Gemini said Lawmakers today face continuous calls to "future proof" the legal system against generative artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, targeted advertising, and all manner of emerging technologies. This Article takes a contrarian stance: it is not the law that needs bolstering for the future, but the future that needs protection from the law. From the printing press and the elevator to ChatGPT and online deepfakes, the recurring historical pattern is familiar. Technological breakthroughs provoke wonder, then fear, then legislation. The resulting legal regimes entrench incumbents, suppress experimentation, and displace long-standing legal principles with bespoke but brittle rules. Drawing from history, economics, political science, and legal theory, this Article argues that the most powerful tools for governing technological change--the general-purpose tools of the common law--are in fact already on the books, long predating the technologies they are now called upon to govern, and ready also for whatever the future holds in store. Rather than proposing any new statute or regulatory initiative, this Article offers something far rarer, a defense of doing less. It shows how the law's virtues--generality, stability, and adaptability--are best preserved not through prophylactic regulation, but through accretional judicial decision-making. The epistemic limits that make technological forecasting so unreliable and the hidden costs of early legislative intervention, including biased governmental enforcement and regulatory capture, mean that however fast technology may move, the law must not chase it. The case for legal restraint is thus not a defense of the status quo, but a call to preserve the conditions of freedom and equal justice under which both law and technology can evolve.
The Supreme Court decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld the constitutionality of Texas H.B. 1181, one of the most constitutionally vulnerable of these age verification laws, holding that it was subject to and satisfied intermediate scrutiny and the requirement that age verification regulations be "adequately tailored". However, the decision leaves unresolved practical challenges. What is the current state of age verification legislation in the United States? How can "adequate tailoring" be interpreted in a way that is accessible to non-legal experts, particularly those in technical and engineering domains? What age verification approaches are used today, what infrastructures and standards support them, and what tradeoffs do they introduce? This paper addresses those questions by proposing an analytical model to interpret "adequate tailoring" from multiple perspectives with associated governmental goals and interests, and by applying that model to evaluate both current state laws and widely used verification methods. This paper's major contributions include: (1) we mapped the current U.S. age-verification legislative landscape; (2) we introduce an analytical model to analyze "adequate tailoring" for age verification and potential application to other online regulatory policies; and (3) we analyze the main technical approaches to age verification, highlighting the practical challenges and tradeoffs from a technical perspective. Further, while we focus on U.S. State laws, the principles underlying our framework are applicable to age-verification debates and methods worldwide.
(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2025 10(1), 25-44 | Article | (Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2025 10(1), 25-44 | Article | (Table of Contents) 1. Introduction and background – 2. Dispensability of the indispensability criterion for independent discriminatory leveraging abuses – 3. Standard of the discriminatory leveraging abuse: what is the plus? – 4. The what-if dilemma: causation and the burden of proof – 5. The never-ending tale of the as-efficient-competitor-test – 6. Conclusion. | (Abstract) Almost fourteen years after the European Commission (EC) opened proceedings against Google for abusive behaviour, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled, confirming in its findings the EC decision of 2017 and siding with the 2021 decision of the General Court (GC) as well as the Advocate General opinion. In its Google Shopping judgment, the ECJ paved the way for an independent self-preferencing abuse and outlined the necessary prerequisites for such a type of abuse, which are generally transferrable to other situations. Discrimination – self-favouring and demotion of competitors – plus potentially anticompetitive or exclusionary effects seen in light of all the specific circumstances and accompanying practices constitutes an own form of abuse. Bronner is not applicable. The Court further emphasised the burden of proof for infringements on the Commission but applied a workable standard of proof that allowed the Commission to discharge its burden of proof without applying a full counterfactual analysis. It also clarified the applicability of the AEC-test.
Jun Wen Law, Bryan K. Mignone, Dharik S. Mallapragada
Low-carbon liquid fuels play a key role in energy system decarbonization scenarios. This study uses a multi-sector capacity expansion model of the contiguous United States to examine fuels production in deeply decarbonized energy systems. Our analysis evaluates how the shares of biofuels, synthetic fuels, and fossil liquid fuels change under varying assumptions about resource constraints (biomass and CO2 sequestration availability), fuel demand distributions, and supply flexibility to produce different fuel products. Across all scenarios examined, biofuels provide a substantial share of liquid fuel supply, while synthetic fuels deploy only when biomass or CO2 sequestration is assumed to be more limited. Fossil liquid fuels remain in all scenarios examined, primarily driven by the extent to which their emissions can be offset with removals. Limiting biomass increases biogenic CO2 capture within biofuel pathways, while limiting sequestration availability increases the share of captured atmospheric (including biogenic) carbon directed toward utilization for synthetic fuel production. While varying assumptions about liquid fuel demand distributions and fuel product supply flexibility alter competition among individual fuel production technologies, broader energy system outcomes are robust to these assumptions. Biomass and CO2 sequestration availability are key drivers of energy system outcomes in deeply decarbonized energy systems.
Tuva Källberg, Chi Yan Law, Jonathan C. Tan
et al.
The role of magnetic fields in regulating the formation of massive stars remains much debated. Here we present sub-millimeter polarimetric observations with JCMT-POL2 at $850\:μ$m of 13 regions of massive star formation selected from the SOFIA Massive (SOMA) star formation survey, yielding a total of 29 massive protostars. Our investigation of the $p'-I$ relationship suggests that grain alignment persists up to the highest intensities. We examine the relative orientations between polarization-inferred magnetic field direction and source column density elongation direction on small and large scales. On small scales, we find a bimodal distribution of these relative orientations, i.e., with an excess of near-parallel and near-perpendicular orientations. By applying a one-sample Kuiper test and Monte Carlo simulations to compare to a relative orientation distribution drawn from a uniform distribution, we statistically confirm this bimodal distribution, independent of the methods to measure structural orientation. This bimodal distribution suggests that magnetic fields are dynamically important on the local scales ($\lesssim 0.6\:$pc) of massive protostellar cores. We also examine how basic polarization properties of overall degree of polarization and local dispersion in polarization vector orientations depend on intrinsic protostellar properties inferred from spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling. We find a statistically significant anti-correlation between the debiased polarized fraction and the luminosity to mass ratio, $L_{\rm bol}/M_{\rm env}$, which hints at a change in the dust properties for protostellar objects at different evolutionary stages.
This article studies the temporal law of the KPZ fixed point. For the stationary geometry, we find the two-time law, which extends the single time law due to Baik-Rains and Ferrari-Spohn. For the droplet geometry, we find a relatively simpler formula for the multi-time law compared to a previous formula of Johansson and the author. These formulas are derived as the scaling limit of corresponding multi-time formulas for geometric last passage percolation.
The paper introduces the emergence, development of the constitutional social rights, and gives a historical overview to these rights in the 20th century. The aim of the paper is to show when the social idea and the appearance of social rights in the constitution began in the Hungarian constitutional system. However, according to the Hungarian legal literature, the first constitutional declaration of social rights in Hungary took place with the adoption of the 1949 constitution (Act XX of 1949), but as a result of my research I will show that in fact social provisions can be found in Article 6 of the so-called final Constitution of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The paper shows how social provisions appeared in the so-called minor constitution of 1946, and then describes the social law provisions of the socialist constitution of 1949. The paper also shows how the social provisions of the 1949 Hungarian People’s Republic Constitution changed between 1949 and 1989, and then describes in detail the changes in the social provisions of the Hungarian Constitution as a result of the political transition in 1989. The paper concludes with a description of the historical development of social rights in the 1989 constitution of the Hungarian People’s Republic, without going into the new Fundamental Law in force in 2012.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Law
This paper poses an important challenge to the growing trend of strategic environmental litigation in the EU: when making strategic choices about bringing, framing, and litigating claims, what becomes more important—being heard through strategically critical procedural choices or being true through ensuring that rights holders and the environment remain at the forefront of decision-making? There are many legal hurdles to bringing environmental claims and it is possible that the voice of the environment and those most adversely affected by its degradation is lost in the strategic legal decision-making. This study uses a small number unstructured scoping interviews with practitioners active in bringing litigation to the CJEU to inductively analyse voice and representation in strategic environmental litigation. This initial research indicates that there are areas which should be further explored. First, all of the practitioners brought up the issue of access to resources. This raises concerns about potential elitism. Second, practitioners highlighted that there are numerous strategic choices made during case selection and framing which could affect how voices are heard. Finally, practitioners felt strongly that admissibility rules have a negative impact on claimants’ voices. Challenges in legal standing and establishing individual harm or direct concern have an enormous impact on what claims are heard and how they are heard.
Law of Europe, Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence
The Springtime of Nations in Germany is mostly associated with the views of various moderate liberals who played leading roles during these revolutionary events. The case is different when it comes to the members of the most radical wing within the liberal movement, the so-called “democrats.” Their ideas are described far less frequently. The article presented analyzes the idea of human rights in the view of Gustav Struve – one of the most important figures in the German democratic movement. During the German Springtime of Nations, the notion of human rights was one of the most frequently discussed but also variably understood problems. G. Struve’s views regarding this question refer not only to the idea of human rights, they also form a kind of political manifesto including solutions for various problems encountered by average citizens along with suggestions concerning an equitable structure of the social order. These postulates were revolutionary and radical but often incoherent. Thus, they fit well into the characteristics of the whole German democratic movement in the first half of the 19th century, which was seen as an unpopular, unsystematic, eclectic and immature phenomenon. The article first describes G. Struve’s life in the context of various events of the German Springtime of Nations. Subsequently, it analyzes the notion of the human being, his functioning in the social community and the definition of his rights. The article ends with an analysis of the material content of the concept of human rights in the view of the described German radical.
* This article is an English translation of the paper published in Polish in Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History in 2022. See Lesiński, “«Wohlstand, Bildung und Freiheit für Alle.»Idea praw człowieka.”
The article is a review of the monograph entitled Bildung und Demokratie in der Weimarer Republik, published by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2022. This monograph is an effect of the academic conference “Bildung und Demokratie”, that took place in 2020 and was organized by the Weimar Republic Research Institution of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and Weimarer Republik e. V. The editors of the reviewed monograph, namely Andreas Braune, Sebastian Elsbach, and Ronny Noak, are renowned scholars specializing in problematics of the Weimar Republic. This review article contains a short de- scription and evaluation of all sixteen chapters published together as a monograph. As a whole, they refer to a wide spectrum of subjects. However, their common ground is the question of the education of both youth and adults on the subjects of democracy and republicanism during the period of the Weimar Republic. All issues raised in the monograph are also analysed in the context of the very complex political reality of Weimar Germany. The article ends with general remarks on the problematics discussed in the monograph.
An international conference, entitled “Administrative Law without Borders” was organised by the Faculty of Law, University of Košice in the municipality Veľká Třňa, which is situated in the very heart of the Slovak area of the Tokaj wine region. The conference was organised under the research project “Extraterritorial effects of foreign administrative decisions in the European Union”, which has been supported by the Scientific Agency VEGA. The Košice-based research team, under the leadership of Associate Professor Radomír Jakab, has been dealing with various problems arising from mutual recognition of foreign administrative decisions for several years, and the conference, as organised on 19th and 20th October 2023 in the Tokaj Wine Region, represents one of the major academic meetings organised under the umbrella of this academic endeavour.
Metcalfe's Law captures the relationship between the value of a network and its scale, asserting that a network's value is directly proportional to the square of its size. Over the past four decades, various researchers have proposed different scaling laws on this subject. Remarkably, these seemingly conflicting conclusions have all been substantiated by robust data validation, raising the question of which law holds greater representativeness. Consequently, there remains a need for inherent mechanism to underpin these laws. This study aims to bridge this disparity by offering a theoretical interpretation of Metcalfe's Law and its variations. Based on a certain degree of consensus that "traffic is value", network effects are gauged using network traffic load. A general analytical boundary for network traffic load is deduced by balancing practicality and analytical feasibility through the establishment of a comprehensive network model. From this foundation, the mechanism behind Metcalfe's Law and its variants is elucidated, aligning the theoretical derivations with the previously validated empirical evidence for Metcalfe's Law.
Neural networks efficiently encode learned information within their parameters. Consequently, many tasks can be unified by treating neural networks themselves as input data. When doing so, recent studies demonstrated the importance of accounting for the symmetries and geometry of parameter spaces. However, those works developed architectures tailored to specific networks such as MLPs and CNNs without normalization layers, and generalizing such architectures to other types of networks can be challenging. In this work, we overcome these challenges by building new metanetworks - neural networks that take weights from other neural networks as input. Put simply, we carefully build graphs representing the input neural networks and process the graphs using graph neural networks. Our approach, Graph Metanetworks (GMNs), generalizes to neural architectures where competing methods struggle, such as multi-head attention layers, normalization layers, convolutional layers, ResNet blocks, and group-equivariant linear layers. We prove that GMNs are expressive and equivariant to parameter permutation symmetries that leave the input neural network functions unchanged. We validate the effectiveness of our method on several metanetwork tasks over diverse neural network architectures.
In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges” — approaches to law and policy that maintain freedom of choice, but that steer people in certain directions. Yet to date, there has been little evidence on whether citizens of various societies support nudges and nudging. We report the results of nationally representative surveys in six European nations: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom. We find strong majority support for nudges of the sort that have been adopted, or under serious consideration, in democratic nations. Despite the general European consensus, we find markedly lower levels of support for nudges in two nations: Hungary and Denmark. We are not, in general, able to connect support for nudges with distinct party affiliations.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is one of the EU’s seven institutions. It consists of two courts of law: the Court of Justice proper and the General Court. It is responsible for the jurisdiction of the European Union. The courts ensure the correct interpretation and application of primary and secondary Union law in the EU. They review the legality of acts of the Union institutions and decide whether Member States have fulfilled their obligations under primary and secondary law. The Court of Justice also provides interpretations of Union law when so requested by national judges.
El 1º de septiembre de 2019 entraron en vigor las enmiendas a la Constitución de la República de Lituania, que establecen por primera vez en el sistema jurídico lituano el derecho de una persona a recurrir directamente al Tribunal Constitucional. Lituania ha optado por el modelo limitado de recurso constitucional individual. La Constitución sólo permite el examen de la constitucionalidad de los actos sobre la base de las cuales se ha adoptado una decisión individual, lo que posiblemente constituya una violación de los derechos y libertades constitucionales de una persona física o jurídica. En consecuencia, el acceso individual directo al Tribunal Constitucional es una medida extraordinaria de defensa de los derechos y libertades constitucionales y sólo es posible tras el agotamiento de todos los recursos jurídicos efectivos, mientras que las decisiones judiciales adoptadas por los tribunales ordinarios no son objeto de control constitucional. En el artículo se llega a la conclusión de que las condiciones previas de una justicia constitucional individual efectiva se crean mediante los siguientes elementos del recurso de inconstitucionalidad. En primer lugar, una definición amplia de los sujetos capaces de interponer un recurso de inconstitucionalidad, que constituyen las personas físicas y todas las personas jurídicas de derecho privado y público. En segundo lugar, una definición amplia del objeto de la revisión, es decir, todas las leyes y otros actos que entran en el ámbito del control de constitucionalidad efectuado por el Tribunal Constitucional (actos normativos e individuales; todos los actos aprobados no sólo por el Parlamento, el Presidente, el Gobierno, sino también por referéndum). En tercer lugar, el efecto retroactivo inter partes de las sentencias adoptadas tras el examen de los recursos constitucionales individuales. En el artículo se llega a la conclusión de que, aunque todavía no se han formulado conclusiones sostenibles sobre la eficacia del mecanismo recientemente establecido, se espera que el recurso constitucional individual se convierta en una medida interna eficaz de último recurso para la protección de los derechos humanos y la libertad con respecto a las prácticas basadas en actos inconstitucionales.
Law of Europe, Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence
Chile, en el marco de un nuevo proceso constituyente, aborda en primicia la reforma del artículo 19 nº 1 de su Constitución para hacer frente a los usos indebidos de las neurotecnologías, una enmienda que se desarrolla a través de un proyecto de Ley en el que se reconocen los conocidos como «neuroderechos », en terminología acuñada en la Neuroright Initiative de la Universidad de Columbia, New York, y que dirige el neurobiólogo español Rafael Yuste. En este artículo se analiza el proceso legislativo y sus enmiendas, con la finalidad de profundizar en el debate acerca de la regulación de las neurotecnologías reivindicando la presencia necesaria del derecho constitucional.
Law of Europe, Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence
Optimal power flow (OPF) is the fundamental mathematical model in power system operations. Improving the solution quality of OPF provide huge economic and engineering benefits. The convex reformulation of the original nonconvex alternating current OPF (ACOPF) model gives an efficient way to find the global optimal solution of ACOPF but suffers from the relaxation gaps. The existence of relaxation gaps hinders the practical application of convex OPF due to the AC-infeasibility problem. We evaluate and improve the tightness of the convex ACOPF model in this paper. Various power networks and nodal loads are considered in the evaluation. A unified evaluation framework is implemented in Julia programming language. This evaluation shows the sensitivity of the relaxation gap and helps to benchmark the proposed tightness reinforcement approach (TRA). The proposed TRA is based on the penalty function method which penalizes the power loss relaxation in the objective function of the convex ACOPF model. A heuristic penalty algorithm is proposed to find the proper penalty parameter of the TRA. Numerical results show relaxation gaps exist in test cases especially for large-scale power networks under low nodal power loads. TRA is effective to reduce the relaxation gap of the convex ACOPF model.
We analyze the law of the SLE tip at a fixed time in capacity parametrization. We describe it as the stationary law of a suitable diffusion process, and show that it has a density which is a unique solution of a certain PDE. Moreover, we identify the phases in which the even negative moments of the imaginary value are finite. For the negative second and negative fourth moments we provide closed-form expressions.