Telegram CEO Arrest and Brazil’s X Ban Raise Free Speech and Privacy Concerns

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This guest post by BC Law Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons first appeared in the AEIdeas Blog.

Last week, global headlines spotlighted two separate flashpoints in the battle by governments to police social media networks. In Paris, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested for complicity in distribution of child sexual abuse imagery. And in Brazil, a judge banned X (formerly Twitter) nationwide after the company refused to block certain users on the eve of election season.  While both incidents can be couched as failures to comply with national law, the unusually harsh remedies raise important concerns about free speech and privacy online.

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What Does “Are You IPTF” Mean? Let Me Explain.

/ Justin Sells / Leave a comment

I first heard someone ask that question as I passed through Stuart House my first week of 1L year. I thought to myself, what on Earth is “IPTF?” Is it an acronym signifying some state of mind, or perhaps some other law school-specific parlance related to the trials and tribulations of being a law student? I was never really good at keeping up with the lingo in high school or college, so to find a possible definition of “IPTF,” I first consulted a secondary source that some young people consider to be persuasive authority: Urban Dictionary. To spare you the trouble of visiting that source, it defined “IPTF” as follows verbatim (with typos): “‘iptf’ stands for I PITY THE FOO!!! famous saying of Mr. T”.

Not relying on a sole source, I continued my research and found that at Boston College Law School, “IPTF” actually stands for the “Intellectual Property and Technology Forum.” The IPTF is both a club and a student journal. As a club, the IPTF helps prepare students to be zealous advocates in intellectual property (IP) and technology law by hosting various guest speakers, firms, seminars, and “technology bootcamps,” and by connecting students with alumni of the IPTF who actively practice IP and technology law. As a student-run journal, the IPTF publishes legal scholarship with the goal of furthering the development of legal thought in IP law (including trade secrets, patents, trademarks, and copyright) and technology policy (including inter alia web-based civil liberties challenges, data privacy, and telecommunications law). 1

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Net Neutrality, and other FCC Initiatives Jeopardized Post-Chevron

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This guest post by BC Law Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons first appeared in the AEIdeas Blog.

It has been a big week for tech policy at the Supreme Court. As my AEI colleague Clay Calvert discussed, the NetChoice cases endorsed social media platforms’ First Amendment right of editorial control. But for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other agencies, Loper Bright, which overturned Chevron, looms largest. The FCC in particular has long benefited from Chevron’s command that agencies, not courts, are the primary arbiters of an ambiguous statute’s meaning. Overturning this regime, and restoring that authority to courts, is likely to pose additional challenges for net neutrality, digital discrimination, and other FCC initiatives that capitalized on ambiguous language to accomplish the agency’s policy objectives.

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Documenting the Triumphs of Our Black BC Law Community

/ Haley Cole / Leave a comment

In 2023, only 5% of all attorneys across the United States identified as Black or African American, according to the ABA National Lawyer Population Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau (not including the 3% of attorneys who identified as multi-racial). In that same year, only 2% of Black or African American identifying attorneys were women. 

These statistics lay bare the stark reality that Black attorneys are underrepresented in the legal community. The same census report cites 15% of Americans who identify as Black, or Black in addition to another race(s). However, the number of Black attorneys does not align with the magnitude of contributions they have made to, and accolades they have earned within, the legal field. 

Within the BC Law community lies a special history of Black excellence. Boston College Law School’s new website “Black History at BC Law” and a companion BC Law Magazine feature story documents and praises the triumphs of our Black BC Law community.

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Facing Cable Cord-Cutting, Cities Fight to Tax Broadband

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This guest post by BC Law Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons first appeared in the AEIdeas Blog.

Broadband has been a bright spot in America’s grim inflationary landscape. While consumer prices rose 4.9 percent last year, two recent reports show that consumer broadband prices fell, both in absolute terms and cost per gigabyte. But where many see a victory, some cities sense an opportunity. Stung by declining cable franchise fees, local governments are pushing to tax broadband. This effort faces severe regulatory headwinds, but if successful could erode consumer gains and drive broadband prices higher.

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It’s a Bad Idea, Right? F– It, It’s Fine.

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This guest post by BC Law Professor Brian Quinn first appeared in the M&A Law Prof Blog.

Hi. Back again. I’ve generally taken a hiatus from blogging, but felt it important to come back and put some things on the record, as it were. If this has not been on your radar, in the past two months or so, Delaware has been on a mad rush to make some significant amendments to its corporate law. This, after having previously signaled it wasn’t going to make any amendments this year. I’ll go into each of the proposed amendments in subsequent posts and the problems I see with the process, but in this post I want to focus on one of the potential reasons for moving so quickly to make changes to the law. 

The amendment themselves are what are being called market practice amendments. Earlier this year the Chancery Court asked itself: “What happens when the seemingly irresistible force of market practice meets the traditionally immovable object of statutory law? A court must uphold the law, so the statute prevails.” Moelis. In all three of these cases, the court effectively dealt a knuckle-wrapping to practitioners.

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New York Tests FCC’s “No Rate Regulation” Pledge

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This guest post by BC Law Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons first appeared in the AEIdeas Blog.

Reclassification opponents have long warned that net neutrality could be a Trojan horse for broadband rate regulation. Partly in response to this criticism, the Federal Communications Commission’s recent Title II reclassification order expressly reiterated its commitment to the agency’s long-standing, bipartisan commitment to keeping the Internet free from price controls. But even before the order had been finalized, New York’s Affordable Broadband Act began testing the strength of that commitment—and the agency’s initial response seems to be reinforcing its critics’ concerns.

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Two Weddings, a Funeral, and a Naturalization Ceremony

/ Jonathan Bertulis-Fernandes / Leave a comment

Two weddings, a funeral, and a naturalization ceremony. This pretty much sums up my time in law school, in many ways. I lost my dad suddenly at the end of my 1L Spring semester (during finals: really wouldn’t recommend). During my 2L and 3L years I had two weddings: one in the U.S. and one in the U.K., where I grew up and my family still live. (For the sake of clarity: these weddings were to the same person. I’m nothing if not consistent.) And after having lived in the U.S. since 2016, I became a citizen in February of last year.

Of course, my time in law school was marked by a great deal more. But, when I think back to my time at BC Law, these are the progress points—the proverbial highway markers as it were—that map out the last three years for me temporally. These events were the points at which “life” most intruded into law school. Law school is all-consuming in a way I do not think I fully comprehended before I began my 1L year. I had worked for five years before returning to school, including three and a half years in a high-pressure role in New York City. But nothing prepared me for the way that law school threatened to take over and take me away from my sense of self. The death of my father, marrying my wife, cementing my life over in the U.S.: these were the events and the life-is-what-happens-to-you-while-you’re-busy-making-other-plans moments that burst the illusion of the bubble of law school for me. 

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If It’s Meant to Be, It Will Be

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

When I was around 9 years old, my mom bought me a brown dress to wear to my sister’s Bat Mitzvah. I loved that dress, but we knew it would be difficult to find shoes to match. My only real option was to find a pair in the same, specific brown, so we put the dress in a shopping bag and went to the mall.

We went to store after store finding shoes that were too uncomfortable, too hard to walk in, or, of course, the wrong shade of brown, until we found the perfect pair. Not too high of a heel, a flattering shape, the right price, and almost the exact color of the dress. The only problem was, they didn’t have my size. This was in 2006 and online shopping wasn’t exactly what it is today, so if they didn’t have the shoes in the store, we weren’t going to be able to buy them. My mom put the shoe back on the display, looked at me, and said, “It wasn’t meant to be.” She walked out, and I followed.

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Our Dreams Are Not Just Our Own

/ Seung Hye Yang / Leave a comment

Two years ago, I watched as my mother ironed my clothes on the frayed wooden floors of our home in Queens in preparation for my first day as a summer associate at a Biglaw firm. I hadn’t realized that the only professional suit I owned was badly wrinkled from my travels between Boston and New York. Frustrated with the slow pace and sloppiness of my handiwork, my mom–like any other impatient mom watching her daughter panic over clothes–took over. She used the floor in lieu of our lack of a proper ironing board, wielding the same iron that we’ve had since we immigrated to the United States 20 years ago. Her wizened hands smoothed out the creases in my blazer, and I wondered how much time had passed while I hadn’t even noticed that my mom had grown old in the years she waited for me to achieve my dream.

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