May 6, 2026 Daniel GervaisTechnology Law
For decades, law-and-tech scholarship has relied on intuition and analogy: a new technology arrives, legal scholars declare it “disruptive,” and commentary proliferates, particularly concerning its governance and affordances. Ryan Calo’s Law and Technology is an ambitious and lucid attempt to give an unruly field a shared intellectual backbone. Calo argues that this ad-hoc mode no longer suffices. Law’s relationship with technology, he insists, is clouded by what he calls “technological fog” (P. 86), which he describes as a recurring set of misconceptions that make technology appear inevitable, obscure human agency, and frustrate regulation. His response is a rigorous, four-step methodical approach (and he stakes his ground without hesitation: “methods are arguably what distinguish scholarship from other modes of inquiry”) designed to help legal analysis catch up with the social fact of technology.
Calo begins by grounding the reader in a deceptively simple insight: technology is not destiny but design. In Chapter One, “Technology as Social Fact,” he dismantles deterministic narratives by showing how law repeatedly mistakes contingent artifacts (driverless cars, AI systems, augmented reality) for unavoidable progress. The problem, he argues, is not that legal scholars fail to grasp how gadgets work, but that they may misunderstand the social contexts in which those gadgets operate. This diagnosis sets the tone for the rest of the book: technology confuses law because law tends to forget that technology is made by people with values and choices. Continue reading "A Method for the Madness of Tech Law"
May 5, 2026 Izze HanelLexEnvironmental Law
Colorado and New Mexico are experiencing one of the driest winters on record, with snowpack at only half its normal level. While drought has long been a challenge for this region, this dry winter—and the dry spring that will inevitably follow—may mark the start of a new chapter of scarcity, requiring adaptation across Colorado and New Mexico. Urban areas will likely be insulated from the effects of this imminent drought, since these areas have the ability to pipe water to their residents from other parts of the state and country. Those living in rural areas, however, typically rely on spring runoff carried by local rivers to meet their water needs and must follow the doctrine of prior appropriation (“first in time, first in right”): the first person to divert water for a beneficial use has a superior right to that water, and later users are entitled to water only after the senior user’s needs have been met. For members of rural communities who are not “first in right,” today’s snowless mountains are a sign of challenges ahead.
In his timely article, Irrigation and Society in the Upper Río Grande Basin, U.S.A.: A Heritage of Mutualism, José A. Rivera explains that in the face of challenge, the culture and traditions of acequia communities may hold the key to adaptation and survival. He posits that the cohesion offered by the Spanish language, as well as the longstanding tradition of mutualismo—reciprocal mutual aid—among acequia communities, will allow them to adapt to the challenges ahead. Acequias are centuries-old gravity-fed irrigation ditches that are characterized by being maintained and managed entirely by their users in a unique form of local government. Acequia communities are spread throughout the arid and isolated areas of southern Colorado and New Mexico. While the rigid doctrine of prior appropriation shows no signs of changing anytime soon, Rivera’s article presents acequia communities’ compelling extra-legal approach to dealing with the challenge of drought: mutualismo. Continue reading "Stagnant Laws in an Arid World: Acequia Communities Illustrate the Key to Adaptation"
May 4, 2026 Anders WalkerLegal History
Andrew Isenberg’s Age of the Borderlands should be required reading for anyone interested in the territorial expansion of the United States. The book takes on a slew of myths about the American past, including the once-popular Frederick Jackson Turner thesis as well as the more recent “settler colonial” thesis, both of which cast westward expansion as an inexorable, perhaps inevitable campaign of settlement and conquest. (P. 12.) Isenberg throws this idea into question by positing that from 1790 to 1850, America was a “relatively weak” nation surrounded by “powerful European imperial competitors, even more powerful Indigenous societies, and formidable enclaves of fugitive slaves.” (P. 4.)
The result was that the United States lacked the military force to impose its will “vertically” onto the borderlands and was left having to impose itself “horizontally” through “diplomacy or commerce.” (P. 4.) This, in turn, meant that the prophetic concept of manifest destiny—the notion that God gave North America to white people—“was but one of many ways early nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future of their borderlands.” (P. 4.) To illustrate his point, Isenberg excavates five stories from the borderlands, each of which constitutes a chapter that, in turn, challenges the idea that manifest destiny drove American settlers across the continent like a horse-drawn steamroller. Continue reading "Manifold Destiny"
May 1, 2026 Carlos BernalJurisprudence
Francisco J. Urbina,
The Object of Interpretation, 114
Geo. L.J. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Feb. 11, 2025).
In The Object of Interpretation, Professor Urbina offers a comprehensive exploration of this topic. He addresses the nature of the object of interpretation, the different senses of the term “object of interpretation”, the alternative candidates for objects of interpretation, and how to determine which should be the object in practice. The paper claims that there is no single correct object of legal interpretation. Text, lawmaking choice, practice, and order are suitable candidates. None of them are necessary objects of interpretation. Ultimately, the object of interpretation is what is treated as a precise source of law, namely, facts that are recognized as generating law. Which candidate is the object of interpretation in any given context is contingent on descriptive considerations on what is regularly treated as a legal source in that legal system and on normative considerations on what officials should treat as a legal source. In this sense, officials cannot presuppose what the object of interpretation is. They should ground what that object should be. Furthermore, in many instances, the object of interpretation is legally unsettled. When this is the case, legal interpreters must exercise discretion in choosing an object of interpretation. But they must also deliberate morally about whether to follow a legal settlement when there is one, and about which settlement they will help bring about when one is needed. Hence, the “‘correct’ object of interpretation is, then, a function of positive law and moral judgment”.
For his analysis, Professor Urbina understands a legal source as a “thing that contains or generates legal norms”, and legal interpretation as the activity of determining what legal norms are generated by legal sources. According to his point of view, a legal source is a fact that generates legal norms that either (i) has been issued according to the rules of the legal system; or (ii) that has been recognized as a legal source in legal practice by officials. In any of these cases, the legal system could recognize a source more or less “precisely”. Thus, it could recognize, for example, “What the Queen in Parliament enacts” as law or “The text that the Queen in Parliament enacts” as law. The latter recognition is at the level of precision of the object of interpretation. Thus, the law here settles the object of interpretation by sanctioning one of the possible alternatives. These two features can break a possible circularity problem, namely, that a legal source is a fact that can generate legal norms, and, at the same time, a legal norm is a determination grounded in a legal source. Continue reading "The Object of Legal Interpretation"
