Cornell Law Review

Recent News & Events

Professor Katyal’s Cornell Article is judged as best 2019 intellectual property law review article

Professor Sonia Katyal’s Article The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy was selected for inclusion in the 2020 edition of the Intellectual Property Law Review, an anthology published annually by Thomson Reuters (West). This article was originally published in 104 Cornell L. Rev. 1183 (2019). Abstract In Lear v. Adkins, the Supreme Court precipitously wrote, “federal…

Jul 2020

Note

“Traveling While Hispanic”: Border Patrol Immigration Investigatory Stops at TSA Checkpoints and Hispanic Appearance

Pablo Chapablanco

In 1896, Justice Harlan dissented against the “separate, but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson,11. 163 U.S. 537 (1896). saying, [I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor…

Jul 2019

Article

Speech, Intent, and the President

Katherine Shaw

Judicial inquiries into official intent are a familiar feature of the legal landscape. Across various bodies of constitutional and public law—from equal protection and due process to the first amendment’s free exercise and establishment clauses, from the eighth amendment to the dormant commerce clause, and in statutory interpretation and administrative law cases across a range…

Jul 2019

Article

The Endogenous Fourth Amendment: An Empirical Assessment of How Police Understandings of Excessive Force Become Constitutional Law

Osagie K. Obasogie, University of California, Berkeley

Zachary Newman, Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley

If the Fourth Amendment is designed to protect citizens from law enforcement abusing its powers, why are so many unarmed Americans killed? Traditional understandings of the Fourth Amendment suggest that it has an exogenous effect on police use of force, i.e., that the Fourth Amendment provides the ground rules for how and when law enforcement…

Jul 2019

Article

The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy

Sonia K. Katyal, Haas Distinguished Chair and Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley.

Today, the government relies on machine learning and AI in predictive policing analysis, family court delinquency proceedings, parole decisions, and DNA and forensic science techniques, among other areas, producing a fundamental conflict between civil rights and automated decisionmaking. Ground zero for this conflict, I argue, has become the murky, messy intersection between software, trade secrecy, and public governance. In many…

Jul 2019

Article

An Empirical Investigation of Third Party Consumer Litigant Funding

Ronen Avraham & Anthony Sebok

This is the first large-scale empirical study of consumer third-party litigation funding in the United States. Despite being part of the American legal system for more than two decades there has been almost no real data-driven empirical study to date. We analyzed funding requests from American consumers in over 100,000 cases over a twelve year period. This proprietary data set was provided to us by one of the largest consumer litigation…

Jul 2019