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The Sole Shareholder Shield: How the Supreme Court of North Carolina Narrowed the Scope of the Public Records Act and Limited Government Accountability
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Supporting Families in a Post-\u3ci\u3eDobbs\u3c/i\u3e World: Politics and the Winner-Take-All Economy
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Near-border mobilization and anticipatory self-defense in the context of international armed conflict law: A case study of border tensions prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
Get PDFThe Private Law of Stablecoins
No full textStablecoins are one of the cornerstones of the crypto world. They’ve attracted significant attention from major players over the past few years, ranging from Wall Street to kitchen-table investors, and even the White House. As a less volatile alternative to crypto-assets like bitcoin, stablecoins have the potential to change the way we make payments, unlock the groundwork needed for more blockchain-based applications, and even reorient the economy toward private money. But how stable are these stablecoins, really? Can they be relied upon in the way their many proponents claim? And how much of the popular beliefs about stablecoins match their realities? That’s where we come in. In this Article, we show, for the first time, just how unreliable and unstable this latest crypto innovation really can be.
This Article makes two important contributions to the legal literature. First, the few and nascent works on stablecoins provide an imperfect and overly simplistic descriptive account of this market. Here, we explain the diversity of business models and issuer configurations that characterize the stablecoin landscape. But setting forth this taxonomy is more than merely upgrading descriptive accounts—creating this world map is critical to understanding the various cracks in the stablecoin market and the ways coinholders are likely to suffer harm when a stablecoin collapses.
Second, through our novel study of key underlying documents, such as stablecoin-issuer corporate records, audit reports, protocol white papers, and user terms of service, this project reveals just how vulnerable stablecoin holders really are as they place their hopes (and sometimes their life savings) in this opaque and fragile market, rife with contradictory claims. In doing so, we break new ground by providing the first comprehensive private law analysis of stablecoins, including a menu of private ordering solutions aimed at creating transactional structures that would better protect stablecoin holders. By complementing the financial regulation and public law analysis in this nascent field, we lay the foundation for more inclusive and balanced normative solutions
What Ever Happened to the Africa in African Human Rights
No full textIn the late 1970s, the Organization of African Unity (“OAU”) committed to drafting and adopting a human rights instrument that would uphold African values and traditions—those aspects of African culture that were unique and praiseworthy and, in the opinion of many African leaders, superior to those of Europe. The resulting document, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“the African Charter” or “the Charter”), included numerous provisions intended to do just that. However, in the decades following the African Charter’s adoption, African lawyers, judges, and tribunals produced little jurisprudence applying and further defining those uniquely African values and traditions. This article offers a historical and legal analysis of what the African Charter’s drafters intended and where things went wrong. It argues that certain uniquely African human rights problems – including the alarming loss of African ancestral land resulting from Western-inspired land titling schemes—should be addressed by applying the sort of African human rights the Charter’s drafters thought they had created
The Nightmare of Dream Advertising
No full textAdvertisers are attempting to market to us while we dream. This is not science fiction, but rather a troubling new reality. Using a technique dubbed “targeted dream incubation” (TDI), companies have begun inserting commercial messages into people’s dreams. Roughly, TDI works by: (1) creating an association during waking life using sensory cues (for example, a pairing of sounds, visuals, or scents); and (2) as the subject is drifting off to sleep, the association is again introduced with the goal of triggering related dreams with related subject matter. Based on a 2021 American Marketing Association survey, 77 percent of 400 companies surveyed plan to experiment with dream advertising—or what this Article calls “branding dreams”—by 2025.
As a therapeutic technique, TDI is being found by sleep and dream researchers to have various benefits such as improving sleep quality, stimulating creativity, and treating addiction. However, when advertisers hijack TDI for commercial purposes, serious harms emerge. These harms are most apparent when the practice of branding dreams is employed in connection with addictive products. But health, privacy, liberty, economic, and cultural concerns also exist more broadly. In fact, dozens of sleep and dream researchers have signed an open letter calling for “new protective policies” regarding dream advertising, lest “dreams become just another playground for corporate advertisers.”
Such specifically tailored regulations may be welcome and helpful. However, this Article suggests that—at least in certain instances— the practice of branding dreams might already run afoul of existing advertising regulations. To this end, the Article advances two claims. First, dream advertising appears to fit the definition of subliminal messaging: advertisements “existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness.” Second, particularly if dream advertising is considered a novel method of subliminal advertising, some forms of dream advertising may be ripe for enforcement as “deceptive acts or practices” under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act
