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Understanding Our Digital Fingerprints: Metadata, Competency, and the Future Practice of Law
Get PDFMetadata, often referred to as “data about data,” plays a crucial role in the digital world. It encompasses embedded information within electronic documents that reveals details about their creation, modification, and transmission. In legal proceedings, metadata can be both helpful and controversial, as it can expose sensitive information and potentially support or refute claims of fabricated evidence. With the widespread use of smartphones and other electronic devices, individuals generate vast amounts of personal data, including metadata, that can provide detailed insights into their lives.
This Article explores the significance of metadata in various contexts, such as digital photographs, and highlights the ethical and practical implications it poses for practitioners. Understanding metadata is essential for practitioners and consumers alike, as it contributes to our technological competence and raises awareness of the risks and benefits associated with personal data. In this Article, I will break up the explanation of metadata into four parts. First, I will detail my approach to teaching metadata to law students. I start with understanding what metadata is, where metadata can be found, and how metadata can reveal personal information about a particular user. Next, I will explore how the use of metadata has impacted individuals in the news. The third part of this Article will focus on how metadata can be used as a hands-on, practical exercise in the classroom. The fourth and final part of this Article will look at how metadata impacts both attorney-client privilege and the ethical duty of attorneys to maintain privileged information
Looking Forward: Potential Major Questions Limits on the CFPB\u27s Power to Regulate Open Banking
Get PDFBorrowed Health, Rising Debt: The Need for Heightened Consumer Protection for Medical Credit Cards
Get PDFMinding the Gap: An Introduction to Empirical Critical Race Scholarship and Complexity Science (with Resources on Agent-Based Modeling)
Get PDFDebt, Race, and Physical Mobility
No full textResidents in every state in the United States can lose their driver’s license or car registration because they owe debt to the state. At least eleven million people across the United States suffer these debt-based driving restrictions at any given time. Because Americans overwhelmingly rely on personal automobiles for transportation, states, by controlling access to driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations, use debt policy to control where and how people travel. And because these laws disproportionately affect people of color, primarily Black people, this kind of regulation props up racial segregation in both location and opportunity. This Article’s first contribution is empirical, descriptive, and prescriptive: it catalogs debt-based driving restrictions across multiple categories for all fifty states and the District of Columbia, provides a long overdue analysis of their harms, and proposes corrective legislative action.
The driving suspension laws that animate this project are not the first instance where the government has turned to debt policy as a mechanism of racial control. These laws are not an aberration, but rather the latest iteration of a long tradition of government actors using debt policy to expand physical mobility for White people and simultaneously constrict physical mobility for Black people. Tracing this thread across American history provides the basis for this Article’s second contribution—a theoretical one—that expands the traditional view of credit and debt as a mechanism of social and financial mobility to include an analysis of credit and debt as a force that acts on physical mobility. When we expand the lens to include debt policy’s effects on physical mobility, we also see debt policy’s differential effects on White and Black people in the United States. Thus, this Article begins a new conversation about debt and debt policy, one that interrogates debt policy’s racialized effects on physical mobility, freedom, and personhood
Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions
No full textTax compliance in the United States historically hovers in the 80 percent range, costing the nation approximately half a trillion dollars annually in uncollected tax revenue. To foster greater tax compliance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should employ whatever tools are at its disposal. Standard deterrence theory argues that increasing the audit rate and imposing stiffer penalties would foster greater tax compliance. There are political headwinds, however, that strongly suggest that these approaches are not currently viable. Instead, there is a low-cost method that could yield greater tax compliance. Drawing on recent and compelling social science research, the IRS should ask more information-revealing questions on tax returns. By engaging in this important exercise of strategic inquiries, dual benefits are likely to emerge: taxpayers would be more likely to report honestly to avoid acts of commission (e.g., lying); and the IRS would be in a better strategic position because it would possess additional, relevant information on taxpayer activities
Crypto Failure in the Shadows
No full textThis Article examines the tension between bankruptcy law’s strong transparency norms and the extensive sealing of records in major cryptocurrency bankruptcy cases following the 2022–2023 “crypto winter.” Through analysis of cases including FTX, Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi, the Article shows how crypto debtors have secured broad protective orders shielding creditor identities and internal documents. It argues that these secrecy practices depart from bankruptcy’s traditional information‑forcing function, inhibiting oversight and creditor participation. While valid privacy concerns exist, courts have too readily accepted expansive sealing without rigorous evidentiary support. The Article proposes a normative framework for evaluating sealing requests under §107, emphasizing narrow tailoring, evidentiary grounding, and protection of the public’s structural interest in understanding major financial failures. It concludes by suggesting that broader systemic reforms may be needed to address privacy challenges across bankruptcy practice
Reflections on Purpose and Professional Identity Formation
No full textThis essay explores how law students and lawyers develop, lose, or reorient their sense of purpose, using the author’s own trajectory through law school and practice to illustrate structural barriers—competition, lack of reflection, limited mentorship, and ideological homogeneity—that complicate identity formation. Identifying common lawyer archetypes whose work aligns differently with purpose, the author argues that legal education must make space for reflection, diverse viewpoints, and virtue-based development to enable students to integrate purpose meaningfully into their professional identities
