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"
Apr 30, 2026 Lisa Larrimore OuelletteIntellectual Property Law
The push for greater clinical trial transparency is typically framed as a conflict between companies’ interest in protecting trade secrets and the public’s interest in accessing health-relevant information. But a new article by economists Dennis Byrski and Lucy Xiaolu Wang analyzes an underappreciated dimension of this debate: clinical trial disclosure also affects patenting. When trial data becomes public, it creates prior art that can block subsequent patents related to the drug. The authors document that European marketing authorization—which requires substantial data disclosure—leads to significant declines in secondary patenting on drug modifications like new dosages and formulations. The result is a regulatory check on pharmaceutical patent “evergreening”: once authorization-related disclosures enter the public domain, many incremental follow-on patents become harder to obtain.
Timing is critical in patent law. To obtain a patent in the United States, the European Patent Office, or other jurisdictions, an applicant must show that their invention is new and nonobvious (or in Europe, has an “inventive step”) compared with the prior art, which includes a host of publications and activities that predate the patent filing (including sale of the drug itself for post-marketing patents). At the same time, applicants must disclose sufficient information about the invention; for pharmaceutical patents, human clinical trial data generally are not required, but applicants must provide a credible reason to expect the drug to work, such as in vitro or in vivo testing. These requirements place temporal limits on patenting: applications must be filed after gathering sufficient evidence to satisfy the disclosure requirements, but before prior art destroys the invention’s novelty. Continue reading "Clinical Trial Transparency and Patent Prior Art"
Apr 29, 2026 Emma CaveHealth Law
Health law does not have the luxury of standing still. Scientific advances, clinical practice changes, and entirely new technological possibilities are on the horizon. Technology, Health and Law in Life and Death is a collection edited by Dr. Neera Bhatia that asks what it means for law to keep pace with innovation without slipping into either uncritical enthusiasm or anxious prohibition. It is an agenda-setting question, and the book handles it with unusual range, across birth, life, and death.
The collection illustrates how technological change is not a series of isolated events but a continuing pressure. When law lags behind, governance tends to relocate rather than disappear altogether. Professional guidance, standards, litigation, commercial risk management strategies, and researcher governance practices can end up doing the work that legislation or formal regulation has not yet done. In controversial domains like reproduction, medical device safety, and end-of-life practices, these forms of governance can distribute risk unevenly and entrench inequalities before they have been properly debated. Continue reading "Keeping Pace with Technological Advances"
Apr 28, 2026 Kaiponanea MatsumuraFamily Law
Nila Bala,
Guilt by Parenthood, 136
Yale L.J. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at
SSRN (Oct. 5, 2025).
As a person of a certain age, I’ve attended my fair share of dinner parties hosted by parents of young children. More times than I can count, the conversation has been interrupted by sounds emanating from a baby monitor; parents will activate their smartphones, searching night-vision images of fidgeting children for the telltale glowing eyes that indicate that their child is awake. This innocuous-seeming surveillance is the entry point into what Nila Bala describes as “a parenting culture…defined by constant involvement and supervision” in her compelling new article, Guilt by Parenthood. (P. 41.) As children age, parents monitor their locations with wearables, track their smart phone usage, and watch their comings and goings through motion-activated cameras. In all my years passively observing these parents trade one form of monitoring for another, only a few have ever even questioned whether they were invading the privacy of their children. None of them doubted their right to do so.
Much has been written by family law scholars in recent years about the expansion and evolution of parental rights as a legal concept, especially as courts and lawmakers have used it as a justification to limit what is taught in schools and to curtail children’s exploration of their gender and sexual identities. Much, too, has been written by criminal law scholars about the public’s desire to punish parents for the transgressions of their children, as recent high-profile prosecutions of the parents of school shooters illustrate. Bala, whose expertise lies at the intersection of both realms, convincingly argues that recent developments in these seemingly disparate areas share the same normative underpinning. The assumption that parents have the right to monitor their children draws support from the conception of children as property of their parents. This conception is a holdover of coverture, the regime that vested total control—akin to ownership—of wives and children in the male head of household. Continue reading "My Child"
Apr 27, 2026 Ryan ThoresonEquality
As feminist scholars have long observed, the rise of populist governance has often been fueled by the enforcement of rigid gender and family roles. Populist leaders frequently cast themselves as the guardians of traditional gender norms and family structures and disparage global elites as imposing new or foreign ideas on unwilling publics. Recently, right-wing governments around the globe have reliably campaigned against what they have called “gender ideology,” a flexible and protean term that can include anything from changing gender norms, to same-sex marriage, to legal gender recognition for transgender people.
Yet the rightward shift toward authoritarian governance in many countries has coincided with a relatively recent recognition of LGBTQ rights in constitutional jurisprudence. Rehan Abeyratne’s excellent new book, Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment, examines how LGBTQ rights have fared amid democratic backsliding and a retreat from a coordinated and generally progressive global constitutionalism. Abeyratne focuses on developments in three jurisdictions: the United States, India, and Hong Kong. He argues that decisions affirming LGBTQ rights have thus far survived an illiberal, authoritarian turn in each of these jurisdictions. This is because LGBTQ rights have provided a vehicle for judges in these jurisdictions either to signal a commitment to liberal values by recognizing at least some LGBTQ rights claims even as they acquiesce to a rightward turn in other respects, or to assert some modicum of judicial independence by ruling against the government and affirming LGBTQ rights claims in the face of growing constraints. Continue reading "Can Global LGBTQ Rights Jurisprudence Survive the Authoritarian Turn?"
Apr 24, 2026 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
- Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica M. Silbey, How AI Destroys Institutions, 77 UC L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (Dec. 8, 2025).
- Andrew Perlman, A Response to “How AI Destroys Institutions” (Jan. 29, 2026), available at SSRN.
A terribly wise man once said—actually, he has said it again and again—that the core crisis of our time is an institutional crisis. The institutions of civil society—public and private, secular and religious—have seen public trust in them plummet in the polls year after year, like a Colorado Rockies fan watching the baseball standings. It’s indicative of the crisis—and the culture that feeds it—that the social-media slogan “burn it all down” rose to popularity among the cosplay revolutionaries of the Bluesky left and then became popular among the cosplay nihilists of the Twitter right.
At the intersection of nihilism and opportunism—which is to say, where we are right now—one can find the inevitable technology enthusiasts. Buoyed by a relentless optimism and unburdened by any sense of community or history, these cheerful Vandals argue that “burning it all down is good, #actually.” They have just the match to start the blaze: AI. There is no shortage of current legal scholarship on AI. (Surely a sentence with a double meaning. There’s lots of current scholarship about AI—and, no one doubts, lots of scholarship written by it, “legal scholarship on AI” in the sense that an addict is “on meth.”) There’s less on the landscape it is altering. So it’s a pleasure to find an article that focuses less on how AI is remaking everything, and more on what AI is remaking—or killing.
How AI Destroys Institutions, by Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey, focuses our attention on our civic institutions, which “form the invisible but essential backbone of social life.” Hartzog and Silbey argue that AI is “a death sentence” for these institutions. Even an AI non-enthusiast may find a lot to disagree with in this short, sharp paper. But the authors focus their lens commendably and well. It’s not a doctrinal paper. It does not, in fact, mention the Constitution. Not everything that is essential to our constitutional order does. (Arguably the most timely constitutional law book of the day is this one, and the Constitution won’t be the most important element there, either.) But the ongoing crisis of our civic institutions is both fundamentally constitutional in nature and affects our ability to respond to the more conventionally “constitutional” problems we face. AI is deeply embedded in both and should be understood as such. Continue reading "Robby The Robot vs. The Little Platoons"
Apr 23, 2026 SpearItCriminal Law
When NFL star Colin Kaepernick was in the spotlight in 2016 for protesting police violence, the notion of “defund the police” was just a fledgling idea in criminal justice reform. At that time, he aligned with and amplified the Black Lives Matter movement, which had reached a zenith in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. This explosive moment put police practices under heavy scrutiny and thrust the notion of “defund” into mainstream debates on police reform. Some states have embraced aspects of the “defund” ideology, but unfortunately, have faced some unsavory consequences that produce the very problem sought to be prevented.
In (Non)Police Brutality, Shawn E. Fields explains the unintended consequences of moves to defund the police. Perhaps the most damaging of these have emerged due to the reality that non-police actors can be brutal too. The main justification for defunding the police, brutality, is sometimes one of the consequences of defunding—only now it is at the hands of EMTs, mental health workers, and other police substitutes. This paradox produces a most insalubrious outcome since civilians have less legal recourse against the acts of non-police responders, leaving victims in a worse position than if they had been brutalized by police. Continue reading "How “Defund the Police” Diminishes the 4th Amendment"
