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On Preparing the Soil for Rain
No full textThis Essay examines several possibilities for improving our thinking about the vexing, multifaceted problem of revitalizing languishing regions of the United States. Its jumping-off point is an important work of socio-economiclegal history: While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy, and Law in a Time of Change, by John Henry Schlegel. The book seeks to understand the steady decline of US regional economies, particularly Buffalo, following a period of relatively high prosperity from World War II through the 1950s; its tandem question is how those economies might be revived. Based on a very full and rich exposition, Schlegel argues that, like farmers who are unable to command rain, human collectivities are unable to take specific actions that will bring about economic development. At best, they can try to minimize three ‘transactions of decline’ defined by Jane Jacobs and be prepared to take advantage of rain, should it come. I argue that Schlegel under-develops the implications of several of his own insights, particularly regarding the roles of economic dependency, political fragmentation, and local culture in inhibiting development. I then discuss possible ways of using those insights to ‘prepare the soil for rain’ and raise the possibility of folding the idea of economic development into that of resilience. I conclude by discussing how and whether these suggestions could be further developed in social practice
Tools Do Not Create: Human Authorship in the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
No full textArtistic tools, from brushes to complex algorithms, don’t create art; human artists do. The advent of generative AI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion has blurred this understanding, causing observers to believe these tools are the authors of the artworks they produce, even so far as to imagine that the artworks are “created” by the AI in the copyright sense of the word. Not so.
The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued guidance on the copyrightability of works produced using generative AI tools. The Office has accepted the narrative that AI tools perform the steps of authorship, conceiving of the image and rendering it into existence, and denying copyright because randomly or automatically generated works lack human authorship. This interpretation of generative AI is fundamentally flawed.
Contemporary visual generative AI systems can do extraordinary things, but as of yet not autonomously and not automatically. Generative AI systems are tools—highly complex, deeply technological tools to be sure, but tools none the less. And these tools require a human author or artist—the end-user of the generative AI system—to provide the inspiration and design and often the instructions and directions on how to produce the image.
It is a fallacy to view AI systems as the authors of the works they generate. The process of how an end-user of a contemporary generative AI tool creates art and how a human artist goes about the same task are very similar. An artist working with a generative AI tool is no different from an artist working with a digital or analog camera or with Photoshop or another image editing and image rendering tool
Fall 2024 Cardozo Law Clinics
No full texthttps://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/flyers-2023-2024/1098/thumbnail.jp
Fast Track to the Civil Death Penalty: Involuntary Termination of Parental Rights and an Analysis of the Minnesota Supreme Court\u27s Decision in R.D.L.
No full textThe Administrative State, Financial Regulation, and the Case for Commissions
No full textAdministrative law is under attack, with the Supreme Court reviving, expanding, and creating doctrines that limit the authority and autonomy wielded by regulatory agencies. This anti-administrative turn is particularly alarming for financial regulation, which already faces enormous challenges stemming from the dynamism of modern finance, its growing complexity, and fundamental contestability. Yet that does not mean that defending the current regime is the optimal response. The complexity and dynamism of modern finance also undercut the efficacy of established administrative procedures. And the panoply of financial regulators with unclear and overlapping jurisdictional bounds only adds to the challenge. Both these procedural and structural challenges put greater pressure on Congress to act, but partisanship and other challenges are making such action more challenging than ever.
This Article tackles the question of how to enhance the willingness and capacity of even a reluctant Congress to engage in the legislation and oversight that the current judiciary is demanding. It argues that having Congress pre-commit to convening congressional commissions every ten years to survey the changing landscape, identify emerging threats, and propose reforms when appropriate could go a long way in enhancing Congress’s capacity to act and serve as a prompt to such action. Like administrative agencies, commissions can be used to harness the specialized insights of experts on a range of technocratic policy issues. They can also incorporate more diverse and independent perspectives on these issues, connect them to broader questions about the role of finance in society, and help galvanize the public and political will needed to bring about regulatory reform. Moreover, unlike administrative agencies, commissions can provide ex ante guidance that informs the political process, enabling a different and complementary way to combine public participation, expert analysis, and congressional oversight. Looking to the historical use of commissions in finance and other domains as a guide, the Article shows how institutionalizing decennial commissions can help enhance both the quality and legitimacy of financial regulation. Commissions are no magic bullet, but they could constitute a useful, if modest, step in efforts to enhance the institutional design of Congress within the constitutionally prescribed parameters
Cardozo Law News Brief: February 23, 2024
No full textFeatured Faculty: Pamela Foohey Alexander Reinert Jessica Roth Luis Calderon Gomez Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum Young Ran (Christine) Kim Edward Zelinsky
Events: The 2024 Cardozo Colloquium on Global and Constitutional Theory Cardozo Law Review Symposium on Ethics in the Judiciary and the Legal Profession: Are We in Crisis
The Palestine Exception to Free Speech
No full textWednesday, February 28, 2024 | 12:30 PM | Eck Hall of Law, Room 1130
The Palestine Exception to Free Speech is a term that acknowledges the widespread and growing suppression of Palestinian human rights advocacy in the United States. Rifqa Falaneh, Jinan Chehade, and Melat Kiros will visit NDLS to discuss their experiences as advocates for the human rights of Palestinians.
Rifqa Falaneh is the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal, where she challenges the censorship, surveillance, and suppression of advocates for Palestinian liberation.
Jinan Chehade is a Georgetown Law School graduate whose offer from Foley & Lardner was rescinded after she made social media posts expressing her support for Palestine.
Melat Kiros is a Notre Dame Law School graduate and former Sidley associate terminated for writing an open letter about the Palestine/Israel conflict.
Co-sponsors: National Lawyers Guild American Constitution Society Middle Eastern Law Student Association Student Voices for Palestinehttps://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndls_posters/1811/thumbnail.jp
Injustice Anywhere: A Comparative Law Analysis of Saudi Arabia’s Criminal Justice System
No full textA narrow understanding of other nations’ judicial systems begets unsupported assumptions about the way a justice system should operate. While many western commenters have publicized the failures of Middle Eastern societies to protect individual rights, much of the existing literature fails to analyze the legal structures which perpetuate injustice and the motivations that keep the institutions in place. This article illuminates the goals Saudi Arabia’s justice system, inspects how those goals parallel the goals of other common law and civil law systems, and evaluates whether Saudi Arabia’s system is able to effectively accomplish its aims.
This article argues that Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system accomplishes its goals with precision, but that the nation sacrifices justice in its pursuit of religious fervor and citizen compliance. This article concludes that Saudi Arabia’s judicial system misses its mark and perpetuates injustice even where it pursues the same goals as western judicial systems. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia’s justice system is in dire need of dramatic overhaul but is too practically deficient to implement reform
