Abstract For generations, marginalized communities have been impacted by discriminatory land use, zoning, and property valuation policies, from redlining in the 1930s to the siting of undesirable land uses that persists today. Because of these policies, marginalized communities are forced to contend with low property values, substandard infrastructure, and increased health risks. The very same...
Redefining Progress: The Case for Diversity in Innovation and Inventing
Abstract This Article makes the empirical and legal case for redefining the concept of patent “progress” to include the promotion of a diversity of innovators and inventors, and not just innovation. Based on a survey of the empirical literature, it details four plausible mechanisms by which diverse innovators improve innovation: novelty, non-obviousness, (overcoming) conflict, and numerosity. It...
Mass Surveillance as Racialized Control
Abstract Incarceration has become the norm for those who assert their innocence. A staggering number of defendants are incarcerated prior to the adjudication of their cases—a reality that has become a central paradox of an American criminal justice system which holds axiomatic the presumption of innocence. Recent attempts to address pretrial mass incarceration through bail reform and the COVID-19...
Bringing Visibility to AAPI Reproductive Care After Dobbs
Abstract Dobbs’ impact on growing AAPI communities is underexamined in legal scholarship. This Essay begins to fill that gap, seeking to bring together an overdue focus on the socio-legal experiences of AAPI communities with examination of the effects of reversing Roe and Casey on women of color. It does so by prompting a research agenda that connects diverse AAPI women’s experiences, abortion...
Can CRT Save DEI?: Workplace Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Shadow of Anti-Affirmative Action
Abstract Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously...
Algorithms in Judges’ Hands: Incarceration and Inequity in Broward County, Florida
Abstract Judicial and carceral systems increasingly use criminal risk assessment algorithms to make decisions that affect individual freedoms. While the accuracy, fairness, and legality of these algorithms have come under scrutiny, their tangible impact on the American justice system remains almost completely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the effect of the Correctional Offender...
Can AI Standards Have Politics?
Abstract How to govern a technology like artificial intelligence (AI)? When it comes to designing and deploying fair, ethical, and safe AI systems, standards are a tempting answer. By establishing the best way of doing something, standards might seem to provide plug-and-play guardrails for AI systems that avoid the costs of formal legal intervention. AI standards are all the more tantalizing...
Sovereignity and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract This Essay explores the concept of sovereignty in relation to artificial intelligence. Although sovereignty has long been used to describe the status of nation states, the concept of sovereignty is used in multiple ways in the digital context. It is used to articulate state policies in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) and data, an assertion of state sovereignty that often has...