TikTok has never been more popular or more controversial. The short-form video platform does not just rule online culture, it shapes it. None of its rivals – not Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat – has come close to capturing its magical hold on our phones and attention spans, especially with young people. The problem? China. Ryan Calo, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
Conversation from the BLM protests in 2020 inspired Travonna Thompson-Wiley and others to form the Black Action Coalition. Group members started weekly marches. Then, when they joined daily demonstrations backed by more experienced activists like Nikkita Oliver, Thompson-Wiley heard a cacophony of outrage finally coalesce into a chorus of three demands: Free the protesters. Invest in the Black community. Defund the police. But three years since protesters hatched a bold plan to reimagine public safety, Seattle hasn’t sniffed divestment of this magnitude. Angélica Cházaro, assistant professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
A proposal for Philadelphia Police to use drones as a crime-fighting tool could face opposition from privacy advocates who view it as an intrusion unlikely to reduce street violence. Mary Fan, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
A proposal for Philadelphia Police to use drones as a crime-fighting tool could face opposition from privacy advocates who view it as an intrusion unlikely to reduce street violence. Mary Fan, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
Changing the clocks is bad for your health and bad for the economy. The U.S. and Europe are trying to stop the seasonal switches, but with little success. Steve Calandrillo, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
There oughta be a law. That’s what millions of Americans may proclaim when they wake up Sunday morning, cursing the fact that Daylight Saving Time embezzled an hour of sleep. Turns out, in fact there is law. Steve Calandrillo, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
New Mexico’s House of Representatives has endorsed new limitations on public access to police body-camera video when it captures images of nudity, violence, injury or death. The 46-19 vote Thursday sent the bill to the Senate for consideration. Proponents of the initiative include the New Mexico State Police and associations representing county and municipal governments, including sheriffs’ departments. Mary Fan, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
Seattle may never embrace the twice-a-year clock-changing ritual of daylight saving time (DST) that state legislators voted to do away with four years ago, but we love that extra hour of evening light. Steve Calandrillo, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
Schnapper said it was his view that the law draws a distinction when it comes to promoting content on the platforms, and that he spent "a very long hour and a quarter trying to answer that question" — a reference to the recent arguments. But he said he was not there to "retry the case."
To kick off the first session, Dean Lawson called out the “outdated ranking systems” for not “doing anything to measure schools that do more with less.” Dean Lawson went on to highlight the American Bar Association’s 509 disclosure reports as a valuable resource for prospective law students as well as a range of other sources of important information. She critiqued U.S. News for disregarding this readily available, regulated, and consistent source of data.
New search warrants were released in the Idaho murders case this week, along with the details of a hearing in which the court discussed reports of a potential conflict of interest involving Bryan Kohberger's public defender. Reports say Kohberger's defender Anne Taylor also represented the mother of Xana Kernodle, one of the victims, in an unrelated case. William Bailey, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
"Discussions of the state Supreme Court’s case involving Washington’s capital gains tax often confuse the measure’s wisdom with its legality. This is a common mistake. Many comments framed as legal arguments instead express the writer’s view about the wisdom of the measure," writes William Andersen, professor emeritus of law at the UW.
Attorney conflict rules landed law professor Eric Schnapper a pair of blockbuster US Supreme Court social media cases that could limit the scope of tech company protections.
Pig butchering, as it’s known, is a new type of online con perpetrated by overseas scammers who “fatten” up victims – making them believe they have made boatloads of money in cryptocurrency often using manipulated apps and websites – before absconding with all their money. Experts say billions of dollars are lost to this type of pernicious scheme each year. The hard truth is that recovering money lost to crypto scams is extremely rare, even when law enforcement does take up a case. But in recent years, a nascent industry has cropped up, offering services that promise to do just that. Mary Fan, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
"We do need to be vigilant as civilian, commercial, and military activities heat up in space," Saadia Pekkanen, director of the Space Law, Data and Policy Program at the University of Washington School of Law, told Newsweek. "As mega constellations of satellites go into space, we have to worry about collision avoidance with not just other assets but also debris. Collisions between spacecraft and the failures of older satellites and spacecraft also contributes to debris."
Eric Schnapper is the lawyer representing US national family members of Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian citizen who died during a 2017 terrorist attack in Turkey. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for this attack, which killed 39 and injured 69 people at a nightclub.
The Supreme Court spent more than five hours over two days considering the responsibilities and failures of Big Tech, but in the end seemed reluctant to impose substantial changes in how social media platforms can be held liable for contentious or even dangerous content on their sites. Eric Schnapper, professor of law at the UW, is quoted.
“Could, under your theory, CNN have been sued for aiding and abetting the September 11th attacks?” he asked Eric Schnapper, a University of Washington law professor who represented the plaintiffs. Schnapper suggested that the interview alone wouldn’t meet all the conditions of JASTA’s text and added, without elaborating, that the First Amendment might protect it as well.
Looming over the case was Tuesday's hearing in Gonzalez v. Google on the scope of Section 230. Should the court reject the plaintiffs' argument that YouTube's recommendation-based algorithms are not covered by 230's immunity, the ATA claims underlying Twitter v. Taamneh will almost certainly fail given that the plaintiffs' attorney, University of Washington School of Law professor Eric Schnapper, said that both cases center around such recommendations by the companies.
Eric Schnapper, an attorney at the University of Washington School of Law representing the Gonzales family, told the justices this morning that it's true Google is not liable under Section 230 for content posted on Youtube. Where it should be liable, he said, is for the catalog of recommendations it creates with those videos.
A lawyer for the family of Nohemi Gonzalez argued Tuesday that Google, which owns YouTube, should be subject to a lawsuit because of its own actions. It was “encouraging people to look at ISIS videos,” said Eric Schnapper, a University of Washington law professor.
But University of Washington School of Law Professor Eric Schnapper, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs Tuesday, emphasized that, whatever the industry's fears might be, the text of Section 230 simply does not immunize companies like YouTube when it uses algorithmic tools to push dangerous content like ISIS videos to its users. The law simply bars courts from finding those sites liable as publishers of that content, he said. To extend the immunity to algorithms that push content to users, "the industry has to go back to Congress and ask, 'We need you to broaden the statute.'"
The lawyer for the Gonzalez family, University of Washington law professor Eric Schnapper, argued that recommendations provided by platforms like YouTube are essentially editorial choices — those platforms could have been designed such that they don’t surface or recommend harmful or defamatory content, but they were not.
