Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The freedom to contract is one of the oldest and most basic tenets of the American legal system. Subject to limited judicial and statutory exceptions, parties have been and are generally afforded carte blanche in determining the terms of a binding agreement and how those terms are memorialized. The recent emergence of “smart contracts,” that […]

Introduction Machine learning describes the process through which computers can learn without continued human input. In the era of big data, machine learning is particularly promising because it allows for identification of patterns in large data sets. Machine learning has applications in fields as diverse as medicine, e-commerce, and banking. This essay will discuss the […]

I. Introduction Facial recognition technology (“FRT”) is the general term for a complex series of programs, the aim of which is to have computers recognize and compare images of faces to determine if they match. The process of identifying and recognizing faces, while common and intuitive for humans, is a daunting task for computers. For […]

I. Introduction Biologics, such as the arthritis drug Humira, are therapeutics and diagnostics derived from living systems—as opposed to non-biologic drugs derived from chemical synthesis—and are often state-of-the-art treatment for many diseases. Today, biologics account for at least one-third of all drug approvals, and the majority of biologics research and development is in monoclonal antibodies […]

I. Introduction Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Every interaction with technology creates data about that user. Each credit card purchase, medical diagnosis, Google search, Facebook post, or Netflix preferences is another recorded data point about that individual user. Beyond that, every census report, home purchase, voter registration, medical […]

Introduction Every day, lawyers, regulators, and policy advocates must use information about a situation to evaluate, predict, and draw conclusions about the world around them. The problem is ubiquitous: You have a hypothesis that attempts to explain something in the real world – perhaps the cause of a disease, the guilt of an accused criminal, […]

Introduction Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics. Computers operate on the foundation of if/then logic statements, whereas natural human language systems do not; NLP endeavors to bridge this divide by enabling a computer to analyze what a user said (input speech recognition) and process what the […]

In early April, WhatsApp, an online messaging service with more than a billion users, announced that they added “end-to-end” encryption to every form of communication on the service. This means WhatsApp’s server now acts as an illiterate messenger, passing along messages that it cannot itself decipher. Because of this newly adopted technology, WhatsApp is unable […]

The Origins of Tor Security in online activity, and privacy from those who wish to monitor it, has been a priority for internet users since creation of the web. To achieve this goal, the concept of onion routing was developed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (“NRL”) in the mid-1990s to protect online communications […]

One may occasionally see five letters displayed at the beginning of a URL: HTTPS. To understand HTTPS and its importance in internet communication, it is first necessary to understand HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol.) The difference of a single letter could contribute to the invasion of your privacy on the internet and the theft of your […]