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The Law of Killing for Biodiversity
No full textIn the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, people kill sentient creatures—by the millions every year—in the crusade to conserve biodiversity.
I explain how laws permit, and in some instances require, killing to save nonhuman species and to keep ecosystems functioning. In Australia, the nation with the worst record of mammalian extinctions, the government has tagged various invaders as “Key Threatening Processes.” In 2023, it laid out elaborate plans to rid the nation of as many feral cats as poison and hunters could kill. Similarly, “Predator Free New Zealand 2050” is the New Zealand government’s elaborate plan to trap and kill every stoat, weasel, fox, and rat that imperils the nation’s largely defenseless flightless bird species. The United States has no overarching plan to get rid of invasive animals that threaten endangered species, but nonetheless sanctions killing barred owls to save northern spotted owls, goats and sheep to save Hawaii’s Palila bird, and Burmese pythons to protect numerous Everglades species . . . the list goes on.
I explain how, where, and why these laws exist and function. In some nations, for some species and ecosystems, the moral calculus tilts towards killing for conservation. As in any conversation about biodiversity in the Anthropocene, the answers hinge on fundamental questions: What kind of planet do we want? Who do we want to share it with going forward? How much can we homogenize our surrounding ecosystems and still sustain human life? I advocate that in many cases, governments should continue to kill sentient, non-native creatures to save other creatures that are critical to maintaining the functioning ecosystems that sustain human lives
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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Betwixt and Between: Restorative Justice, DEI, and Education Carcerality
No full textAmerican K-12 public education is at a critical anti-civil rights inflection point amidst a rapidly changing landscape of federal and state education law and policy. From local anti-literacy measures to state “three strikes” exclusionary school discipline legislation to punitive federal executive orders, new legal mechanisms are conjoining to produce public school climates marked by structural violence, and the erasure of students with multiple marginalized identities. Attending to these political and legal realities is a growing cluster of legal scholarship empirically categorizing, and theoretically challenging, the rise of such anti-education civil rights obstructions. Though diverse in scope, analyses prominently center the direct effects of individual and structural mechanisms to police, punish, and exclude students from classrooms and schools. This focus has created an unattended space in the literature for interrogations centering broader collateral consequences of an expanding educational retrenchment movement. It is in this liminal gap in which this Article intervenes. Specifically, it extends prior work querying the future of school-based restorative justice under early forms of anti-woke legislation and “parental right” activism and examines new state and federal attacks on American public education that may limit the ability to advance, and in many instances, maintain restorative justice practices, policies, and programs in K-12 schools
