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Recognizing Arab Climate Refugees Under Both International and Regional Law
No full textClimate change is increasingly displacing populations worldwide, yet existing international and regional legal frameworks, including the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Arab Charter on Human Rights, fail to recognize climate refugees as a protected category. These legal instruments define refugees narrowly, limiting protection to individuals fleeing persecution on specific grounds such as race, religion, or political opinion. As climate change accelerates environmental degradation, resulting in extreme weather events, desertification, and resource scarcity, millions of people are being forced to migrate, often across international borders, without legal recourse or asylum rights. This Article argues that climate refugees should be afforded the same protections as political refugees under both international and regional refugee law.
Using the Arab Charter and the 1951 Refugee Convention as a foundation, the Article examines the gaps in the current asylum framework and proposes legal solutions to extend protection to climate-displaced individuals. It argues that existing legal definitions should either be interpreted broadly to encompass climate refugees or amended to explicitly include them as a protected category. Additionally, it explores alternative avenues under international and regional human rights law, emphasizing rights to life, health, a safe environment, and non-discrimination as crucial for protecting displaced populations.
Given the Arab world’s heightened vulnerability to climate change, exemplified by rising temperatures, droughts, and natural disasters, there is an urgent need for reform. Without action, climate-induced displacement will continue to pose humanitarian challenges, exacerbating resource conflicts and straining asylum systems. This Article advocates for an immediate legal response to prevent the exclusion of climate refugees before displacement reaches an unprecedented scale
When Ownership Meets Licensing–New Normative Expectations and the Need for NFT Categorization: All Your Projects “Are” Belong to Us
No full textThe current treatment of all NFTs in legal scholarship as identical digital assets fundamentally misunderstands their varied applications and the new normative expectations they create. The Moonbirds controversy of 2022, where a creator’s unilateral license change affected nearly 20,000 token holders, exemplifies the crisis: token holders believed they owned digital assets that could be controlled and commercialized, but existing copyright frameworks treat NFTs merely as licenses subject to creator discretion. Picture for Profile (PFP) Projects—community-based NFT collections involving thousands of tokens often with governance and commercial rights—combine concepts of possession, community governance, and commercialization in ways that challenge traditional intellectual property licensing. Despite industry efforts to create NFTspecific licenses, empirical analysis reveals declining adoption and increasing fragmentation. Current legal scholarship debates whether NFTs should fall under copyright or property law, but such broad categorizations are premature. A better approach is a fact-based analytical framework to distinguish PFP Projects from other NFT types. Such a framework would enable courts to apply appropriate legal doctrines based on the specific NFT type rather than one-size-fits-all solutions that risk stifling innovation or inadequately protecting consumers. This article advocates for American Law Institute (ALI) guidance to create default rules for the $10B, and exponentially growing, NFT market. Guidance from the ALI provides courts with practical tools to navigate potential disputes involving ownership rights, commercial licensing, and decentralized governance while balancing innovation with consumer protection in an evolving digital economy
From Prompt to Clone: Copyright Challenges in AI Model Distillation
No full textThis paper examines the legality of model distillation in the context of large language models (LLMs), where smaller “student” models are trained by mimicking the outputs of larger, proprietary “teacher” models. As artificial intelligence continues to advance rapidly, the legal framework surrounding patent, and contract law is being tested. Specifically, the paper explores whether current U.S. copyright law offers sufficient protection for frontier LLM developers and whether practices like unauthorized distillation amount to infringement. By analyzing model architecture, training data, behavioral mimicry, and reverse engineering under prevailing legal doctrines—including fair use, terms of use enforcement, and recent litigation—the paper finds that model distillation is unlikely to constitute copyright infringement under existing law. Nevertheless, the broader implications for innovation, proprietary model protection, and ethics of open sourcing suggest that a reevaluation of intellectual property norms in AI development is both necessary and imminent
Abandoned Priorities and Cases in Limbo: An Analysis of Title IX Enforcement in the First Year of Trump’s Second Term
No full textDuring President Trump’s second term, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has resolved far fewer cases than his first term or the ten year average, and has not resolved a single case of discrimination based on sexual assault, sexual harassment, or pregnancy/parental status.https://repository.uclawsf.edu/wll/1003/thumbnail.jp
