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Agents in a Tangled Bank: An Ecosystem Approach to AI Regulation
No full textAs autonomous artificial intelligence agents ( Agents ) become increasingly prevalent in society, legal frameworks must evolve to govern their behavior effectively. This article argues that autonomous AI agents must be understood as operating within complex ecosystems of other agents, humans, institutions, and actual biological ecosystems-similar to how biological organisms exist within broader ecosystems. Drawing on established research in multi-agent systems and environmental law, we propose that effective governance of AI agents requires moving beyond just regulation on individual agents to include system-level approaches. We examine how existing legal frameworks handle heterogeneous autonomous entities (humans, corporations, and animals) and explore how these frameworks might extend to AI agent ecosystems. Finally, we propose a set of concrete principles for ecosystem-based AI governance. This approach offers more effective ways to manage agent interactions, prevent systemic risks, and promote beneficial outcomes in increasingly complex multi-agent environments
The Hunger Games: Food as a Right, Not a Privilege
No full textDespite the United Nations\u27 explicit declaration that all humans have a right to food, food insecurity and hunger remain persistent problems in the United States and around the globe. The dystopian landscapes depicted in novels such as The Hunger Games and Parable of the Sower—societies crippled by poverty, oppression, and pervasive starvation—resonate with sobering contemporary realities. This Article examines existing food laws, food rights, and the current protections safeguarding the United States food supply from a humanitarian perspective. Ultimately, this Article argues that the human right to food must expand to encompass a right to healthy or natural food, and that the United States can ensure equitable access to quality food for all its citizens by considering a broader application of rights and duties under the public trust doctrine.
Food is a foundational human need, essential for life, health, and overall well-being. Despite this immense importance, robust legal protections to ensure equitable access to quality food remain insufficient. This Article proposes a more robust legal framework necessary to address the inadequacies of the current system, arguing that the United States can ensure equitable access to quality food for all its citizens by applying the public trust doctrine. As a common law doctrine, the public trust doctrine stipulates that certain natural resources are held by the government in a fiduciary trust for the benefit of current and future generations. This doctrine provides a flexible legal mechanism for safeguarding vital public assets from irrevocable damage or alienation. While traditionally applied to resources such as navigable waterways and coastlines, this Article contends that food in its natural state is similarly a public resource deserving of enhanced protection.
This Article unfolds in two principal arguments. First, it centralizes the position that all human beings have a human right to healthy, quality food because food is a natural resource that should be protected. Second, this Article proposes the application of the public trust doctrine to afford enhanced protection for natural food sources. Part I establishes the factual background of global and national food access, alongside contemporary challenges facing the United States food supply. Part II details the existing international legal framework for food rights and protections, subsequently examining current food safeguards within the United States, including the various regulatory bodies involved. Part III synthesizes scholarly analyses concerning the legal problems and proposed solutions related to food rights and protections.
The second half of this Article proposes the use of the public trust doctrine to protect natural food rights in America. Part IV discusses why the current protections of food in the United States are inadequate to ensure the supply of natural food. Part V describes and defines the public trust doctrine and what resources have been considered natural resources under the doctrine. Part VI proposes why food should be considered a natural resource under the public trust doctrine and explains why and how food should be protected under this framework. By establishing food as a natural resource held in trust by the government for the benefit of all citizens, this approach would impose a fiduciary duty on the state to ensure equitable access to healthy food, offering a more robust and ethically grounded framework for achieving food justice and fulfilling the human right to adequate and healthy food for all Americans
Clarifying Concreteness: Statutory Grants Of Standing After Spokeo And TransUnion
Full text linkArticle III limits the federal judicial power to deciding “cases” and “controversies,” demanding that a plaintiff suffer real, concrete, de facto harm to sue in federal court. In Spokeo and TransUnion, the Supreme Court clarified the outer limits of concreteness by making clear to plaintiffs that an injury in law is not an injury in fact. The Court largely grounded the decisions in the separation of powers, setting a tone that appears less deferential to Congress in its creation of statutory rights of action. A plaintiff does not automatically satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement whenever Congress grants a right and purports to authorize a suit to vindicate that right. If the Court simply were to accept Congress’s judgment of what constitutes a concrete injury-in-fact, such acceptance would significantly broaden access to the federal courts and directly undermine the separation of powers. The federal standing requirements ensure federal courts remain forums for concrete injuries—not mere hypotheticals or abstractions. Federal courts hold the power to adjudicate, which entails the power to provide remedies. The purpose of this power is to provide remedies to those who are injured, and the Supreme Court has now put an end to Article III courts hearing claims based on nonexistent injuries. In so doing, the Court properly has prevented extension of the judicial power beyond cases and controversies
Fairness Writ Large or Writ Small in International Criminal Justice
Full text linkThis article highlights the various, sometimes competing conceptions of fairness in international criminal law
ICCA Handbook Supplement 137: Venezuela
No full texti. Introduction This National Report describes the legal framework of domestic and international arbitration in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (“Venezuela”). It includes the most relevant and recent case law, and other important aspects that have shaped the development and use of commercial and investment treaty arbitration in recent times. This Report also discusses the regulation and use of mediation/conciliation given its distinction – alongside arbitration – as a non-judicial form of dispute resolution. The description offered here also considers the social, economic and political context insofar it is relevant to the discussion about arbitration in Venezuela. This Report is divided into nine chapters, including this introduction (Chapter I). Chapters II to VII cover different aspects of commercial arbitration, from the arbitral agreement to the means of recourse against the award. Chapter VIII discusses the current state of mediation/ conciliation in Venezuela, and Chapter IX addresses the main issues involving investment treaty arbitration. An unofficial English translation of the Commercial Arbitration Law of 1998 (Ley de Arbitraje Commercial, “CAL”) is included as Annex I to this National Reporthttps://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_books/1319/thumbnail.jp
Unvaccinated by Doubt: How COVID-19 Governance Sparked a Measles Revival
No full textA measles outbreak occurred in the United States this year, with measle cases reaching the highest levels in over two decades, even though the disease had been declared eliminated in 2000. In large part, this measles resurgence can be traced to unvaccinated individuals who have chosen to disregard public health officials\u27 vaccination guidance. Clearly, the public has lost trust in their governmental public health officials. As the next disease outbreak looms, the need for restoration of trust becomes imperative.
This article demonstrates how the government\u27s actions during COVID-19 further led to this lack of trust, by providing conflicting guidance as to face masking requirements, by mandating the COVID-19 vaccine without acknowledging natural immunity, and by the inconsistency of lockdown parameters. Additionally, the government coordinated with social media companies to censor the information available to the public regarding COVID-19, as alleged in the Murthy v. Missouri U.S. Supreme Court opinion. These confounding governmental actions ultimately resulted in the public losing significant trust in their officials. The path to restoring trust has many different avenues, but this article concludes that the clearest path forward is to ensure transparency in governmental actions and to return to scientific debate and discourse. If this path is not taken, the public will continue to ignore the public health officials, and the country\u27s health will further decline
Confronting the Challenges of Regulating Artificial Intelligence
No full textPublic opinion polls conclude that the American public is in favor of regulating artificial intelligence (“AI”), and many technology companies publicly claim that they would welcome regulation. And yet the United States has struggled to enact federal comprehensive AI regulations beyond a short-lived Executive Order. Why? Part I of this Article explains why regulating AI is so difficult, focusing on six key reasons: AI is a global issue; AI is not one discrete issue; AI is developing at a speed that is unprecedented; lawmakers largely lack the technical expertise effective AI regulation requires; the stakes of getting the regulation wrong are so large that paralysis results; and there is currently high-profile hostility toward federal regulation. Exploring each of those complications helps contextualize the relative lack of U.S. federal action on AI regulation. But a choice to not enact comprehensive federal AI regulation does not mean that AI will not be regulated in the U.S. Rather, as Part II discusses, if the U.S. does not enact federal AI regulation, AI will still be “regulated,” either through corporate self-regulation by AI developers, existing federal and state regulatory structures (namely antitrust, copyright, and privacy), and/or private tort actions. Each of these alternatives to AI regulation has important limitations. Part III concludes by offering some optimism, building the case for why now is an ideal time for AI regulation, notwithstanding the many challenges. There is public support for AI regulation, we can implement lessons learned from existing regulations, and technology companies themselves at least claim to welcome it. It is time to confront the challenges of regulating AI to help ensure innovation, prosperity, and safety
