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      Technology innovation constantly challenges law to meet the needs of today’s society.  If we rely solely on law to solve the problems of refugees, justice will be delayed. Why?  With the refugee crisis reaching a feverish level in the United States, laws are aspirational from the refugees’ point of view, and US state sovereignty ‘trumps’ any of these aspirations. Citizen pushback, as massive as it is, can only provide very limited legal impact for refugees: (1) finding lawyers to connect to refugees one to one to enter an antiquated court system and make a case for asylum. Resolution of these cases takesRead More →

On May 31, I spoke at USIP on how our PeaceTones music projects use innovation in the ways we make and enforce laws to help musicians in the developing worlds earn money from themselves and their communities. (See powerpoint slides.) PeaceTones runs programs which teach Intellectual Property laws in the developing world to gifted and aspiring musicians. We also use technology tools to open up global markets for musicians from places like Haiti, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Kenya, Liberia, and Afghanistan. The problem we encounter everywhere, as do musicians all over the world, is that the global norm for IP law is an outdated IP systemRead More →

One of the earliest letters I received from Nigeria (before the Internet – postage/envelope/letter inside/a “real” signature) invited me to help out an individual there who was a relative of a prince and had a very substantial bank account in New York, but they could not access the funds there (millions of dollars) without my help. Hmmm…. Nigeria has had a reputation for scammers for a long time. The Internet gave these scammers new fuel and new ways to catch people in their lair. These scammers are sophisticated and the reason they don’t give up is because it works. Nevertheless, the reputation that has befallenRead More →

When I first worked with Don Hagans and Bruce Jaster from Texas and several others in 1986 to help develop the inaugural ABA TECHSHOW, the idea of using computers in the practice of law was at its complete inception. At the time, I had already started the Computer College in Massachusetts as chair of the Law Practice Section of the Mass Bar Association – generously funded by Digital Equipment Corporation (remember when DEC and WANG battled for the legal market…). Running educational programs all across the state of Massachusetts, by 1986, we had trained hundreds of lawyers across the state on how to automate theirRead More →

This year Internet Bar Organization is co-organizing the international ODR2014 Conference, which will take place from June 25-27 at UC Hastings and Stanford Law. I am excited about the agenda we have put together, which includes many of my closest colleagues. Here is a preview I wrote about a data security presentation by one of my board members Demetrios Eleftheriou, along with the brilliant Anjli Garg: At the Stanford Law program at ODR2014 (June 26-27), two of the world’s leading thinkers on protecting private information, Anjli Garg and Demetrios Eleftheriou, will explore the disputes that can arise when companies handle personal data (PD) and how to avoid them. In their recent articleRead More →

When it comes to legal education at a grassroots level, I am drawn to strong initiatives that provide access to justice training, both in the U.S. and beyond. A key player in these efforts is Street Law, Inc, a nonprofit Washington, DC organization dedicated to educating students and communities across the world about their legal rights, about global human rights, and about democracy at the local and international level. Finding established change agents like Street Law which have been working at the grassroots level for years is a gift. The need for global communities to learn to empower themselves in terms of legal education, humanRead More →