8145 research outputs found
Sort by
Automated Agencies
Get PDFWhen individuals have questions about federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they increasingly seek help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer guidance to the public. The absence of scholarly attention to automation as a means of communicating government guidance is an important gap in the literature. Through the use of automated legal guidance, the federal government is responding to millions of public inquiries each year about the law, a number that may multiply many times over in years to come. This new form of guidance is thereby shaping public views of and behavior with respect to the law, without serious examination. This Article describes the results of a qualitative study of automated legal guidance across the federal government. This study was conducted under the auspices of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency of the U.S. government charged with recommending improvements to administrative process and procedure. Our goal was to understand federal agency use of automated legal guidance, and offer recommendations to ACUS based on our findings. During our study, we canvassed the automated legal guidance activities of all federal agencies. We found extensive use of automation to offer guidance to the public by federal agencies, with varying levels of sophistication and legal content. We identified two principal models of automated legal guidance, and we conducted in-depth legal research regarding the most sophisticated examples of such models. We also interviewed agency officials with direct, supervisory, or support responsibility over well-developed automated legal guidance tools. We find that automated legal guidance offers agencies an inexpensive way to help the public navigate complex legal regimes. However, we also find that automated legal guidance may mislead members of the public about how the law will apply in their individual circumstances. In particular, automated legal guidance exacerbates the tendency of federal agencies to present complex law as though it is simple without actually engaging in simplification of the underlying law. While this approach offers advantages in terms of administrative efficiency and ease of use by the public, it also causes the government to present the law as simpler than it is, leading to less precise advice and potentially inaccurate legal positions. In some cases, agencies heighten this problem by, among other things, making guidance seem more personalized than it is, ignoring how users may rely on the guidance, and failing to adequately disclose that the guidance cannot be relied upon as a legal matter. At worst, automated legal guidance enables the government to dissuade members of the public from accessing benefits to which they are entitled, a cost that may be borne disproportionately by members of the public least capable of obtaining other forms of legal advice. In reaching these conclusions, we do not suggest that automated legal guidance is uniquely problematic relative to alternative forms of communicating the law. The question of how to respond to complex legal problems, in light of a public that has limited ability or inclination to understand complex legal systems, is a difficult one. There are different, potential solutions to this problem, which each present their own series of cost-benefit tradeoffs. However, failure to appreciate, or even examine, the tradeoffs inherent in automated legal guidance, relative to the alternatives, undermines our ability to make informed decisions about when to use which solution, or how to minimize the costs of this form of guidance. In this Article, after exploring these challenges, we chart a path forward. We offer policy recommendations, organized into five categories: transparency; reliance; disclaimers; process; and accessibility, inclusion, and equity. We believe that our descriptive as well as theoretical work regarding automated legal guidance, and the detailed policy recommendations that flow from it, will be critical for evaluating existing, as well as future, government uses of automated legal guidance
Supporting Families in a Post-Dobbs World: Politics and the Winner-Take-All Economy
Get PDFThe pathway to stable and secure middle-class status involves two elements: the ability to postpone family formation to facilitate human capital investment and the ability to marshal the emotional and material resources needed to address children needs. Yet, the ability to meet the middle-class threshold for family investment is under assault as the class-based COVID-19 pandemic vulnerabilities and the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u27s Health Organization illustrate. While the American Rescue Plan demonstrates the federal government\u27s considerable ability to address children\u27s needs, Dobbs represents the judicial assault on federal power and the ongoing devolution in responsibility for family support from the federal government to the states, a devolution that increases regional, racial, and class-based inequality.
This Article explains the three factors that exacerbate the regional differences. First, we show the development of a new federalism over the past half century that has granted states more authority, undercutting federal ability to establish a floor for available benefits such as health care. Second, we show that increased partisanship and the resulting single party control in many states contributes to the election of more extreme state legislators, with little accountability to voters. Third, we maintain that legislatures have become more responsive to well-funded national business and activist groups and less concerned about local needs.
This analysis turns the conventional justification for federalism--that, particularly in family law, smaller units of government are more in touch with local conditions and needs--on its head. Partisan polarization and the outsized influence of lobbying groups on state legislations suggest that the federal government may be better poised to advance family interests than the states. The nation has a collective interest in the well-being of its children, particularly as the importance of investment in human capital becomes increasingly important in an economy rewarding greater education and technological sophistication. The federal government is also better suited, for a variety of reasons, to coordinate the creation of a new family infrastructure. An era of greater inequality, rather than make smaller units of government more responsive to local conditions, makes them more susceptible to the influence of individuals and entities willing to spend near-unlimited sums of money to produce desired results. We use abortion as the lens of our analyses, rendering visible the intersectional nature of this state-sponsored violence: the misogyny of existing government policies (lack of contraception, coerced pregnancy, no support for resulting families), combined with class (wealthier women pay for their own abortions), race (Black women are more likely to have abortions), and the need for investment in children in the new economy
Environmental Destruction and Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Examining the Epicenter of the Cobalt Mining Industry from an International Criminal Law Perspective
Get PDFThe Mixed Legacy of the January 6 Investigation for Executive Privilege and Congressional Oversight
Get PDFAn Organizational Theory of International Technology Transfer
Get PDFInternational technology transfer plays a critical role in advancing economic and social welfare around the world. Conventional wisdom holds that strong intellectual property rights—primarily patents—promote the transfer of technologies between countries. An important counternarrative, however, contends that weakening patents promotes important forms of technology transfer. This Article challenges the centrality of both perspectives by arguing that neither strengthening nor weakening patents is sufficient to transfer many technologies. This Article disaggregates international technology transfer into its constituent activities, focusing on the important processes by which technical knowledge itself moves between countries. In theory, patents play an important role in the international transfer of technical knowledge because, among other functions, they require inventors to disclose their inventions. In practice, however, such disclosure is often inadequate. This Article argues that multinational organizational structures play an important and underappreciated role in transferring technical knowledge between countries, even for inventions that are ostensibly disclosed in patents.
In so doing, this Article offers a new gloss on the knowledge- based theory of the firm. In pertinent part, the knowledge-based theory of the firm emphasizes the advantages of transferring tacit knowledge—personal, experiential knowledge that is not amenable to codification (and not disclosed in patents)—within firms as opposed to between separate firms. This Article extends this theory in two ways to articulate a novel knowledge-based theory of “bounded entities.” First, it argues that firms (and organizations more broadly) provide a hospitable environment for transferring not only tacit knowledge but also trade secrets—secret, technical information that may or may not be codified. Second, it argues that the knowledge-transfer advantages of organizations extend beyond classic, integrated firms to a broader class of “bounded entities.” Such entities, which span integrated and quasi-integrated organizational forms, facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge and trade secrets.
Drawing on this novel theory, this Article argues that “multinational bounded entities”—which include multinational firms, foreign-domestic joint ventures, and “thick” cross-border contractual relationships—greatly facilitate the transfer of technical knowledge abroad. They do so even for inventions that have been publicly disclosed in patents and even when innovators would ordinarily assert intellectual property rights to limit such transfer. Illustrating these dynamics, this Article explores the role of multinational bounded entities in the global manufacturing of patented COVID-19 vaccines and “forced technology transfer” in the U.S.-China trade war. Going further, this Article synthesizes the roles of patents and organizations in international technology transfer, arguing that the strength of patent protection and the nature of technology to be transferred help determine the most effective transfer channels. It then provides prescriptions for improving international technology transfer through patent-based channels and multinational bounded entities
Tea and Donuts
Get PDFU.S. trademark law often permits simultaneous use of the same brand by multiple entities. Its approach to deciding when and how this concurrent use is permissible has become antiquated, rooted in outdated assumptions about trade and telecommunications. By using the physical location of mark-users as a proxy for consumer confusion, trademark law creates doctrinal inconsistencies, undercuts trademark law’s notice function, and can cause the confusion it seeks to prevent. In theory, someone who registers their mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office obtains nationwide rights; in practice, those rights remain limited to the places where the registrant actually conducts business. This Article argues for ending this place-based methodology for evaluating simultaneous use. It marshals empirical and theoretical evidence to demonstrate that problems with concurrent use are steadily worsening, driven by changes to the economy and information distribution that upend long-held assumptions about consumer confusion. The Article describes the tortuous evolution and current morass of case law interpreting how geography affects consumer confusion. It articulates a set of interventions to remedy these failings, ranging from the modest (altering the defenses available for infringing an incontestable mark) through the moderate (folding geography into the standard infringement analysis) to the controversial (abolishing unregistered marks and stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over state claims involving such marks). Finally, the Article advocates for adopting its more sweeping reforms based on doctrinal coherence, improved notice, and welfare gains for both consumers and producers