All posts tagged: Technology

Photo of people in a board room with biometric face scans

Temple Law Confronts Policy Gaps for Emerging Technologies

Newly founded institute advocates for federal regulation of AI-enabled biometrics The technology boom of the last several decades showcases incredible feats of human ingenuity. Biometric technology in particular has quickly and quietly embedded itself into our lives as we monitor our kids, calories, and homes through our phones. However, as we idly scroll, we are increasingly being watched. For example, the Philadelphia Police Department has access to more than 1,800 surveillance cameras through one of a growing number of fusion centers in the United States, operated by state and local law enforcement in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Pennsylvania driver’s license photos and records feed into the state’s law enforcement database, JNET, which operates a facial recognition system called JFRS. As humankind continues to invent greater, more powerful, and potentially more intrusive tech, Temple University’s newly founded Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology (iLIT) seeks to help regulate them by focusing on practical engagement and the human dimension to making and using technology. Its mission is to deliver equity, bridge academic and …

Temple-Law-Library

Mind the Gap

We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in legal research—both how it is done and how it should be taught. For generations of lawyers, the process of legal research remained static, rooted in a bibliographic approach that reflected the print publication of legal materials. However, as legal sources have become digitized and migrated online, it is now impossible to talk about legal research from a purely bibliographic perspective. The organization of legal materials in digital databases is getting further and further away from the world of books it once replicated. The search box has replaced most print finding tools for legal research, and lawyers conduct most of their research electronically. Today, it would be irresponsible to teach legal research without a focus on electronic research, and many have abandoned teaching book research at all. In recent years, legal writing professors and law librarians have given much scholarly attention to questions of pedagogy and training in a world of online legal research. One question that poses a serious and ongoing challenge is that …

Stock Market on iPhone

Financial Weapons of War

A new type of warfare is upon us. In this new mode of war, finance is the most powerful weapon, bullets are not fired, financial institutions are the targets, and almost everyone is at risk. Instead of smart bombs, improvised explosives, and unmanned drones –– economic sanctions, financial restrictions, and cyber programs are the weapons of choice. This is the reality of modern financial warfare. This Article offers an early examination of this new mode of war. It explores the new financial theater of war, analyzes the modern arsenal of financial weapons, highlights emerging legal tensions, and proposes key recommendations for current and future financial warfare. The Article begins with a general survey of the modern financial infrastructure, the emerging battlefield of modern warfare. Next, it provides a more detailed inventory of the financial weapons of war. It accounts for traditional weapons like economic sanctions, anti-money laundering regulations, and banking restrictions, as well as cyber weapons like distributed denial-of-service attacks, data manipulation hacks, and destructive intrusions. It also explains how these weapons are used in …

Financial Newspaper

Infinite Financial Intermediation

Intermediation is a fundamental fact of finance. Intermediaries like commercial banks, investment banks, stockbrokers, mutual funds, and stock exchanges form the fabric of modern finance. Yet despite all these financial links, entrepreneurs and innovators continue to endeavor towards the possibilities of fundamentally disrupting and disintermediating these existential financial ties, breaking apart from the financial main, and building new financial islands. This Article offers a studied commentary of those financial links and those disengaging endeavors, the ties that thread the fabric of modern finance and the efforts to tear those threads asunder. It presents an examination of the functional evolution of financial intermediation, explains the difficulties of true financial disintermediation by revealing the underappreciated links that remain when traditional links are decoupled, and highlights potential implications and recommendations arising from such a revelation. Building upon a rich literature that spans law, economic, finance, and sociology, it seeks to explain the strong adhesiveness of financial intermediation and explore the looming challenges presented by future financial intermediation. Collectively, this Article provides a different perspective for thinking about financial …

commuter on phone

Your Kindle Dims My and My Students’ Empathy

I am the commuter many of you hate. Maybe I see you alone at the bus stop reading a book that looks interesting and ask you about it. Perhaps I see you looking a little confused on the train platform and ask if you need help figuring out where you are going. Or maybe I see you wearing that Phillies shirt on the train after the game and ask you the score, why you aren’t a Cubs fan like you should be, and how the Phillies will ever improve. In short, I am the overly interested in you transplanted Midwestern type that you may be trying to avoid, trying to draw you into a longer conversation to learn about you. You will succeed in chasing me away with a one-word answer—I am also Midwestern enough to know to leave you alone based on your response—but we’ll miss something. We’ll miss the chance to get to learn a little more about the world and each other together, to possibly become friends (it happens this way!), to …