In this episode, we interview UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh, whose article The Freedom of Speech and Bad Purposes is published in issue 63.5 of the UCLA Law Review. We discuss the merits and weaknesses of First Amendment purpose tests--legal tests that strip protection if a person speaks with bad motives or intentions--and we consider whether First Amendment protections should ever be...
Foreword - Imagining the Legal Landscape: Technology and the Law in 2030
Legal scholarship tends to focus on the past, the present, or the relatively visible, near-term future. And that’s understandable: the challenges that loom many years away often aren’t susceptible to confident claims or carefully worked out solutions. In law as in life, our biggest worries—or hopes—may never come to pass at all. But what about challenges in the foreseeable but still uncertain...
Imagining Perfect Surveillance
Abstract How would society react to “the Watcher,” a technology capable of efficiently, unerringly, and immediately reporting the perpetrator of virtually every crime? This Essay treats that speculative question as an opportunity to explore the relationship between governmental surveillance and criminal justice. The resulting argument is unabashedly fictional but draws attention to pressures...
Selective Procreation in Public and Private Law
Abstract This Article sets forth a new way to think about the ethics and law of choosing genetic traits in future children. And it applies this framework of offspring to controversies over efforts to select offspring traits including sex, race, intelligence, and deafness using methods ranging from donor selection to embryo screening and gene editing. I adapt the lens of ambivalence that...
Giving Up On Cybersecurity
Abstract Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in digital information and connected devices, but constant revelations about hacks make painfully clear that security has not kept pace. Societies today network first, and ask questions later. This Essay argues that while digitization and networking will continue to accelerate, cybersecurity concerns will also prompt some strategic...
DNA in the Criminal Justice System: A Congressional Research Service Report* (*From the Future)
Abstract Recent bills have allocated federal funding to states and localities as an incentive to adopt handheld genome sequencing devices, smooth the ongoing transition from older forensic typing methods to “next generation sequencing” (NGS), and facilitate law enforcement access to medical and recreational DNA databases. At the request of legislators considering these bills, the Congressional...
Utopia?: A Technologically Determined World of Frictionless Transactions, Optimized Production, and Maximal Happiness
Introduction1 Imagine a world that is aggressively engineered for us to achieve highly desirable objectives. In this hypothetical future, technology will serve as the means for governing—or one might say, micromanaging—our world to prioritize three distinctive yet interrelated normative ends: optimized transactional efficiency, resource productivity, and human happiness. Now, even though we do...
The CRISPR Revolution: What Editing Human DNA Reveals About the Patent System’s DNA
Abstract Not since the invention that launched the entire biotech industry has a life science invention offered as much promise as the CRISPR technique for editing genes. Gene editing techniques existed before CRISPR, but they were slow, inaccurate, and expensive. The CRISPR invention is like moving from the manual typewriter—click, clack, slide across—to modern word processing. As we stand at...