cost-efficient to monitor economic transactions, to effectuate necessary compliance measures, and to reduce opportunities for corruption to occur. Blockchain’s inherent advantages could help establish more transparent, widely trusted, and ultimately more democratic governance systems that are better aligned with modern economic and social relations. Public-private partnerships, along with multiparty cooperation between countries and international organizations, should encourage the adoption of blockchain-based tools, assuage concerns over their use, and ultimately lead to the design and implementation of more effective anti-corruption regulations
THE ENDURING GENOCIDE AGAINST THE YAZIDIS: How Iraq\u27s Law on Religious Identity Violates the Human Rights of Yazidi Survivors of ISIS Captivity and Their Children Born of Sexual Violence
Full text link2024 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) genocide against the Yazidis—an ethnoreligious minority community indigenous to northwest Iraq. Beginning in August 2014, ISIS executed between 3,000 and 5,000 Yazidi men and elderly Yazidi women and buried them in mass graves, kidnapped and converted young Yazidi boys to a radical form of Sunni Islam and pressed them into military service, and captured or trafficked over 6,800 Yazidi women and children, subjecting many of them to sexual violence. ISIS carried out its intent to eradicate the Yazidis through systematic murder, forced conversion, and sexual violence with brutal intensity and on a shocking scale. The horrific acts perpetrated by the terrorist group against the Yazidis have been recognized as genocide by the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and many other countries around the world.
While ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and the Iraqi government and non-governmental organization (NGO) groups have made progress in rebuilding the Yazidi homeland in Sinjar, several hundred Yazidi survivors of conflict-related sexual violence—many with children born from their time in captivity—are unable or unwilling to return, forcing them to languish in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq and Syria to this day. And while the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council has publicly welcomed back female survivors of sexual violence, some members of the community have been less accepting of the children born in captivity to ISIS fathers—in large part because of a 2016 law designating these children as Muslim.
This article examines the harsh impacts of the National Card Law on Yazidi mothers, who gave birth in ISIS captivity, and on their children through the lens of international human rights law. In hindering these women from returning to their homeland of Sinjar with their children and in preventing this new generation from carrying on the Yazidi religion, the National Card Law violates their fundamental human rights under international treaties and the Iraqi Constitution and perpetuates the devastating effects of ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis