Compliance as Data Work

Abstract

Regulatory compliance increasingly relies on the labor of producing, managing, and transmitting digital information-a form of work largely invisible to administrative law. Although agencies often justify these requirements in terms of efficiency, transparency, and accountability, the burdens they impose fall unevenly across regulated communities, raising questions about fairness and practical feasibility. Agencies require stakeholders to maintain detailed digital records, yet doctrines designed to protect against overreach fail to account for the costs, expertise, and inequities these mandates impose.

This Article examines these burdens through an empirical analysis of over a thousand public comments responding to a federal rule mandating granular digital records. While the rule itself concerns food supply chains, it serves as a lens to study a broader pattern: digital mandates across the administrative state frequently redistribute labor in ways that are invisible to current legal frameworks. Drawing on qualitative methods and informed by feminist approaches to data, the Article identifies three recurring challenges: (1) the labor and educational costs of learning new systems; (2) collisions with infrastructural and cultural realities; and (3) regulatory “flexibility” that generates costly ambiguity.

These burdens expose systemic blind spots in administrative law. Doctrines that treat information collection as neutral, whether by collapsing digital labor into “paperwork hours,” discounting lived experience, or limiting review to only the smallest entities, fail to account for how digital mandates redistribute work and risk. This Article argues that administrative law must recognize data labor as labor and proposes equity-focused reforms, including Data Equity Impact Assessments, to better align digital compliance with the goals of participation, accountability, and inclusion. While illustrated through food regulation, the lessons extend broadly across sectors, from health care and finance to immigration and environmental governance, demonstrating that the stakes of equity in the digital administrative state are both immediate and far-reaching.

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Abstract

U.S. antitrust law has traditionally paid little attention to global competitiveness, industrial policy, and geopolitical policy considerations. This reflects a commitment to enabling the free play of competitive forces to determine market outcomes and an aversion to enabling protectionist policies that can protect inefficient “national champions.” These assumptions are challenged in a global marketplace where large geopolitical powers pursue mercantilist strategies that intervene in market processes to secure competitive advantages in strategically critical industries. This essay proposes a two-prong framework that integrates global competitiveness concerns within U.S. antitrust’s commitment to the market process, as implemented through adjusted treatment of market definition, scale economies, and state-backed predatory pricing practices. The essay also identifies “escape hatches” through which U.S. policymakers can address geopolitical and national-security concerns that fall outside the scope of antitrust law.

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Abstract

Technological innovation has long been a central driver of competition, consumer choice, and financial inclusion in U.S. consumer financial services. From the advent of standardized credit reporting and automated underwriting to online banking and digital payments, innovation has repeatedly expanded access while reducing costs and discriminatory practices. Today, fintech represents the latest and most consequential wave of this evolution. While some innovations, such as artificial intelligence and alternative data underwriting, are genuinely novel, others, including Earned Wage Access (EWA) and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), are modernized versions of well-established financial practices delivered more efficiently through technology.

This article argues that fintech’s benefits accrue most strongly to consumers historically underserved by the traditional financial system, including younger, lower-income, rural, and minority households. Drawing on a broad range of empirical research, it shows that fintech products increase access to credit, reduce reliance on high-cost alternatives, lower transaction costs, and mitigate demographic disparities in pricing and approval rates. Evidence indicates that EWA helps workers smooth income volatility, avoid overdraft fees and payday loans, and improve job retention. BNPL enables consumers to manage liquidity and spread the cost of purchases, usually with no interest, without increasing overall financial distress. Moreover, while critics have expressed concern that both EWA and BNPL could lead to increased financial distress, empirical evidence to date indicates that these speculative concerns are unfounded.

Despite these benefits, fintech innovation faces growing regulatory risks. The article contends that inconsistent and overly burdensome state regulation, arbitrary asset thresholds, and misguided restrictions threaten competition and consumer welfare by raising costs and limiting choice. It concludes that a coherent national regulatory framework—emphasizing competition, proportional oversight, and evidence-based intervention—is essential to preserve fintech’s promise. Properly designed regulation can protect consumers while allowing innovation to flourish, particularly for those with the fewest existing financial options.

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This chapter contribution develops a framework for understanding how intellectual property rights facilitate biopharmaceutical innovation and entrepreneurship through two core functions: attracting investment in original-drug development and enabling coordination among differently specialized entities throughout the drug-development cycle. In light of long development lag times, high failure rates, and the exceptional gap between innovation and imitation costs, robust exclusivity is essential to attract investment capital to support the research, testing, production, and distribution stages of original-drug development. IP rights also mitigate the expropriation risks inherent to transacting over informational goods, allowing research entities, startups, investors, and pharmaceutical companies to implement a division of labor that generates specialization efficiencies and lowers entry costs for biotech entrepreneurs. The historical development of the US biotech market, and the vertical disintegration of the biopharmaceutical supply chain concurrently with the strengthening and adoption of patent rights, illustrates these functions in action. Based on the observed performance of real-world biopharmaceutical markets, the Chapter presents “first principles” for designing IP policies that can facilitate both technological and transactional innovation in the life sciences ecosystem.

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Abstract

We build a Markov state-space model of competition in rental industries among firms facing capacity constraints and uncertain demand. In the model, consumers randomly arrive, choose among available options, and then randomly depart. In this setting, spare capacity acts like inventory that can be sold immediately or held for later. We compute subgame perfect equilibrium and show that when occupancy is high, expanding output becomes costly. When one firm raises price, its rivals can pick up only a little of its lost output, so there is little change to the firm’s post-merger profit calculus. This reduces both its incentive to merge or collude and the magnitude of any price increase if it does.

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Abstract

We study the short- and long-term effects of organized crime across neighborhoods in U.S. cities by exploiting the migration of Sicilian Mafia members in the 1920s who fled a large-scale repression campaign in Italy. Using newly linked administrative and historical data from the U.S. Census, Social Security records, and declassified files of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, we show that neighborhoods hosting enclaves of migrants from Sicilian towns targeted by the repression later became centers of Italo-American Mafia activity. These neighborhoods experienced higher violence, incarceration, and financial exclusion in the short run, but higher educational attainment and employment in the long run. The results suggest that while the arrival of organized criminal networks initially intensified conflict and exclusion, their subsequent consolidation generated localized economic spillovers, helping to explain the long-term resilience and persistence of organized crime.

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Abstract

The implementation of generative artificial intelligence in legal services offers undeniable efficiency gains, but also raises fundamental issues for law firms. These challenges can be categorised along a broad continuum, ranging from changes in business lines to changes in the competitive environment and the internal organisation of law firms. This paper considers the risks that law firms face in terms of both the quality of the services they provide and perceived competition, both horizontally and vertically, considering possible relationships of dependency on suppliers of large language models and cloud infrastructures.