In her Article, Zina Makar offers the first comprehensive analysis of digital privacy rights in prisons. She explains why the spatial logic defining prison law cannot govern the digital technologies evolving behind bars, and she reframes data surveillance as data compulsion.
In his Note, Trent Kannegieter reframes questions of AI liability around how AI systems work in practice. He argues that understanding LLMs’ key technical features—especially in-production nondeterminism—enables tort-law redress when LLM-based products cause harm.
The Yale Law Journal
Vol. 135, Issue 7 is live! With Articles by @vivekdotca.bsky.social (Colo. Boulder Law) and Zina Makar (U. Balt. Law); Features by Haiyun Damon-Feng (@cardozolaw.bsky.social) and Alana Frederick & Judge Newsom (11th Cir.); and Notes by Fred Halbhuber (YLS ’25) and Trent Kannegieter (YLS ’27)!
In their Feature, Alana Frederick & Judge Newsom develop a statutory-interpretation method of “contextual textualism” that privileges ordinary understanding over ordinary meaning. Whereas meaning is sterile and clinical, understanding is gritty and awash in real-world context.
In her Feature, Haiyun Damon-Feng identifies a critical yet underappreciated agency function: fact-making. She explores the social, distributional, and legal significance of agency-made facts and argues that politicized control over agency fact-making risks eroding democratic norms.
The Yale Law Journal
In his Article, @vivekdotca.bsky.social surveys four centuries of transit law, which requires states to permit passage across their territory. He distills transit law’s principles and makes the case for extending them to digital infrastructure and the internet.
In his Note, Fred Halbhuber demonstrates that the origin of the appellate model of judicial review—which sits at the heart of the Administrative Procedure Act—lies not in federal law, but in nineteenth-century cases applying the writ of certiorari.
