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Law’s Detrimental Reliance on Intermediaries
Get PDFEmerging technology is law’s magic mirror. Even as law seeks to cabin the effects of emerging technology in society, when we hold emerging technology up to law, emerging technology often reflects flaws or gaps in legal constructs. Of course, rather than recognizing those flaws or gaps, law retorts back “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?,” demanding that all other disciplines and constructs bow before law’s mighty, near-perfect reach. Often, no matter how strongly emerging technology demands that law bend, legal evolution only occurs after regulatory failures harm individuals on a massive scale. One emerging technology—blockchain technology—serves as a magic mirror for financial and capital market regulation. Since 2009, blockchain technology has promised to disrupt centralized financial intermediaries—institutions acting as middlemen between parties to facilitate financial transactions. As the blockchain technology industry grows, such disruptions become more and more apparent.Although some point to recent turmoil in the cryptocurrency industry as evidence of the technology’s failure, this Article argues instead that the cycles of expansion and explosion prevalent in the blockchain ecosystem represent the magic mirror effect of emerging technology. When viewed through a magic mirror lens, cycles of boom and bust in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries reveal deep flaws in regulatory structures that depend on the compliance of centralized intermediaries. Indeed, this Article argues that if considered at this angle with a wide enough lens, blockchain technology reflects deep cracks in the law-making process itself.Blockchain technology reduces the need for intermediaries in certain circumstances and can enable flatter governance structures. When considering law’s responses to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, recent regulatory proposals and enforcement actions seem to emphasize the need for centralized intermediaries more than ever, proposing an expanding definition of intermediary in an effort to combat specific harms in financial markets. However, recent rapid and significant failures in the cryptocurrency markets shine a light on law’s potentially detrimental reliance on intermediaries and offers an opportune moment to consider—both as a matter of substantive financial regulation and as a matter of law-making itself—when deeper decentralization might improve legal and policy outcomes. To that end, this Article ignites a discussion about whether and how blockchain technology can unlock an avenue for mitigating law’s practical need for centralized intermediaries and sets up further research exploring the potential for disintermediating the law-making process itself. Ultimately, perhaps, the magic mirror reflects the power of disintermediation in the law-making process as a means to improve the legitimacy, effectiveness, and function of law
Procedural Innovation, the Rule of Law, and Civil Rights Justice
Get PDFAmong the most inscrutable and plaguing roadblocks to implementing the Rule of Law in the United States and abroad has been delay—both postponement required by legal substance and procedure and delaying tactics offensively employed by parties and jurists who oppose clearly established law. The results include denial of justice and destabilization of our democratic legal system. This Article proposes the key of courts employing innovative and courageous procedural mechanisms to thwart delay and breakthrough the logjam of resistance to the Rule of Law. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals governing six Southern states— Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—during the post-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) years provides an exemplar of how court systems can surmount dilatory and obstructive tactics to deliver justice.
This six-state circuit—then known as the Fifth Circuit—included officials, jurists, and communities vehemently opposed to desegregation and determined to avoid the dictates of Brown through delay and obstruction. In response, innovative and bold federal appellate judges employed legal methods others had not recognized or used as broadly to spur justice: expediting appellate hearings, making mandates effective immediately upon judgment, deeming traditionally non-appealable orders (such as a temporary restraining order denial) appealable, issuing injunctions pending appeal based upon the All Writs Statute and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 62(g), dictating the substance of the trial court’s order upon remand, and deciding appeals by a single-judge panel. Contemporary opponents screamed foul—but the reforms stood and resulted in expedited justice.
Although others have lauded the post-Brown Federal Circuit Court governing the Deep South for its procedural ingenuity and resulting expeditious advances in post-Brown civil rights, this Article adds four critical dimensions: (1) diving deeper and broader (including through assimilation of prior scholarship) into the basis for and ingenuity of these procedures in civil rights cases; (2) extending appreciation of the long-term effect of these bold moves in future decades, including today; (3) proposing three replicable keys to the court’s successfully subjugating delay and obstruction: proactively structuring and employing local rules and procedures, applying procedural rules assertively in non-traditional ways, and harnessing what this Article terms “potential power” laws to grant the court the greatest and most flexible authority; and (4) arguing for the broad employment of this bold procedural approach when democratic legal systems globally confront systemic or purposeful obstruction. The Article, in sum, proposes a flexible paradigm for courts to employ to overcome incapacitating delay and resistance, and consequently deliver justice, through procedural assertiveness and undaunted mettle
Computers, Credit, and Human Dignity
Get PDFCredit scores determine a person’s life chances. The credit scores we’re all used to, calculated by Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion, take as inputs a person’s payment history, loans, current debt, and similar financial information. But that world is changing. Modern alternative data models for credit scoring can go so far as to include an individual’s educational record, criminal history, shopping behavior, or telephone patterns. Activists, regulators, and scholars have expressed serious concerns about these new credit systems. Do they classify applicants on unfair or arbitrary grounds? Do they perpetuate, or even amplify, bias and pre-existing inequality?
Participants in this conversation tend to assume that the new credit scoring models are a departure from a stable historical norm in which lenders made credit decisions solely based on individuals’ loan repayment history and similar financial inputs. But that’s not right. The new models recapitulate a story from the mid-twentieth century, when a new credit scoring industry, relying on newly developed statistical modeling techniques, looked to a broad range of information: How many years had the person been at the same address? Did he have a telephone? What zip code did he live in? For the new method’s proponents, all data – including the applicant’s race and religion -- was fair game.
The new credit scoring crystallized a growing sense that computers, and the new computer age, had no room for fully fleshed human beings. Opponents charged that the new technology enabled and replicated bias, seized on spurious correlations, and generated arbitrary results. They saw it as stripping away agency from credit applicants, based on apparently arbitrary criteria, and as reinforcing social and economic hierarchy. More fundamentally, they argued that it was inconsistent with basic human dignity.
The technology was short-lived and has largely been forgotten. By the early 1990s, lenders––for economic rather than public-policy reasons––had moved to the model we’re familiar with today, in which credit scores are based solely on applicants’ credit history and related financial information. However, the story of 1970s-era credit scoring is still relevant today, and it provides lessons as we confront today’s use of machine-learning algorithms to categorize people and predict their future behavior
Choosing Your Judge
Get PDFAccounts of American litigation pose a contradiction: forum shopping is acceptable, but judge shopping is not. Formal disfavor toward judge shopping is pervasive, and attempts by parties to manipulate the assignment of their case are deemed abusive and even sanctionable. Nevertheless, sophisticated judge-shopping tactics have proliferated in specific areas of the law—particularly in challenges to executive-branch policies and in the reorganization of large companies under Chapter 11. In these disparate areas of law, judge-shopping strategies have been deployed in high-profile cases, ranging from a challenge to the FDA’s authorization of an abortion drug to the opioid-driven bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma. In these cases, and in others like them, plaintiffs used permissive venue rules to reach small geographical divisions where a single, preferred judge hears all, or nearly all, cases. These trends led to recent and contested proposals by the Judicial Conference to encourage random assignment.
This article first introduces a framework to distinguish between types of judge-shopping, explaining why some forms may be more problematic than others. Then, it compares judge-shopping in areas of the law, examining the basis for common intuitions against the practice. It concludes that judge shopping in the regulatory context is especially concerning, with its attendant impact on national governance and its selection away from judicial expertise in administrative law. In contrast, in bankruptcy cases, judge shopping can be disentangled from other controversial—and independently fixable—bankruptcy problems. When examined as a conceptually independent issue, judge-shopping in the bankruptcy context raises fewer concerns. Having concluded that judge shopping is more problematic in some areas than others, this article examines both broad and tailored reforms to address it, including the abolition of single-judge divisions, reforms to venue statutes, the use of three-judge district court panels to review certain cases, and judicial peremptory strikes
Using Chat-GPT to Automate Cosmetic Procedure Planning
No full textThis paper presents the development and evaluation of an AI-driven system that leverages ChatGPT to predict cosmetic surgeries based on patient profiles and images. The system is designed to assist plastic surgeons by providing personalized surgical plans, including primary procedures, supplementary surgeries, and follow-up care recommendations. The study focuses on using large language models (LLMs) to automate virtual consultations, enabling patients to receive expert advice without in-person visits. This paper focuses on the development, metrics, and utility of this system and how it can be used to supplement surgical practices. We discuss the iterations of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and implementation of the system
Inexact Methods For Large-Scale Stochastic Programming
No full textThis dissertation addresses the development of inexact methods for solving large-scale stochastic programming problems, with a focus on two-stage and multistage settings. Stochastic programming is a robust approach for managing uncertainty in decision-making, with applications across various domains like supply chain management, power systems, and logistics. However, solving large-scale stochastic programming problems, especially those with a nonlinear structure, is computationally challenging due to the high-dimensional nature of uncertainties and the need for efficient optimization techniques.
This work introduces novel inexact proximal bundle algorithms designed to solve two-stage stochastic quadratic programming problems. The proposed methods utilize dual-based and partition-based approaches to approximate the second-stage solution, significantly reducing the computational burden compared to traditional exact algorithms. Asymptotic convergence properties are established, and the algorithms\u27 efficiency is demonstrated through numerical experiments on instances such as the optimal power flow problem. The study also includes a rigorous analysis of how inexact approximations impact convergence rates, offering insights into improving solution accuracy and efficiency.
Additionally, this dissertation explores multistage SP models where uncertainties follow a Markov process. A regularized stochastic dual dynamic programming method is adapted for cases where the probability distributions are not known in advance, enabling data-driven optimization through sequential sampling. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated through implementation and performance evaluation, highlighting their potential for real-world applications
Contract Tokenization in the Renewable Energy Market
No full textThe conventional approach to renewable energy contracting, primarily through traditional Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), presents several disadvantages including lengthy contract durations, non-transferability, difficulties in matching projects and offtakers, and limited accessibility. Endorsed by the blockchain technology, contracts can be digitally recorded and stored in crypto tokens, which is referred to as being tokenized. Using the renewable energy market as a backdrop, we study the impact of contract tokenization on different parties in the industry based on their respective incentives through a game-theoretic approach. In particular, we compare tokenized and traditional PPAs for utility-scale solar projects. Our results show that that tokenized PPAs typically yield higher energy prices, shorter contract lengths, and increased land utilization. As a first study on contract tokenization in the renewable energy market, we find that tokenized contracts offer greater profits for developers, but with a slight reduction in utility for offtakers. Notably, tokenized PPAs enable more efficient energy market operations and foster broader access to renewable energy, particularly for smaller entities previously constrained by traditional models
An Analysis of Drivers of the Federal Funds Rate
Get PDFThe Federal Funds Rate (FFR) is a tool used by the Federal Reserve to set monetary policy on borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. The Fed’s primary motivation with the FFR is to control macroeconomic factors such as inflation and unemployment. Over time, policy stances for the Fed have varied in response to events such as the Great Recession, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the Fed’s actions following these events, there is intensified debate over which macroeconomic factors should be prioritized, and what magnitude of change is sufficient to warrant action. Additionally, when action is taken (e.g., an increase in FFR), it is important to understand whether such action is consistent with historical trends based on the data, or whether the change resulted from a shift in policy stance. This research provides quantitative analysis and insight into the factors that drive the Fed to act. It also compares various time series modeling techniques to identify the most effective method and combination of variables for predicting the FFR
Growing Tensions: Consumer Privacy and Corporate Disclosures
Get PDFData privacy and data security have become key issues for legislators, regulators, and individual citizens. Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe their data is being regularly tracked, monitored, and collected by companies and the government. A majority of U.S. adults also believe their data is less secure today than five years ago, expressing concerns that they have little control over how their personal information is being used and that the entities who control their data are not responsible stewards. In the absence of comprehensive federal regulation, a continuous stream of privacy statutes have been proposed at the state level. Beginning with California in 2018, a handful of states enacted major comprehensive data privacy legislation. The number of states adopting consumer privacy laws has more than doubled in 2023 alone, and 2024 is on pace to exceed the prior year’s adoption rate.
Data privacy legislation obligates businesses operating in those states to comply with additional regulations regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information and provides “consumers” with new rights over their personal data. Broad in scope, these state privacy statutes apply to not only traditional consumers, but also shareholders and—in some states—employees, officers, and directors of a corporation. This article discusses the growing tensions between compliance with privacy statutes and corporate disclosure activities. In light of impending conflicts between these two areas of the law, this article proposes legislative and judicial paths for navigating and reconciling the competing legal obligations. As more and more states, as well as the federal government, are contemplating adopting consumer privacy statutes, consideration of the interplay and impact of privacy statutes on corporate actions is crucial
Reverse Divisibility and Subsequent Modification : Expanding the Scope of Justified Non-Performance in Multiple Contract Situations
Get PDFParties to a contract sometimes invoke divisibility arguments in an attempt to recharacterize the contract as being two or more separate contracts. This is often done in order to limit the justified non-performance consequences of a breach of contract on their part. This short article considers the often-overlooked symmetrical possibility of a non-breaching party attempting to recharacterize two or more facially separate but closely related contracts as a single contract, expanding the scope of their justified non-performance rights after one contract is breached. I describe two complementary arguments justifying such a single-contract recharacterization of the relationship as the reverse divisibility and subsequent modification arguments. Under some circumstances, they have substantial merit and may prove advantageous to the person asserting them