Peter K. Yu

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), innovative businesses are eager to deploy intelligent platforms to detect and recognize patterns, predict customer choices, and shape user preferences. Yet, such deployment has brought along the widely documented problems of automated systems, including coding errors, corrupt data, algorithmic biases, accountability deficits, and dehumanizing tendencies. In response to these problems, policymakers, commentators, and consumer advocates have increasingly called on businesses seeking to ride the artificial intelligence wave to build transparency and accountability into algorithmic designs…

By Daniel Wells

On July 24, 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion and imposed significant requirements on its Board to increase its accountability and transparency. The FTC, after a year-long investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach, found that Facebook had deceived its users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. This fine not only underlined the corporate governance failings that created such major privacy violations, but also indirectly brought to the fore the inherent public policy dangers of Facebook's “dual-class” corporate share structure. This type of share structure, in which some of the company’s shares hold much greater voting power than others, enables Mark Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg), Facebook's founder, CEO, and chairman, to enjoy total control over shareholder decisions, even though he owns just 14% of the company’s shares…

Micah L. Berman

Professor Richard Daynard was an early proponent of the view that tort litigation could lead to the “undoing of the tobacco industry,” just as litigation had helped drive asbestos and other dangerous products from the market. Despite some notable litigation successes—and litigation’s crucial role in revealing the tobacco industry’s previously-hidden misconduct—this outcome has not materialized. To the contrary, in many cases courts have instead distorted legal doctrine in order not to hold the tobacco industry accountable for its wrongdoing, in part because judges viewed it as beyond their proper role to effectively put the tobacco industry out of business. These distortions in legal doctrine have, in turn, catalyzed legal developments that have “severely weakened the ability of personal injury litigation to effectively deter corporate misconduct and protect public health” more generally. Thus, the decades of tobacco litigation—often described as occurring in three separate “waves”—have shown that despite its promise, tobacco litigation is a public health tool to be used with caution…

Lance Gable

The upsurge of litigation against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and sellers currently proceeding through the US court system—with nearly 3,000 state and local governments as plaintiffs—raises a number of complex legal, political, and strategic issues. Although offering a wide array of legal theories, most of the local government lawsuits have been consolidated in a multi-district litigation currently overseen by a federal judge in Ohio. The state government lawsuits are mostly proceeding separately in state courts. The multiplicity of theories, plaintiffs, and jurisdictions may lead to conflict and competition between plaintiffs, as state and local governments compete to control the legal strategy deployed in the cases and the resources that may be garnered from successful rulings or settlements. . .

By Daniel P. O’Gorman

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is credited with “brilliantly reformulating” Christopher Columbus Langdell’s idea of a general theory of contract law, providing the “broad philosophical outline” for what has since become known as classical contract law. He did this in his 1881 book The Common Law, referred to as “the most important book on law ever written by an American,” and written while he was still a practicing lawyer. His series of lectures on contracts have been described as “astonishing,” the main themes of which were an emphasis on the parties’ overt acts rather than their undisclosed intentions, adoption of a bargain theory of consideration and rejection of the benefit-detriment theory, and a restrictive approach to damages…

Michael R. Ulrich

Gun violence is a growing public health crisis in the United States. In 2017, nearly 40,000 people were fatally shot, the highest recorded number since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began tracking this data fifty years ago. Though the data on firearm injuries is not as reliable, approximately 115,000 individuals are nonfatally wounded by firearms in a year. These tragic injuries and fatalities alone are enough to justify public concern, yet they still fail to capture the full scope of harm caused by gun violence. Frequently overlooked examples include individuals suffering from lead poisoning associated with bullet fragments that could not be extracted and children suffering from trauma and post-traumatic stress by exposure to shootings. Research now suggests the likelihood of knowing a gun violence victim within a social network is approximately 99.85%, regardless of race, ethnicity, or social class…

By Emma Coreno

“No one defends trafficking. There is no pro-sex-trafficking position any more than there is a public pro-slavery position . . . . The only issue is defining these terms so that nothing anyone wants to defend is covered.”

Sex trafficking is an extreme permutation of gender-based violence. However, its definition is often contested because of the long-standing dispute as to whether prostitution is a profession and, therefore, not encompassed in the definition of sex trafficking or sexual exploitation. At the international level, the formation of two rival coalitions depicts this schism. In 1988, feminist activists formed the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). In 1994, human rights activists formed the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). At the Palermo Protocol, CATW—which equates prostitution with slavery—and GAATW—which recognizes prostitution as a profession—attempted to define sex trafficking. The result was a definition encompassing broad means of “abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability” that notably did not limit the means to solely force, fraud, or coercion…