The Article examines the Italian rice sector as a case study in how law mediates the tensions between territorial agricultural traditions and the pressures of globalization. Focusing on the rice-producing districts of Piedmont and Lombardy, the Article argues that the resilience of Italian rice production cannot be explained solely by agronomic or economic factors. Rather, it depends on a dense legal and institutional framework that structures water governance, quality control, market organization, and contractual relations across the supply chain. The Article develops three principal claims. First, it shows that the competitiveness of Italian rice production rests on an integrated model in which public irrigation consortia, the National Rice Authority, and statutory rules governing classification, labeling, and commercialization together produce market transparency and reduce informational asymmetries. Second, it argues that the revival of autochthonous varieties—most notably Riso Gigante di Vercelli—demonstrates the legal significance of hybrid governance tools, including Slow Food Presidia and production guidelines, in preserving biodiversity, promoting sustainability, and reinforcing territorial identity where formal PDO and PGI protections remain limited. Third, it contends that contractual standardization in paddy-rice sales, read alongside the European Union’s intervention against unfair trading practices, offers an important mechanism for correcting structural imbalances between producers and downstream actors. By connecting market regulation, quality governance, and local ecological knowledge, the Article advances a broader claim: agricultural law should not be understood merely as a technical body of rules governing production and exchange, but as a constitutive framework through which sustainability, economic coordination, and productive identity are legally organized. The Italian rice sector thus offers a paradigmatic example of how law can transform territorial specificity into a durable competitive advantage in an increasingly globalized food economy.
By exploring the intersection between transitional justice initiatives and transformative constitutionalism, this article proposes that fruitful comparative study covering similarities and differences between diverse definitions of property—challenges and possibilities of accessing it and the main characteristics of the disputes over it—in four jurisdictions can be advanced. A close examination of the classic liberal paradigm framing the transitional process reveals the ways in which a progressive and justice-driven understanding of property falls short in all the countries considered. To examine this, we look at how property clauses, substantively and procedurally, are construed in transformative constitutions sitting at the heart of the liberal project animating political transitions.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic child sexual abuse images without any real child involved. These AI-generated depictions pose a unique challenge: they replicate the most pernicious form of pornography—child pornography—while potentially being claimed as “speech” immune from regulation. This paper argues that it is both constitutionally permissible and morally imperative to criminalize AI-generated child pornography. This article presents two doctrinal pathways to justify a ban. First, such content can be treated as unprotected speech under existing First Amendment exceptions. Courts have long held that child pornography and obscenity lie outside First Amendment protection, and a carefully defined prohibition on AI-synthesized child sexual abuse material can fit within these categories or be analogized to contraband, thus sidestepping strict scrutiny. Second, even if considered protected expression, a narrowly tailored ban can survive strict scrutiny by advancing the compelling interest of protecting children and society from sexual exploitation. This paper demonstrates that lawmakers can define the offense to cover only realistic, valueless depictions virtually indistinguishable from real child pornography, thereby targeting the core harm while avoiding overbreadth. This article concludes that a well-crafted prohibition on AIgenerated child porn not only withstands constitutional scrutiny but is a necessary extension of child protection into the digital age.
The economic principles of supply and demand dictate that market prices are contingent on the conditions under which supply and demand converge. Within this theoretical framework, the concepts of scarcity and abundance assume paramount significance. When goods are scarce, prices tend to escalate, while in cases of abundant supply, prices tend to decline. But what factors determine scarcity and abundance? In many cases, scarcity is inherent to the nature of the commodity (for example, diamonds are rarer than common stones). In other cases, such as geographical indications, scarcity is constructed through the legal denomination associated with the commodity, thereby creating an artificial scarcity by accentuating certain particularities—geographical, physical, or cultural—regardless of their actual availability in nature. From this economic perspective, geographical indications represent the legal name under which, and through which, such market engineering is carried out, giving rise to different and conflicting interests. To what extent does this legal engineering of markets invite a negative reading, and to what extent a positive one?
Imagine being sexually assaulted and then having to choose between justice or deportation. In today’s climate of heightened immigration enforcement, many undocumented immigrant victims of sexual assault understandably remain silent. After all, who would risk everything just to report a crime that might get them deported? The fear of being separated from their families, ripped from the lives they have built, and sent back to dangerous conditions in their home countries prevents these victims from coming forward and seeking justice. Additionally, the current protections available to them are flawed and insufficient—primarily due to the U visa cap and prolonged processing times. These flaws only heighten the barriers these victims face. To increase reporting among these victims, comprehensive reforms are necessary, including eliminating the U visa cap, streamlining the application process, strengthening trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities, implementing anonymous reporting systems, and expanding access to legal and community-based resources.
Private equity has become an increasingly influential force in American healthcare. Hundreds of billions of dollars have flown into healthcare acquisitions over the last decade, and a growing share of physician practices and health services are coming under investor control. This Comment argues that the current regulatory framework has not kept pace with that expansion. Existing federal tools, primarily antitrust and fraud enforcement, leave most transactions unreviewed because many deals fall below reporting thresholds. At the state level, doctrines such as the corporate practice of medicine are unevenly enforced and often avoided through management services’ organization structures. These structures preserve formal physician ownership, but shift practical control and economic incentives. Gaps in regulation matter because private equity’s core model often prioritizes short investment horizons and the use of leverage. That approach, coupled with aggressive value-extraction strategies, can conflict with healthcare’s long-term commitments to patient welfare, stable access, and ethical clinical judgment. After defining private equity and describing its market structure, this Comment traces the evolution of private equity activity in healthcare, surveys the fragmented federal and state regulatory landscape, and evaluates how these rules operate in practice through recent enforcement efforts. It then weighs competing arguments about efficiency and innovation against evidence of higher prices and compromised quality. Finally, it proposes a more robust, balanced regulatory approach that strengthens transparency and oversight without undermining legitimate capital formation or operational improvements.
When copyright law collides with press freedom, which one survives the takedown? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was once hailed as a necessary adaptation to copyright protection issues in the digital age. But now, nearly three decades since its incorporation into the Copyright Act, the DMCA has continued to cast a shadow over the journalism industry. The DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system, originally designed to protect copyright owners by allowing for quick removal of infringing content, has become a mechanism that risks suppressing lawful reporting and undermines the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. This Comment will explore how the DMCA’s innate, structural flaws have fostered an environment that disproportionately harms news media and journalism. To address these harms, this Comment then proposes concrete solutions like codifying exceptions, reforming the fair use doctrine, and implementing enforceable penalties for wrongful takedowns. By rebalancing copyright law to reflect the realities of modern journalism and the guarantees of a free press, these reforms can ensure that intellectual property right enforcement does not come at the expense of the First Amendment.
As innovation cycles accelerate, companies seeking to remain at the forefront of the knowledge economy increasingly partner with sophisticated firms to co-create innovation. These collaborations involving pervasive uncertainty are structured through hybrid contractual arrangements that combine features of market-based independence with those of the close coordination typical of the firm. To date, contracting for innovation has been examined primarily in the context of the Global North. In the United States, the literature has focused on the governance mechanisms that parties employ to continuously define their obligations and mitigate opportunism amid profound uncertainty. In Europe, scholarship on contractual networks or organizational contracts has also addressed governance mechanisms, but has focused mainly on how contractual doctrine and interpretation should adapt to these novel forms of collaboration. In the Global South, by contrast, studies on the existence, design, and legal implications of contracting for innovation remain scant. This Article aims to fill this gap by presenting the results of empirical research conducted in Brazil on contractual practices to co-create advanced innovation. The findings reveal, first, that contracting for innovation exists in Brazil within a narrow segment of globally connected firms that employ sophisticated governance mechanisms. Second, they show the presence of a heterodox element in certain initiatives, where public-private collaborations and ad hoc arrangements between the state and the market are designed to foster the conditions necessary for collaborations to innovate to flourish. The Article argues that this heterodox approach may offer inspiration—for Brazil and other jurisdictions alike—on how to diffuse collaborative relationships for innovation, thereby contributing to a more inclusive knowledge economy.
Food systems are regulated by a global and hybrid legal framework. In fact, while supranational and international sources play an increasingly important role, private regulators are also becoming more and more involved alongside traditional public policy-makers. Within this context, Geographical Indications (GIs) serve as the main tool in the European Union and beyond to protect quality agri-food products. This Article aims to explore these instruments in depth in order to analyze several critical aspects from the perspective of global governance, i.e., the networked, hybrid, and diffuse legal space that develops through the participation, negotiation, and strategic interaction between public and private regulators at all levels of law-making.
Egyptian cotton has become a celebrated brand. Referring to cotton as “Egyptian” signals a certain quality, luxury, and durability. Egyptian cotton has, thus, become its own trademark, a signifier of value, and a symbol of national heritage. This image is carefully curated. It is now protected under a licensing scheme of branding and marketing that assures that fraudulently claimed “Egyptian cotton” does not benefit from the added value this geographic location ascribes to it. The Egyptian Cotton Association was thus created in 2005 to license and accredit the brand. Part of the curation of the brand image is a historical narrative of the making of Egyptian cotton. It is understandable that a curated narrative would highlight moments of pride while omitting those elements that unsettle or trouble the image it seeks to project. Yet, what the dominant narrative omits produces something beyond just forgotten histories. It is deliberately oblivious to the making of cotton as a global commodity, the abuse of the labor that planted and harvested the cotton, and the role of empire in the entire endeavor. In this Article, I focus on the making of Egyptian cotton as a starting point for a more nuanced and complex narrative that is not oblivious to the suffering of the native people and the violence of colonial domination. The goal is to do justice to histories of land, labor, and capital. The focal points chosen here are those structured in a legal apparatus that shapes arrangements of landownership, forced labor, debt and global trade. It spans from feudal and imperial laws at the beginning of the nineteenth century up until the British occupation.
Regulation (EU) 2023/2411 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 October 2023 has introduced the protection of geographical indications for craft and industrial products. The contribution aims at investigating how the Regulation may have implications in the fashion world. In particular, it will focus on a particular case study undertaken in Northern Italy, concerning the possibility of protecting the “Lace of Cantù” through a geographical indications for craft.
Drug trafficking from source countries in South and Central America to other parts of the world is of growing concern as drug use increases globally. Driven by the region’s geographic proximity to source countries in South and Central America and weak antitrafficking infrastructure, drug traffickers have increasingly used routes through Caribbean ports to access target consumer nations. The use of Caribbean ports for transshipment trafficking has led to record homicide levels, corruption, and democratic backsliding. In response, Caribbean nations, other Western democracies, and international organizations have created numerous cooperative organizations and programs to reduce the number of drugs trafficked through the region. Despite these efforts, the amount of contraband seized at Caribbean ports continues to increase. This Comment argues for a comprehensive, Caribbean-led approach to combat transshipment drug trafficking. More specifically, through ratification of the Treaty of San José and an expansion of the Caribbean Community Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (CARICOM IMPACS) and the Regional Security System (RSS), Caribbean states can cooperatively address drug trafficking without yielding influence to outside actors. By modernizing communications, enhancing surveillance, and expanding interdiction capabilities, these international organizations present the best solution to the influx of contraband through Caribbean ports. Both domestic and international policy among participating Caribbean nations must adjust to expand these organizations to realize this goal. Through a case study on the Dominican Republic’s successes in port security and interdiction capability, this Comment will illustrate how effective practices can be scaled regionally to strengthen antitrafficking efforts. By fostering regional cooperation and leveraging international resources, a sustainable strategy can be developed to address drug trafficking in the Caribbean from within.
Law fundamentally exists to enable human cooperation, providing frameworks for everything from basic contracts to complex international agreements. As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they may enable new ways that collaborative activity can occur. We posit the possibility of a new kind of AI entity: the “Apex Collaborator,” a computational system with capabilities for cooperation and partnership that are superior, in at least some ways, to those of humans. Just as apex predators shape the ecosystems in which they live through predation, Apex Collaborators would shape human-AI networks through their ability to enhance peaceful coexistence, collective problem-solving, and shared decision-making. “AI as an Apex Collaborator” flips the normal scripts of “AI as danger” or “AI as passive deliverer of benefits to humans,” instead conceiving of AI as a catalyst and enabler capable of lifting human abilities to cooperate above their evolutionary trajectory. This Article maps the legal architecture needed to guide AI development toward this collaborative potential, while simultaneously mapping fundamental implications particular coding decisions may have for the law. We address key areas requiring reform: liability regimes governing potential harms to humans, property, or other AIs, copyright law to enable AI training, structures and strictures for AI self-determination, clear accountability for AI-assisted actions and AI agents, interoperability standards, and alignment requirements. The Article proposes specific proactive and enforcement mechanisms for AI-ogenic conflict resolution, military restrictions, and data protection including crossborder transfer controls. We outline pathways to foster beneficial collaboration while preventing harmful applications. In particular, we explore the potential for AIs acting as Apex Collaborators to support humanity’s transition to sustainability. Our framework recognizes that as AI systems advance toward apex collaboration capabilities, they may need to participate in their own governance, monitoring and responding to not only harmful AI developments but also previously impossible benefits to humanity.
Sex is at the very core of individual identity. It affects the conception of the self and the way others view the individual. Every day, one's sex may open and close doors, access to communities, and opportunities. Laws that define sex may affirm scientific knowledge and protect people, or threaten to unravel the facts and the reality of sex. A deep unmooring of sex is underway, and this Article aims to halt it. On day one of the current presidential term, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." The Executive Order seeks to define sex as immutable at conception in order to stop a problem it characterizes as follows: "Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women's domestic abuse shelters to women's workplace showers." The Executive Order follows laws in multiple states that have restricted access to women's and girls' sports, restricted access to bathrooms, and prohibited or restricted access to gender affirming care. This Article takes seriously the assertion that there is a biological reality of sex. By examining the scientific and medical evidence, this Article demonstrates that sex determination does not and cannot occur at fertilization, but is instead a complex process occurring at various stages of human development from the embryonic and fetal stage through adulthood.
This Article discusses the impacts of the introduction of a data ownership scheme on access to information. It does so with reference to the distinction between data, defined as some representation of information by a specific medium (the syntactic level), and the information itself (the semantic level). With respect to data, it then looks at the difference between standard property rights and intellectual property (IP) rights, similarly assessing impacts on access to information. Private control at the semantic level is bad policy as it effects particularly serious limitations, relative to private control at the syntactic level, on the availability of information in society. IP-type rights similarly effect more serious limitations on the availability of information in society than do standard property rights over data. Focusing on the syntactic-semantic divide to discuss the data ownership case clarifies a few things. First, although there are reasons to be more solicitous of the case for data ownership for data subjects than the case for data ownership for others, there must be an acknowledgment of the fact that the former case often requires data ownership over the information itself. The two premier rationales for granting data ownership to data subjects are that such rights would enable data subjects to protect their privacy, and that it would enable them to claim a share in the benefits of the data economy. This Article points out that any effective attainment of these rationales for data ownership for data subjects requires that data subjects be empowered to exclude others from information even before its collection; that is, even before its representation in syntactic form. This is exclusion power over semantic information. Second, the data ownership for data subjects case is less objectionable in the context of control at the syntactic level as such control is less likely to lead to indirect semantic-level control. By contrast, control at the syntactic level by data collectors creates the problem of indirect semantic control. There is, therefore, no meaningful case for data ownership for data collectors, even at the syntactic level. But the reduced likelihood of indirect semantic-level control in the context of data subjects means that there are sometimes prospects for propertarian rights for data subjects over data being structured to avoid semantic control. What emerges from this understanding is a pattern in which policy supports some syntactic bases for a propertarian remedy for data subjects, but otherwise counsels against data ownership. Finally, those bases for a propertarian remedy over data for data subjects are limited to discrete areas where data ownership for data subjects can be deployed with little, or no, control being exerted at the semantic level, and therefore at little to no cost in public access to information. This is likely to be especially true in the context of standard property as semantic-level control by data subjects is more likely to be a non-issue in this case.
To this point, we have developed some idea of what progress might have meant to the constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and later judges. We need not attempt the fruitless task of doing any precise head count of the variations of the concrete meaning, perceived likelihood, or value of progress among those parties. Doubtless some persons were more optimistic than others.178 But we need only assume that enough constitutional Framers, ratifiers, and judicial interpreters sufficiently shared any mainstream understanding of progress. Any such constitutional legitimacy of the idea, or the multiple ideas, of progress licenses the language of progress embraced in Trop.
Civil rights cases brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 are very difficult for plaintiffs to win. Commentators generally blame stringent doctrinal and pleading standards for plaintiffs’ low rates of success. This Article instead focuses on factors related to attorneys who litigate civil rights cases: the identity of the attorney (i.e., whether the attorney is a solo practitioner or affiliated with a firm or a nonprofit), the prior experience of the attorney in litigating civil rights cases, and whether these two elements are related to plaintiff success. We identified and coded the dockets for 463 civil rights cases, or 20% of all cases initiated between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2022, in five federal district courts (the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Southern District of Texas, the Northern District of California, the Middle District of Florida, and the Northern District of Ohio). This large, original data set yielded a wealth of information about the relationship between the existence of representation, the identity of attorneys who litigate civil rights cases, the prior experience of attorneys who litigate civil rights cases, and how all of these factors relate to plaintiff success in civil rights litigation. Our Article answers the question posed in the title in the affirmative: Yes, available evidence indicates that attorneys matter in civil rights litigation. We find an association between some of the information we compiled in our data set and the degree of plaintiff success in litigation, particularly with respect to prior attorney experience. However, more information and study are needed to determine exactly how attorneys matter. We conclude with the hope that our Article will serve as a foundational step in promoting research about an understanding of how attorneys influence litigation under § 1983.
Are ChatGPT and Midjourney tools or creators? Ownership of billions of AI-assisted creative outputs hangs in the balance. Copyright scholars have long debated whether an autonomous artificial intelligence could qualify as an author, but this remains a hypothetical question. Despite widespread application of the term “AI” to software products of the 2020s, autonomously creative artificial intelligence still does not exist. Today’s commercial AI products—such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Suno, Perplexity, and Lumo—are simply the newest generation of computer software. They do not qualify as “artificial intelligence” in either the scientific or science fiction senses. They are mere computer programs, tools that act only upon instructions of human creators. Under basic principles of copyright law, long applied to computer software, the human user of the software program is entitled to protection of the output. Every “AI-generated” work has a human author. To prove that point, this Article’s centerpiece is a Socratic dialogue, presented as a conversation between myself and a large language model (LLM). Following long tradition, this dialogue is structured to lead readers to a logical conclusion; namely, that every “AI-generated” work has a human author. By design, the narrative presents as an encounter between two minds. In reality, there is only one intelligence at work—mine. This dialogue serves several purposes. Of interest to scholars in any discipline, it demonstrates how we can use digital dialectic to explore hard problems, identify related literature, develop theories, and achieve new insights. Thematically, it explains how LLM software works, contrasts this with common misconceptions about “artificial intelligence,” and reflects on the intellectual work we do when we use LLM software and what this means for the authorship question in copyright law. It also models how scholars—and lawyers—can leverage LLM AI tools to conduct more powerful research, thinking, and analysis. Finally, it offers copyright scholars a welldocumented specific instance of AI-assisted writing, so that we can move from hypothetical debate to empirical analysis of generative authorship. The dialogue thus serves as argument, methodology, and demonstration— piercing the illusion of artificial intelligence to offer a more realistic understanding of today’s generative software as tools, not creators. The Article also surveys over four decades of copyright scholarship about authorship and artificial intelligence, distinguishing between hypothetical and empirical AI scholarship. Copyright issues surrounding AI have long been explored hypothetically. In my view, there is now an urgent need for empirical AI scholarship. The new school of generative empiricists ground their legal analysis in real-world study of how artists, musicians, and writers use the new tools to explore, play, study, and create. The longhypothetical copyright debate presumed an autonomously-acting artificial intelligence. Empirical AI scholarship emphasizes that today’s generative technology does not fit this description. Midjourney and ChatGPT are software tools, subject to the same rules of copyright that govern Photoshop and Microsoft Word. Under the Supreme Court’s Feist standard of originality, software users are entitled to copyright ownership of the output whenever they contribute at least a minimal spark of creativity.
As facial recognition technology (FRT) becomes increasingly embedded in policing, concerns and controversies over the lack of consent, misidentification, and mass surveillance grow. This Comment compares how the European Union (EU) and Washington State (Washington) regulate law enforcement’s use of FRT to mitigate risks to individual rights. The EU governs FRT use through a robust legal framework, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Law Enforcement Directive (LED), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), which offer protections against these risks. In contrast, Washington’s pioneering statute, Wash. Rev. Code section 43.386, promotes transparency and limits the use of FRT. However, the statute does not provide enforceable rights, as it focuses more on internal oversight than on granting individuals direct remedies. This comparative analysis concludes that while both frameworks attempt to balance government convenience with civil liberties, the EU’s rights-centered model likely provides stronger protections. Accordingly, United States jurisdictions ought to adopt protections modeled on the EU’s rights-based framework to safeguard civil liberties against the risks posed by FRT more effectively.
