Feb 9, 2026 Stacy-Ann ElvyTechnology Law
Alicia Solow-Niederman,
AI and Doctrinal Collapse, 78
Stan. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Aug. 08, 2025).
Government actors across the globe have responded to the rapid uptake of artificial intelligence by adopting or proposing various forms of legislation. For instance, on September 29, 2025, California adopted the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, which imposes transparency and safety obligations on artificial intelligence companies in the state. Other states, such as Colorado, have also responded by enacting laws addressing artificial intelligence. At the federal level, the proposed Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act would impose disclosure requirements on artificial intelligence developers that use copyrighted works to train their systems. In 2024 the European Parliament adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act—a comprehensive framework for the regulation of artificial intelligence in European Union countries. Despite domestic and international legislative responses, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence continues to pose significant challenges for several established areas of law, including privacy law and intellectual property law.
In her article AI and Doctrinal Collapse, Professor Alicia Solow-Niederman offers an impressive contribution to both the privacy law and intellectual property law fields by exposing the various pressures placed on these two legal regimes by artificial intelligence. Solow-Niederman contends that artificial intelligence has blurred the boundaries between privacy law and copyright law—a phenomenon she aptly labels as “inter-regime doctrinal collapse.” She convincingly posits that without sufficient intervention, corporate actors will continue to implement “exploitation tactics” to profit from this doctrinal collapse and further undermine the rule of law. Continue reading "Crossroads: Privacy Law and Copyright Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"
Feb 6, 2026 Shelby D. GreenProperty
The Yellowstone River ecosystem is breathtaking, unparalleled in its wonder and expanse. The river is the longest free-standing river in the United States. But, its transcendent beauty and abundance are threatened by overuse and climate change (rising temperatures, snowmelt, greater runoff, and reduced summer flows).
In Equity Along the Yellowstone, Professor Jason A. Robison laments the myriad of threats to the Yellowstone River, even as more than seventy-five years ago, an interstate compact was entered into for the asserted purpose of ensuring its future. The Yellowstone Compact is a domestic water treaty between Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Ratified in 1951, the Compact aimed to establish a rational regime for allocating uses of the Yellowstone River that would avoid constant litigation in the Supreme Court. These negotiations took over two decades. Continue reading "Infusing an Ethic of Place into the Water"
Feb 5, 2026 Elizabeth D. KatzLegal History
Family law scholars, activists, and practitioners have devoted increasing attention to state actions that separate hundreds of thousands of children from their parents every year in the United States. Many condemn laws that regulate child removal and foster care, finding current approaches insufficiently protective of children’s wellbeing. Commentators consider how reframing and strengthening children’s and parents’ rights may better ensure respect for family integrity. These accounts often include historical context that emphasizes continuity in the harmful, classist, and racist treatment of marginalized families.
In The Origins of Family Rights and Regulations, Professor Laura Savarese identifies a forgotten period in which parents’ habeas corpus litigation prompted the development of formal protections for the parent-child relationship. Predating canonical U.S. Supreme Court cases constitutionalizing parental rights (beginning with Meyer v. State of Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925)), parents sued institutions to recover custody of their children and contributed to nascent understandings of parental rights. Continue reading "Developing Legal Protections for Family Integrity"
Feb 4, 2026 Martin GelterInternational & Comparative Law
Royhan Akbar, Nathanial Mangunsong, & Dan W. Puchniak,
The Abolition of Independent Directors in Indonesia: Rationally Autochthonous or Foolishly Idiosyncratic, __
Am. J. of Compar. L. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN.
Over the past 30 years, comparative corporate law scholarship has grown into a worldwide industry with a substantial volume of publications. For an English-speaking scholar, it has become easy to follow debates in (mainly Western) Europe, Japan, China, India, and Brazil, just to name a few hotspots of the field. Indonesia is often overlooked in the literature, which is surprising, given that it is the fourth largest country in the world by population and its status as a Member of the G20 and an Upper-Middle-Income economy (in fact, the seventh largest economy by GDP/PPP).
Royhan Akbar, Nathanial Mangunsong, and Dan W. Puchniak’s forthcoming article, The Abolition of Independent Directors in Indonesia: Rationally Autochthonous or Foolishly Idiosyncratic, is one of very few filling this gap. What at first glance seems like a peculiar development—the abolition of the requirement for publicly traded companies to have independent directors—reveals many parallels to other countries upon closer investigation, which allows the authors to make important points that reveal structural features of comparative corporate governance beyond the country. Continue reading "Finding Familiarity in the Unknown? Independent Directors in Indonesia"
Feb 3, 2026 Cynthia AlkonLexDispute Resolution
The pandemic forced courts (and every other part of society) to do things differently. These changes continue to be a gold mine for scholars as we continue to learn lessons about the impact of these changes. Professor Wechsler’s article is a wonderful example of looking at one specific area, civil protection hearings for survivors of intimate partner violence, and examining COVID-19-generated lessons that could improve the process moving forward. The article is grounded in original empirical research with survivors and legal services providers and focuses on procedural justice, empowerment, and access. Although civil protection orders are the most common legal remedy sought by survivors of intimate partner violence, this article examines how different options for filing protective order petitions and hearing participation are important to survivors.
The article is based on two complementary and original empirical studies. The first is a survey of intimate partner violence survivors in New York City family courts who sought protective orders during the pandemic. Notably, 85% of participants were women of color, ensuring that the study centers the voices of those disproportionately impacted by intimate partner violence but who are often marginalized in policy debates. The second was a survey of legal services providers nationwide, documenting changes in protective order procedures before, during, and after the pandemic restrictions. Methodologically, this dual approach gives the article both depth and breadth with rich qualitative accounts from survivors themselves, combined with a broader procedural landscape from practitioners’ perspectives. Importantly, Professor Wechsler builds on prior scholarship without duplication, providing new empirical insights. Continue reading "A Lesson from the Pandemic: Moving Beyond “One Size Fits All” in Protection Order Processes for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence"
Feb 2, 2026 Brian BixJurisprudence
Gregory Klass,
What Might Contract Theory Be?, in
Understanding Private Law: Essays in Honour of Stephen A. Smith 181 (Evan Fox-Decent, John C. P. Goldberg & Lionel Smith eds. 2025).
Gregory Klass’s article, What Might Contract Theory Be?, was published in the collection, Understanding Private Law, a volume honoring Stephen A. Smith, the eminent Contract and Private Law Theory scholar who passed away far too young (shortly before this volume’s publication). Klass’s article focuses on an influential discussion in the first chapter of Smith’s influential work, Contract Theory. In that chapter, Smith sets out the criteria he believes should be used to evaluate theories of contract law. In particular, Smith offers four criteria: fit, coherence, morality, and transparency. In Klass’s discussion, he asks good, probing questions of each of Smith’s categories and the way that Smith applies them. (Pp. 183-89.) However, Klass’s most important challenge may be the following, general one: should a theorist of contract law (or other doctrinal areas of law) be essentially an outside spectator to the practice, or essentially a (kind of) participant in the practice?
Whether theorists should be (or should treat themselves as being) participants or observers has been an active dispute for some time in the related area of general theories about the nature of law. Many of the best-known theories of law take primarily an observer’s attitude towards the subject – law, legal norms, the legal system. At the same time, at least since the work of H. L. A. Hart, they have simultaneously given significance to the “internal point of view,” the fact that some of those in the practice accept the law (as giving them reasons for action). By contrast, Ronald Dworkin presented a theory of law, and an approach to theorizing about law, in which the theorist is a participant in the practice, and “no firm line divides jurisprudence from adjudication or any other aspect of legal practice.” Hart’s response to Dworkin on this matter was simple: that whatever value there might be to a theory built entirely from an insider’s perspective, “there is an important place for general and descriptive jurisprudence”. Continue reading "Theorizing for Insiders and Outsiders"
Jan 30, 2026 Margo BagleyIntellectual Property Law
Jorge L. Contreras,
The Role of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights, 59
Int’l Law. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (Sept. 2, 2025).
Some years ago, I reviewed a book about patent office administration, a topic even the book’s author considered “excruciatingly dull”. As such, I had low expectations for the book but was delightfully surprised by how engaging it was. I have experienced déjà vu with Jorge L. Contreras’ short article, The Role of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights. An article on a topic that I would have expected to be boring in fact was quite enlightening in important ways and a pleasure to read.
I may not be alone among Intellectual Property (IP) law scholars in acknowledging a lacuna in my knowledge of IP enforcement at the U.S. border. For many of us, the topic may surface in course discussions about, inter alia, the benefits of federal trademark registration on the principal register or litigation at the International Trade Commission (ITC), but border enforcement is seldom explored in any depth. Continue reading "IP Savvy at the U.S. Border"
Jan 29, 2026 Marc SpindelmanEquality
Dean Spade’s latest book, Love in a F*ucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (2025), is a self-help volume with a distinctive mission. The book’s self-improvement stylings arrive amidst the highly intentional teachings of an established social movement activist, organizer, and institution-builder writing here primarily for a younger generation on or open to the political left. The book leverages hardscrabble wisdom wrought from Spade’s years on the political front lines as deepened by serious psychological study and reflection. The result is a book offering readers a space for meaningful self-witness. Love encourages readers to discover via self-reflection that many of the forces they oppose “out there” in the social world also operate within themselves. The book’s self-help resources then guide readers toward the transformative self-healing that may follow—producing selves capable of new intimacies, relationships, and social movement work that may yet set them, and the rest of us, free.
Love’s self-help advice unfolds across digestibly structured chapters. These carve-ups give readers opportunities to process the book’s instruction and self-exam prompts, making the experience almost dialogic. The book braids self-help advice with political argument and complements both with first-person narrative and fictionalized vignettes that supply readers with additional layered contact points for approaching its ideas, questions, questionnaires, assessment tools, and worksheets. Continue reading "Spade’s Love"
Jan 28, 2026 Jessica Lind MantelHealth Law
The phrase “hospital desert” sanitizes a brutal reality for millions of rural Americans: the closure of a local hospital means longer journeys for life-saving care, worse health outcomes, and the hollowing out of fragile local economies. While many commentators point to demographic changes and strained budgets as primary causes of this growing crisis, in her compelling new article, The Healing Power of Antitrust, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that we have been misdiagnosing the problem. She shows that hospital deserts are also the product of anticompetitive practices and enforcement failures—noncompete clauses that drive clinicians away, hospital mergers that strip rural communities of services, and regulatory blind spots that treat closures as unavoidable. Stavroulaki calls for antitrust enforcers to embrace their “healing power” by addressing these practices head-on, proposing reforms that expand merger analysis to labor markets, ban healthcare noncompete agreements, and condition rural hospital mergers on commitments to preserve services. Stavroulaki thus shows that antitrust is not simply a tool for protecting consumer welfare, but can also advance health equity by addressing the geographic disparities that leave rural patients behind.
Stavroulaki begins by powerfully situating what is at stake with the rural hospital closure crisis. Rural hospitals serve communities that are poorer, older, sicker, and more likely to be uninsured. These communities also experience higher rates of chronic conditions, disability, and substance use. Unsurprisingly, rural communities rely heavily on their hospitals to meet their healthcare needs. Moreover, because hospitals are often the largest local employer—generating jobs, purchasing goods and services, and sustaining community life—many rural hospitals serve as their community’s economic anchor. When a rural hospital closes, the resulting hospital desert can devastate the community, endangering lives and destabilizing the local economy. Continue reading "An Antitrust Prescription for Ailing Rural Hospitals"
Jan 27, 2026 Brian BixFamily Law
Susan Frelich Appleton & Albertina Antognini,
Abolishing the Family, 61
Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN (Aug. 1, 2025).
There are benefits to thinking about extreme proposals—suggested utopias and radical restructurings of institutions. However unlikely it might be that such proposals are ever put into effect, they help us to think more clearly both about what needs to be changed and about what might yet be feasible. The particular extreme or utopian (or perhaps dystopian) set of proposals Susan Frelich Appleton and Albertina Antognini consider in their recent work is, as their title indicates, “abolishing the family.” While family, in conventional social and political ideologies, is often presented as an ideal, it has also for a long time been the subject of sharp criticism by many feminists and more than a few family law scholars. And, from the perspective of such critics, moderate reforms have turned out to be frustrating, teaching us (as the authors put it) “not only that inequality and its counterpart, privilege, continuously find ways to reassert themselves” (P. 60, fn omitted), but also that many suggested reforms “have failed because they defy core pillars of what families are assumed to be or do.” (P. 61.)
As the authors note (P. 4), the analysis of family abolition broadly evokes the discussion of abolishing marriage associated with Martha Fineman in work such as The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies and others (see, e.g., the contributors to Anita Bernstein (ed.), Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status and Elizabeth Brake (ed.), After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships). During the later stages of the same-sex marriage movement, some more conservative voices also urged getting the state out of the business of recognizing marriage (so as not to be forced to give official sanction to same-sex unions). Despite such right-wing arguments joining critiques from within the LGBTQ+ movement and older left-wing arguments against marriage, civil marriage, now expanded to include same-sex couples, is still with us, and with little likelihood of imminent abolition. Continue reading "What We Can Learn from Family Abolition"
