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Our Spring 2026 Issue—Volume 15, Number 2—brings together scholarship that grapples with a shared, increasingly urgent set of questions: how law should respond when decision-making, speech governance, and even cultural and geopolitical “infrastructure” are mediated by opaque systems such as algorithmic models, platform architectures, and export-control regimes.
First, Professors Ignacio Cofone and Katherine J. Strandburg reframe algorithmic transparency as a classic principal-agent problem. That is, claims of “gaming” and “trade secrecy” can sometimes reflect not genuine social costs of disclosure, but strategic incentives to preserve opacity and avoid accountability. Cofone and Strandburg propose a decision-quality-anchored framework that uses error profiles and outcome distributions across groups as diagnostic signals of misalignment, triggering rebuttable presumptions in favor of tailored disclosure. The Article ultimately presses a practical point for regulators and courts: disclosure is not binary. Effective regimes can be staged, mediated, and audience-specific without collapsing into either full secrecy or full exposure.
Second, Elisabeth Paar takes aim at a growing temptation in legal technology discourse: if AI can draft something that sounds like an opinion, why not let it judge? Paar argues that the resemblance is misleading because judicial decision-making is not reducible to text production. Drawing on normative accounts of judging, she contends that AI lacks core capacities required for legitimate adjudication—social competencies for fact-finding, legal competencies for assessing facts under law, and the ability to provide reasoned justifications that are tethered to the decision-making process. Paar concludes that making AI “good enough” to judge would not be a matter of incremental tuning, but would require a deeper reconfiguration of how we expect adjudication to exist in a democratic legal order.
Third, Professor Ioanna Tourkochoriti offers a comparative account of platform regulation in the United States and the European Union, asking whether diverging legal approaches are steering us toward a divided internet. The Article contrasts the EU’s rights-balancing framework and the Digital Services Act’s procedure and transparency obligations, with the U.S. constitutional landscape shaped by state-action constraints and First Amendment doctrine. For an illustrative case study, Tourkochoriti engages with Moody v. NetChoice and the contested boundary between editorial discretion and algorithmic moderation. Along the way, she raises questions about accountability for speech governance that is partly automated and transnational by design.
Fourth, Professor Frank Fagan turns to the upstream dependency that quietly powers much of modern AI: training data. Noting that AI-generated summaries and answer engines are reducing referral traffic and destabilizing the economic foundation of online publishing, Fagan uniquely frames training-data governance as a problem of preserving access to high-value inputs without undermining incentives to produce them. He proposes a welfare-oriented, three-part test for when a fallback licensing mechanism is justified, implemented through a tiered framework that distinguishes baseline, transitional, and at-risk content.
Fifth, Jordan Hanyi Yu examines a different kind of governance problem in Holocaust-related art restitution litigation in New York. She situates New York state doctrine against the backdrop of the Washington Principles and the evolving federal HEAR Act framework, including Congress’s 2025 amendments aimed at pushing courts toward merits-based resolution by removing time-based defenses. Yu’s Note argues that the pre-amendment New York approach struck a workable balance between justice and market stability, while also identifying distributional concerns—particularly the disproportionate risk borne by purchasers relative to dealers and auction houses—and mapping how collectors, dealers, auction houses, and museums adapt their practices in response to shifting legal uncertainty.
Finally, Will Shao confronts the fast-paced intersection of IP-adjacent regulation, national security, and cybersecurity. He analyzes the Chip Security Act’s push for geolocation-enabled “chip security mechanisms” as an export-control tool, but emphasizes that the bill’s broad, technology-agnostic language creates practical vulnerabilities, particularly because current geolocation methods can be spoofed and may themselves introduce attack surfaces. Shao’s Note offers concrete revisions and safeguards, such as a more explicit (and more securely designed) chip registry and strengthened institutional capacity for monitoring and compliance.
Sincerely,
Cindy L. Chang
Editor-in-Chief
NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law