Bolstering New York’s Tenant Protection Law: Ensuring Retroactive Application Under the Heightened Regina Standard

Introduction Rent regulation laws have long been a cornerstone of the New York City and New York State housing markets, enacted to combat excessive rent increases that risked pricing out low- and middle-income tenants. On June 14, 2019, the New York State Legislature enacted the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which brought sweeping changes to New York’s rental laws, including regulated and unregulated buildings. The HSTPA significantly expanded tenant protections across New York State, and specifically in New… Read More

Wrong Search at the Wrong Time: Keyword Search Warrants and the Fourth Amendment

Introduction On August 5, 2020, five members of a family were killed when their house was set ablaze. Kevin Bui admitted to investigators that he and two other teens burned the house down after his iPhone had been stolen. He used the Find My application and located his phone at the Green Valley Ranch home. It was not until the next day while reading the news about the arson that he realized he had targeted the wrong residence. The Denver… Read More

Navigating Campaign Finance Reform Through Publicly Funded Elections on the Local Level

Introduction Despite the Constitution’s silence on the issue of campaign finance, the Supreme Court has had a considerable hand in shaping the campaign finance regulatory structure of the United States. There are countless criticisms of the campaign finance system the Court has constructed. On the one hand, some scholars stipulate that, though they are critical of the system, it is an intelligible “product” of the Constitution. On the other hand, others argue that the “vision of democracy” portrayed in money-in-politics… Read More

Beneficial Conflicts of Interest

Abstract Conflicts of interest exist in both professional and private settings, and everyone experiences them from time to time. If a person harboring a conflict acts on it—meaning the person acts against interests she ought to uphold—innocent parties may be harmed. Accordingly, the key to addressing a conflict in most settings is to eliminate it, such as by prohibiting conflicted behavior or recusing oneself from a deliberative process. However, conflicts of interest have a special character in the securities realm,… Read More

Holistic Claim Construction

Abstract Jurisprudence in the area of defining patent scope is opaque and inconsistent. District courts and litigants cannot be certain of the bounds of the exclusive territory covered by a patent—defined by the patent’s claims—until the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit—the single patent appellate court in the nation—says what it is in an appeal after final judgement. The appellate court appears to simply redo the analysis of the district courts, yet often inexplicably reaches a different conclusion based… Read More

Nerds v. Nintendo: Video Game Decompilations Versus Rights-Holder Interests

Abstract Video game “decompilations”—a potentially technically inaccurate term referring to fan efforts to entirely reprogram video games based on reverse engineering those games—present an interesting case study for evaluating the scope of video game copyrightability, fair use, and public expectations about content availability. Decompilations usually comprise entirely new code and do not comprise any assets of the original video game, suggesting that the decompilations, if viewed as mere code, do not apparently infringe any video game copyrights. That said, decompilations… Read More

Adjudicating Algorithms: Accountability in Regulation of Surveillance, Privacy, and Discrimination

Introduction The movement for accountable algorithms has attained critical mass. That momentum includes a range of areas where the collection of data plays a key role, including privacy, online disinformation, surveillance, and screening for credit, housing, employment, and government benefits. For example, the White House has released an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bill of Rights that outlines standards and recourse for a host of AI applications that touch human needs and endeavors. Assessments, disclosure, and procedures for filing complaints about abuse are… Read More