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Making Virtual Things
Get PDFPeople value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.
Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and why people purchase virtual things in favor of regulation based on the misguided search for the technological essence of something. If a Bitcoin is used as money, it is money. If an NFT is valued, bought, and sold as a thing within a community of collectors, the law ought to and inevitably will support that characterization
How exactly does it get done here? Conducting Cross-Jurisdictional Research with Judges and Court Staff
No full textThe legal, political, and organizational environment in which judges and court staff work affects their performance in significant ways. To ensure that researchers control for these effects, it is critical that they take sufficient time in the research design phase to identify relevant factors that might complicate their analyses or distort the interpretation of research findings. This article highlights common challenges of multijurisdictional research, including inconsistent use of terminology, differing organizational structures and procedures, and exogenous factors such as court governance, policymaking authority, funding, and local court culture. It also offers guidance to researchers on identifying and integrating these factors into their analyses to enhance the validity and utility of research findings
Use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Civil Case Management: A Report on Three Proof of Concept Projects
No full textIn 2016, the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) endorsed recommendations to leverage technology to improve civil case management. In particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related tools could be used to support two areas of civil case processing: sorting cases at filing based on the anticipated level of judicial involvement in case management, and confirming that essential procedural requirements have been satisfied before entering final judgments in cases.
To explore the feasibility of NLP to support court operations in these two areas, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) designed three distinct Proof of Concept (POC) projects. NCSC partnered with three general jurisdiction courts that participated in the CJI automated civil case triage project to use NLP techniques to identify and extract key terms and characteristics from the case pleadings for use in assigning cases to an appropriate civil case processing track. For quality control over high-volume dockets, the NCSC worked with the Cleveland Municipal Court on a POC to identify inaccurate or missing information from case documents in its consumer debt collection docket that would signal the need for increased judicial review. The NCSC partnered with two vendors that specialize in NLP technologies to control for variation in vendor quality. In addition, NCSC interviewed IT staff in the superior courts of Maricopa County, Arizona and Orange County, California about their experiences implementing these technologies for purposes similar to the POCs.
This abstract has been taken from the authors\u27 introduction
The Philosophy of AI: Learning from History, Shaping Our Future. Hearing Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Senate, One Hundred Eighteenth Congress, First Session.
Get PDFIndividual Inspiration: Stories of Lawyers and Legal Figures Through Time (Anti-Heroes Included)
Get PDFOn display in the Wolf Law Library August - November 2023.https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libdisplays/1005/thumbnail.jp
The Nightmare of Dream Advertising
Get PDFAdvertisers are attempting to market to us while we dream. This is not science fiction, but rather a troubling new reality. Using a technique dubbed “targeted dream incubation” (TDI), companies have begun inserting commercial messages into people’s dreams. Roughly, TDI works by: (1) creating an association during waking life using sensory cues (for example, a pairing of sounds, visuals, or scents); and (2) as the subject is drifting off to sleep, the association is again introduced with the goal of triggering related dreams with related subject matter. Based on a 2021 American Marketing Association survey, 77 percent of 400 companies surveyed plan to experiment with dream advertising—or what this Article calls “branding dreams”—by 2025.
As a therapeutic technique, TDI is being found by sleep and dream researchers to have various benefits such as improving sleep quality, stimulating creativity, and treating addiction. However, when advertisers hijack TDI for commercial purposes, serious harms emerge. These harms are most apparent when the practice of branding dreams is employed in connection with addictive products. But health, privacy, liberty, economic, and cultural concerns also exist more broadly. In fact, dozens of sleep and dream researchers have signed an open letter calling for “new protective policies” regarding dream advertising, lest “dreams become just another playground for corporate advertisers.”
Such specifically tailored regulations may be welcome and helpful. However, this Article suggests that—at least in certain instances— the practice of branding dreams might already run afoul of existing advertising regulations. To this end, the Article advances two claims. First, dream advertising appears to fit the definition of subliminal messaging: advertisements “existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness.” Second, particularly if dream advertising is considered a novel method of subliminal advertising, some forms of dream advertising may be ripe for enforcement as “deceptive acts or practices” under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act
Election Subversion and the Writ of Mandamus
Get PDFElection subversion threatens democratic self-governance. Recently, we have seen election officials try to manipulate the rules after an election, defy accepted legal procedures for dispute resolution, and try to delay results or hand an election to a losing candidate. Such actions, if successful, would render the right to vote illusory. These threats call for a response. But rather than recommend the development of novel tools to address the problem, this Article argues that a readily available mechanism is at hand for courts to address election subversion: the writ of mandamus. This Article is the first comprehensive piece to situate the writ of mandamus within contemporary election law disputes.
This Article traces the history and application of the writ of mandamus in election disputes and posits that it is uniquely situated to help courts prevent election subversion. Federal and state laws delineate clear and mandatory responsibilities for election officials after votes have been cast in an election. Congress’s recently-enacted Electoral Count Reform Act strengthens the legal obligations placed upon election officials in presidential elections in particular. Courts can order state election officials to certify election results and to transmit those results to victorious candidates or the appropriate branch of government. If election officials refuse, courts can proceed to alternative mechanisms of enforcing the judgment, including expeditiously directing another actor to perform the appropriate election administration tasks. Mandamus is particularly valuable— more valuable than ordinary injunctive relief—because of the original jurisdiction in many state supreme courts to handle these disputes, which avoids the delay of a layered appellate process. This Article demonstrates the value of the existing remedy of mandamus to avoid election subversion. It then suggests ways that states strengthen the law around mandamus to ensure that election administration occurs in a timely and effective manner
Twilight-Zone Originalism: The Peculiar Reasoning and Unfortunate Consequences of New York State Pistol & Rifle Association v. Bruen
Get PDFThis Article consists of two Parts and a conclusion. Part I focuses on the Bruen opinion and considers its contradictions, flaws, fallacies, and implications. Part II examines lower-court decisions applying Bruen during the first year after that decision. These decisions make Bruen’s flaws vivid.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
