Discourse publishes shorter articles that are timely, interdisciplinary, and novel. Discourse strives to serve as a platform for scholars, ideas, and discussions that have often been overlooked in traditional law review settings. Because we seek to publish pieces that are accessible to legal and non-legal audiences alike, Discourse articles are generally between 3,000 and 10,000 words. Like our print journal, Discourse articles are published on Westlaw, Lexis, and in other legal databases, as well as our own website. Beginning with Volume 68, Discourse began publishing special issues of Law Meets World.
Abstract The privatization of public K-12 education in the United States has accelerated dramatically in recent years, blurring the line between public and private schooling. This shift has raised critical constitutional and statutory questions, particularly for students with disabilities. Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides robust protections for this...
Abstract Across the country, students of color face daily threats of arrest, exclusion, and violence at the hands of school police officers. Whether deemed threatening, defiant, or hypersexualized, Black students, in particular, pay a heavy price to access their right to free public education. Despite victories in dismantling educational carcerality since the mid-2000s, efforts to formally remove...
Abstract Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts...
Abstract Dobbs’ impact on growing AAPI communities is underexamined in legal scholarship. This Essay begins to fill that gap, seeking to bring together an overdue focus on the socio-legal experiences of AAPI communities with examination of the effects of reversing Roe and Casey on women of color. It does so by prompting a research agenda that connects diverse AAPI women’s experiences, abortion...
Abstract Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously...
Abstract Judicial and carceral systems increasingly use criminal risk assessment algorithms to make decisions that affect individual freedoms. While the accuracy, fairness, and legality of these algorithms have come under scrutiny, their tangible impact on the American justice system remains almost completely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the effect of the Correctional Offender...
Abstract How to govern a technology like artificial intelligence (AI)? When it comes to designing and deploying fair, ethical, and safe AI systems, standards are a tempting answer. By establishing the best way of doing something, standards might seem to provide plug-and-play guardrails for AI systems that avoid the costs of formal legal intervention. AI standards are all the more tantalizing...
Abstract This Essay explores the concept of sovereignty in relation to artificial intelligence. Although sovereignty has long been used to describe the status of nation states, the concept of sovereignty is used in multiple ways in the digital context. It is used to articulate state policies in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) and data, an assertion of state sovereignty that often has...
Abstract This essay considers the emerging transnational governance frameworks for AI that are being developed under the auspices of a handful of powerful regulatory blocs, namely the United States, the European Union, and China, which are best positioned to influence emerging global standards. It argues that these represent a relatively homogenous set of global interests, and that while...
Abstract This Essay addresses reasons for impacted stakeholder involvement in AI governance, ranging from democratic accountability norms to principles of regulatory design. It evaluates several recent examples of both soft and hard law, noting a range of examples of impacted stakeholder participation. It closes with a critique: none of these laws adequately contemplates how to craft transparency...
Abstract The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act takes a so-called risk-based approach to regulating artificial intelligence. In addition to being celebrated by industry, this risk-based approach is likely to spread due to the ‘Brussels Effect’ whereby EU legislation is taken as a model in other jurisdictions around the world. This article investigates how the AI Act’s risk-based...
Abstract In the face of current technological developments and the uptake in use of opaque algorithmic systems, democracy requires to strengthen the rule of law wherever public or private actors use algorithmic systems. The law must set out the requirements on AI systems’ creation, documentation and use that are necessary in a democratic society and organize appropriate accountability and...
In this essay series, the authors explore different aspects of emerging AI governance regimes. Though about quite different topics, the essays have many common threads. Several of the essays demonstrate that many of the difficulties with AI governance are less challenges of AI than challenges of governance generally—navigating power struggles and competing interests, getting buy-in, and avoiding...
Abstract Among the world’s largest polluters, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), not privately controlled businesses, are the greatest contributors to global industrial emissions. SOEs are major contributors to fossil-fuel-related carbon emissions, so understanding how to engage SOEs in combating climate change is essential. Because SOEs do not respond to all of the same pressures and incentives as...