Executive Order 14105 "Addressing United States Investments in Certain National Security Technologies and Products in Countries of Concern" was enacted to protect U.S. national security interests in light of China's military technological growth. This Executive Order creates an outbound investment review program that restricts investments by a U.S. person into companies in specified countries operating in certain technology sectors. This Note will discuss the background ofgeopolitical tensions between the United States and China, review E.O. 14105, and argue that the program it creates results in burdensome unintended consequences to the U.S. economy. These unintended circumstances include: (1) high regulatory compliance costs, (2) trade wars, (3) a decrease in U.S. competitiveness, and (4) retaliatory policies from China. Along the way, this Note will propose methods and considerations to alleviate some of these burdens.
Rap music has earned its prominent place in American music culture.1 It provides a unique creative outlet for artists to share their experiences and criticize the systems in which they live. Rap lyrics, often metaphorical or exaggerated, have been weaponized by prosecutors to attack the character of artist-defendants at a level not seen with other modes of creative expression. The lyrics of an artist are turned against them in a manner that invites unfair prejudice and improper character evidence into legal proceedings. In the 2020s, major progress has been made to curb this practice, with several jurisdictions introducing legislation that would limit the use of creative expression, such as rap lyrics, as evidence in trials. While these proposed laws are a significant step to protecting creative expression, they leave gaps that allow prosecutors to continue their misuse of lyrics as evidence. This Note argues that an effective creative expression evidence rule must have the following characteristics: (1) a presumption of inadmissibility, (2) a distinct framework to investigate whether a lyric can be properly interpreted literally, thereby rebutting the presumption of inadmissibility, (3) an exception for lyrics that create a cause of action by themselves, and (4) a requirement that creative expression evidence be presented to a jury in the least prejudicial medium available. This Note invites legislators wishing to protect creative expression to consider Rule X, a model rule that combines the strengths of current legislation to strike a balance between protecting creative expression and ensuring such expression cannot be used to shield wrongdoings or genuine confessions with immunity.
California is currently facing an insurance crisis. The increased impact of climate change, including extreme droughts and wildfires, poses new risks to the insurance industry, especially when it comes to homeowner's insurance. Insurance providers have limited their homeowner coverage, with many companies leaving the state entirely due to the undervaluation of climate risk in the policies they provide. A so-called "climate insurance bubble" is already beginning to burst. The state's last-resort public insurance program, the FAIR Plan, has expanded rapidly to fill in for the lack of insurance providers in the state. But because FAIR Plan policies are expensive and limited, many Californians are forced to go without any home insurance coverage at all.1 This Note will examine California's ongoing insurance crisis, focusing on the factors driving the increased severity and frequency of wildfires in the state. It will then explore the impact of these wildfires on the housing market and provide an overview of California's insurance regulations and the current state of the insurance market. The Note will highlight the drawbacks and benefits of sustainable Insurance Strategy, and offer recommendations to strengthen wildfire insurance regulation by incorporating more consumer-focused strategies. The recommendations include providing additional financial incentives for homeowners to fireproof their properties, expanding wildfire preparedness education, and rebuilding communities affected by fires with greater resilience by utilizing smarter, more sustainable land use practices.
All three branches of the federal government have wrestled with how the law could or should regulate social media applications to mitigate the harms of disinformation. However, most proposed solutions make the same critical mistake: Lawmakers may focus on speech regulation or even economic regulation to solve for disinformation but these solutions do not actually address contemporary, technological vectors of disinformation. In today's increasingly technologically driven global speech environment, the lynchpin for disinformation is not speech but data. In particular, algorithmic personalization is a new, technological factor that makes disinformation especially harmful. Luckily, data protection and privacy regulation can greatly curb the impact of algorithmic personalization and, correspondingly, disinformation harms as well. These privacy regulatory solutions also do not have the negative factors that make speech and economic regulatory solutions difficult and ineffective. Thus, lawmakers would be better off moving away from speech and economic regulation to instead focus on privacy regulation to mitigate the harms of disinformation, including disinformation found on foreign-owned social media applications, like TikTok. Legal solutions that focus on data privacy, instead of pure speech regulation or economic regulation, are better solutions for disinformation for four reasons. First, privacy regulation addresses the root of the problem for today's disinformation: the technological factor of personalization, driven by technological developments like the internet and artificial intelligence ("AI"). Second, privacy regulations are more likely to pass constitutional muster, avoidingFirstAmendment roadblocks. Third, privacy regulations are likely less controversial to an American public primed to fear censorship. Finally, privacy regulations would be less likely to discriminate harshly against foreign companies, resolving international tensions around perceived economic protectionism and trade unfairness.
A recent challenge to the Biden Administration's military aid to Israel as aiding genocide presents an important question of the role of U.S. courts in adjudicating claims that top U.S. officials, in their execution of U.S foreign policy, are violating fundamental international law norms, such as the prohibition against committing or aiding and abetting genocide. Both the District Court and the Court ofAppeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed the case as presenting a non-justiciable political question. The Ninth Circuit's decision raises the broad question of whether challenges to U.S. government violations of fundamental norms of international law can ever be justiciable in domestic courts. The court's holding suggests that all cases challenging a broad U.S. policy of committing or aiding torture or genocide abroad will be dismissed as a political question. While the panel attempted to temper its holding by asserting that "although some cases involving alleged genocide will be justiciable," the decision's rationale contradicts this. This essay will analyze Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden ("Defense for Children") as a window into broader, theoretical questions of the legitimacy and viability of the political question doctrine as the courts have applied it to foreign affairs disputes. Further, this discussion of Defense for Children will fashion a proposed solution to the conundrum federal courts face when confronted with broad challenges to U.S. foreign policy as violative of the Constitution, congressional statutes, or international law.
