UCLR Online
In February of this year, we published a call for the government to relaunch the federal Gun Control Act’s § 925(c) petition process, which empowers anyone subject to a federal restriction (“disability”) on their ability to purchase or possess firearms to apply to the Department of Justice for restoration of their gun rights.
The Trump Justice Department has moved with some dispatch to relaunch the program—using a workaround we suggested in our piece. In this short Essay, we propose several improvements to the proposed regulation.
Critics of generative AI often describe it as a “plagiarism machine.” They may be right, though not in the sense they mean. With rare exceptions, generative AI doesn’t just copy someone else’s creative expression, producing outputs that infringe copyright. But it does get its ideas from somewhere. And it’s quite bad at identifying the source of those ideas. That means that students (and professors, and lawyers, and journalists) who use AI to produce their work generally aren’t engaged in copyright infringement. But they are often passing someone else’s work off as their own, whether or not they know it. While plagiarism is a problem in academic work generally, AI makes it much worse because authors who use AI may be unknowingly taking the ideas and words of someone else.
Disclosing that the authors used AI isn’t a sufficient solution to the problem because the people whose ideas are being used don’t get credit for those ideas. Whether or not a declaration that “AI came up with my ideas” is plagiarism, failing to make a good-faith effort to find the underlying sources is a bad academic practice.
We argue that AI plagiarism isn’t—and shouldn’t be—illegal. But it is still a problem in many contexts, particularly academic work, where proper credit is an essential part of the ecosystem. We suggest best practices to align academic and other writing with good scholarly norms in the AI environment.
Beware dark patterns. The name should be a warning, perhaps alluding to the dark web, the “Dark Lord” Sauron, or another archetypically villainous and dangerous entity. Rightfully included in this nefarious bunch, dark patterns are software interfaces that manipulate users into doing things they would not normally do. Because of these First Amendment complications, the constitutionality of dark pattern restrictions is an unsettled question. To begin constructing an answer, we must look at how dark patterns are regulated today, how companies have begun to challenge the constitutionality of such regulations, and where dark patterns fall in the grand scheme of free speech. Taken together, these steps inform an approach to regulation going forward.
Parents are turning to autonomous vehicles (AVs) to shuttle their children around, seeing them as a safe and convenient option. AVs promise increased mobility for children but bring with them unparalleled surveillance risks. As parents embrace in-cabin monitoring and location tracking to enhance safety, they also—often unknowingly—authorize the mass collection, retention, and potential disclosure of their children’s most intimate data.
This Essay presents the first case study of children’s privacy in AVs, serving as a lens to critique the prevailing reliance on parental notice and choice as the cornerstone of children's data protection. Drawing on privacy theory, surveillance studies, and child development literature, the Essay argues that the notice-and-choice framework fails to account for children’s distinct privacy interests, particularly when the data collected may be retained indefinitely, repurposed by law enforcement, or sold to data brokers. The Essay calls for real limits on data collection, meaningful restrictions on sharing, and mandatory deletion rules. These principles extend beyond AVs to the technological ecosystem now shaping childhood in the digital age.
The common law is, among other things, a mode of legal development. In this mode, judges develop the law yet simultaneously act as if they were only discovering law that already existed. This sketch of the common law introduces contemporary readers to a way of thinking and talking about law that was once instinctive for judges. The common law as a mode of development may seem alien at certain points, yet its influence on the legal systems of the United States has been enormous, and it is critical background for understanding the grant of “the judicial power” in the U.S. Constitution.
Welcome to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. Like the Twilight Zone, the emergency docket is “the middle ground between light and shadow,” and hence is the core of the so-called “shadow docket.” Commentators have criticized the Court’s shadow-docket interventions: Summary orders shirk the Court’s responsibility to resolve important legal issues in reasoned opinions informed by complete briefing and oral argument, are unwise because they risk premature decisionmaking before issues percolate in the lower courts, provide insufficient or confusing direction for lower courts, and undermine the Court’s legitimacy because of their “shadowy” deliberation. My big problem is that shadow-docket stays deeply (not just technically) undermine the rule of law and violently affect the lives of people like O.C.G. without sufficient legal justification.
In today’s competitive global economy, U.S. companies upholding strict labor and human rights standards increasingly face unfair competition from foreign firms that exploit forced labor. In this Essay, we argue that this exploitation is not just a grave human rights crisis but also a serious market distortion that disadvantages ethical businesses in the United States and elsewhere.
This Essay outlines a strategic approach to confront this unfairly uneven playing field. Beyond simply deploying the existing legal tools, we propose a unified federal enforcement strategy and smarter trade agreements with enforceable labor standards. We also propose affirmative incentives, including procurement preferences and legal safe harbors, for companies that invest in ethical sourcing. The final component to the integrated strategy we propose is greater investment in traceability technologies and public-private partnerships to identify and root out forced labor deep within supply chains. Ultimately, we outline a forward-looking blueprint to ensure fair and competitive markets for U.S. businesses, ones that reward integrity and drive a global race to the top in labor practices. Economic competitiveness and human dignity, we argue, must be pursued together, not treated as competing priorities.
The Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause allows successive criminal prosecutions for the same conduct so long as they are pursued by separate sovereigns (such as two different states). This Case Note examines Illinois law to argue that state statutes are a useful, though imperfect, means of addressing the dual sovereignty doctrine. It argues further that the details of statutory language are highly consequential to whether states can scale back dual sovereignty in practice.
This Case Note summarizes the primary holdings surrounding Ninestar Corp, focusing on the resulting predicament for the FLETF. By revealing more information to regulated firms about its Entity List determination procedures, the FLETF could force firms to seek administrative remedy before they could access the courts, thereby retaining greater control over UFLPA enforcement; yet, in doing so, it may enable firms to circumvent Entity List designation. This Case Note ultimately concludes that forced labor enforcement regime is best served by greater transparency in the Entity List designation process.
This Case Note offers some direction for handling competing interests in this developing body of law and other complex cases weighing intersecting constitutional rights against governmental interests. Parts I and II provide background information, describing the Sell test and the current state of constitutional and statutory religious protections. Part III critically analyzes how courts, including the Fifth Circuit, have considered religious objections in Sell determinations so far. Because such analysis remains underdeveloped in the courts, Part IV suggests frameworks for coherently integrating Free Exercise doctrine into Sell inquiries based on the “hybrid theory” of constitutional rights.
Search costs matter and are reflected in many areas of law. For example, most disclosure requirements economize on search costs. A homeowner who must disclose the presence of termites saves a potential buyer, and perhaps many such buyers, from spending money to search, or inspect, the property. Similarly, requirements to reveal expected miles per gallon, or risks posed by a drug, economize on search costs. But these examples point to simple strategies and costs that can be minimized or entirely avoided with some legal intervention. Law can do better and take account of more subtle things once sophisticated search strategies are understood. This Essay introduces such search strategies and their implications for law.
This Case Note argues that categorizing college athletes as employees would, under a faithful application of Title IX and the court’s reasoning in Johnson, take wage payments outside the purview of Title IX’s equal opportunity requirement for athletes. Instead, Title IX as applied to college employees would govern, along with the other relevant employment discrimination laws. Under these statutes, it would likely be permissible for colleges to pay athletes in revenue-generating sports more than those athletes in nonrevenue sports.