In 2022, second year-student George Ward ’24 wrote a noteworthy paper in his consumer financial protection seminar that so impressed his professor, Patricia McCoy, that she helped him prep it for publication. Their collaboration paid off. His work landed a prestigious spot in volume 6, issue 1, of the highly competitive Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies (JET).
Founded in 2020, JET is a student run-law review publication bridging the gap between legal scholarship, science, policy, and ethics through insightful literary works. Each volume of JET focuses on a cutting-edge area of technology, aiming to inform, innovate, and engage interdisciplinary students as it explores the chosen topic in depth.
Ward’s published work, “Like, Share, and Repost: Content Creator Commodification,” explores the commodification of personhood arising from income-sharing agreements, particularly those signed by content creators. It highlights how this issue has become significantly more complex with the emergence of the digital world, highlighting the multifaceted challenges and ethical considerations that arise in the modern era of content creation.
According to Professor McCoy, Ward’s article offers an eye-opening perspective by flagging income-sharing agreements as a commodification concern and by analyzing the exploitative terms of actual agreements.
Ward was grateful for her collaboration. “I’d planned to totally focus on public defense in law school but Professor McCoy’s seminar drew my attention to the injustices caused by certain exploitative financial institutions. Her guidance and support made the Notre Dame article possible,” he said.
A similar thing happened in Justice Gerry Hines’s class, Race, Policing, and the Constitution, which Ward described as “incredible because she authored some of Massachusetts’ most important court opinions on race, policing, and poverty.”
In her class, Ward was encouraged to write a case comment titled “Bicycles, Bloody Knives, and Black Boys.” The critique of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s extension of its equal protection doctrine to encompass Terry (stop-and-frisk) stops failure, while still allowing racial bias to influence a police officer’s decision to target an eighteen-year-old Black Bostonian, was also recently published, this one in the Massachusetts Law Review.
Ward’s gratitude for his BC Law mentors extends beyond his publishing successes. “Both professors,” he said, “continue to inspire me in my work as a public defender.”
Read the full paper on the JET website here, and the case comment here.