Emory Law Insights

Introduction

This issue of Insights features work by four new Emory Law professors, part of a strategic plan to build a faculty eager to research and teach subjects that were on the horizon a few years ago, and now are at the forefront.

The growth of artificial intelligence dominated news again this year—inspiring both awe and dread. Some employers see it as a means to winnow and monitor employees.

Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa’s new book, The Quantified Worker, shows the dark side of technology used to track workers’ keystrokes, productivity, steps, and toilet visits. An employer-sponsored gym membership may be tied to a workplace wellness program as a condition of health insurance. Smart devices and badges can become personal hall monitors.

“If this sounds to you like a dystopian future, you are half correct,” Ajunwa writes. “This is not the future. It is the current plight of workers. Most workers are now caught up in what scholars like Shoshana Zuboff have identified as ‘surveillance capitalism,’ their every move tracked and monitored in service of profit-making.”

Lindsey Simon’s article, “Bankruptcy Grifters,” exposes how wealthy mass tort defendants including the Sackler family (owners of Purdue Pharma) use bankruptcy proceedings to get the benefits and protections of bankruptcy without declaring it themselves. A particularly egregious example, she says, is the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney sued after years of sexual abuse by now-incarcerated former sports doctor Larry Nassar.

“Today, [Maroney] is trapped in the matrix of bankruptcy because USOPC is a bankruptcy grifter — a parasite that embedded itself within the Chapter 11 case of USA Gymnastics,” Simon writes.

In August, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge from the Biden administration to the legality of the Purdue Pharma settlement. That decision could affect similar cases including the Boy Scouts of America’s $2.46 billion settlement last year.

In that case, a reported 80,000 men say they were sexually abused by troop leaders.

Andrew Jennings’ article, “The Market for Corporate Criminals,” addresses the penalty structure for mergers and acquisitions that he argues punishes the wrong party for prior malfeasance by the firm being acquired. In M&A, criminal successor liability is both less predictable and more threatening to buyers than successor liability in tort or contract, he says. Jennings uses the 2017 acquisition of financial firm Bankrate by Red Ventures as an example.

“This Article proposes new prosecutorial policies that, through better targeted sanctions and compliance-enhancing mergers, would promote M&A markets, deter corporate crime, and foster corporate reform,” he writes. This approach would pin the costs of corporate crime on current shareholders and “de-risk criminal M&A for future acquirers.”

“Modern separation-of-powers doctrine is in disarray,” Alex Zhang writes in his forthcoming article, “Separation of Structures.”

“While the Supreme Court routinely decides questions of interbranch conflict, agency structure, and delegation, both its approaches and the cases’ outcomes feature sharp disagreement and immense unpredictability,” he writes.

Zhang says to resolve these questions, it’s important to not only look at the power being exercised, but also, the institutional structure of the government entity that is exercising it.

We look forward to presenting more scholarly work in upcoming issues from about a dozen new tenure-stream professors who have joined Emory Law since 2022. Visit our faculty scholarship page to see complete articles, accolades, and recently accepted work.