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Face Card Declined: The Deepfake Threat to Biometric Security in Financial Systems
No full textOnce limited to entertainment and disinformation, deepfakes are now extending into the financial sector, where voice and facial impersonations exploit biometric authentication systems to facilitate fraudulent transactions. This evolution exposes gaps in existing legal and regulatory frameworks, raising critical questions about consumer protection and institutional safeguards. This Note argues for a reconceptualization of deepfake harms as both a privacy and a financial security issue. It examines the illusion of consent generated by synthetic impersonation and insufficient statutory protections. The analysis examines the patchwork of federal, state, and international laws governing data privacy and artificial media, highlighting the gaps that allow biometric exploitation to exist. Finally, this Note proposes a two-pronged solution: enactment of comprehensive federal privacy legislation with biometric protections that incorporate robust notice-and-choice standards coordinated enforcement between state and federal authorities, and implementation of a public-private key infrastructure within financial institutions to authenticate identity against deepfake interference
Can Employers SAVE Us from Student Loans? Credentialism, Arms Races, and Debt Forgiveness
Get PDFAmerica is drowning in student loan debt. About 45 million Americans owe the astounding sum of $1.75 trillion in outstanding student debt, and many of them default on their payments. While most agree that something must be done, attempts to alleviate the problem have met political backlash and legal challenges. In June of 2023, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s comprehensive student loan debt forgiveness plan, and recently the administration initiated the politically contested “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan (“SAVE”). Amidst this political tug of war, this Article aims to offer a critical and nuanced analysis of the student loan debt crisis. We discuss the crisis’s root causes and critically evaluate the plans currently on the table, arguing they cannot provide a fair and sustainable solution to the problem.
In an attempt to reach the root of the student loan debt problem, this Article introduces the phenomenon of the higher education arms race. The educational arms race involves a process through which individuals are pushed to acquire higher education, not because of the intrinsic value of education, but merely because they need a diploma to compete in the labor market. Employers increasingly require college diplomas as a signal for the quality of prospective employees, even in jobs that do not objectively require higher education. For those without higher education, little options remain except for low-paying and menial jobs. These hiring demands force individuals to obtain a degree at all costs, including incurring debilitating debt.
This Article stipulates that any long-lasting solution to the student debt crisis must involve measures to alleviate the higher education arms race, and it proposes two such solutions. The first seeks to broaden the scope of post-secondary education through lifelong learning, especially through on-the-job training. We show that on-the-job training can enhance productivity, but that the enhanced productivity is not reflected in the workers’ salaries. We maintain that formalizing on-the-job training can correct this discrepancy and enable employees to receive a wage premium (akin to the premium received for a college diploma) for their training. This, we believe, will mitigate the compulsion to obtain unnecessary and expensive degrees, while broadening access to lifelong education. The second solution involves imposing a fee when employers hire over-educated employees. Hiring over-educated employees implies employers use college credentials solely as a signal for quality, and in these cases, it is efficient and just that employers will pay for the benefit (information) they received—or else stop using it. By adopting employer-focused solutions and promoting lifelong learning, we argue, policy makers can address the root causes of the crisis and diminish the accumulation of debt
Look What You Made Me Do
No full textWe have understood for centuries that crime is both the product of social forces and individual choice. We know now that crime is affected by economic deprivation, addiction, trauma, and mental health issues. But American criminal legal processes hide this reality by coercing defendants into expressing a profoundly simple narrative: crime is solely individual choice to do wrong. This coerced narrative finds defendants during a plea colloquy standing up in court saying that they are pleading guilty because they are guilty and for no other reason. A defendant who goes off-script to tell the judge that they have been repeatedly attacked runs the risk that the judge will refuse to accept the guilty plea and punish them at sentencing. That narrative of pure individual choice plays out throughout the criminal process. This Article focuses on the plea colloquy, sentencing, and parole. It also discusses how trial drives the same narrative but without coercing the defendant’s participation.
Coercing defendants to tell a story that is not their own is troubling in its own right. And it perpetrates epistemic injustice, yielding a damaged public understanding of crime. It hides our own societal failings and lets us distance ourselves from the wrongdoers. It pretends that threatening ever-harsher punishment will keep us safe—prioritizing a cheap illusion of safety over actual safety. And by stifling the stories that could build counternarratives it insulates our system of mass incarceration from this fundamental critique. If crime is driven, at least in significant part, by unaddressed trauma and poverty, better mental health care and an expanded social safety net could promote public safety more effectively than increased threats of cages
Equity Partners or Equity Predators? A Call for Federal Regulations to Safeguard Against Abusive Home Equity Sharing Agreements
No full textHome equity sharing agreements are on the rise throughout the country. In a home equity sharing agreement, homeowners are given a lump sum of cash, upfront, in exchange for a portion of their home’s future value. Agreements are structured however the investment company prefers and are not subject to any state usury caps, mortgage loans, or federal lending laws. The investment companies believe that their product is exempt from all of these requirements, despite the high risk that home equity sharing poses to consumers. In reality, home equity sharing agreements are dangerous, unregulated mortgage loans, which are being utilized by unsophisticated and vulnerable consumers.
This Note explores the new phenomenon of home equity sharing agreements, compares them to typical home loans, touches on current state regulations that may address the issue,
and proposes a federal regulation to protect consumers who use these products. The proposed federal statute combines the strongest parts of the state regulations, while adding additional protection typically seen in federal consumer protection statutes, such as the Truth in Lending Act.
Ultimately, this Note expresses the idea that home equity sharing agreements must be regulated to protect consumers but not dismantled so as to remove the possibility of these becoming more common home loan arrangements. With the right amount of research and control, home equity sharing agreements could be the answer to many homeowners’ cash flow problems
The Right to Truth
No full textThis Article argues that today’s anti-CRT statutes, book bans, and “divisive concepts” laws are not isolated culture-war skirmishes but the latest chapter in a long campaign—dating back to the Lost Cause and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—to legislate white innocence as national identity. By sanitizing slavery, suppressing discussions of systemic racism, and threatening educators with punitive ambiguity, these laws flatten historical truth and convert classrooms into zones of anticipatory obedience. The result is a state-engineered amnesia that undermines the core First and Fourteenth Amendment protections the Supreme Court has recognized for more than a century, from Meyer and Barnette to Tinker and Pico.
Building on this doctrinal lineage, the Article advances a constitutional “right to truth” in public education—a substantive due process safeguard rooted in the nation’s history, philosophical commitments to intellectual liberty, and long-standing First Amendment principles. Recognizing such a right is essential to preserving students’ ability to access accurate historical narratives, engage in democratic reasoning, and resist state-mandated orthodoxy. At a moment when public education is being weaponized to construct a sanitized national myth, the right to truth offers a necessary constitutional framework to confront these censorship regimes and protect the democratic project itself