Indicators of Silently Overruled Cases
September 17, 2026A small case study of Warner Bros. v. CBS (the Sam Spade case): can the texts of later opinions tell you when a court has quietly moved on?
Farm kid, Berkeley grad in cognitive science and computer science, software engineer and future lawyer. Founder of CitationClerk.com. Kate lives near Yosemite in Sonora, CA.
Authenticated Attributes: An Alternative to Deepfake Detection
April 09, 2024The solution to the problem of AI-generated images isn’t to try to detect the “tells” of AI. That’s a battle that’s lost every time AI improves. The solution is to use technology—specifically, cryptography—to record what’s real. This different approach shifts the burden of proof to better fit a world where AI is cheap and investigations are expensive.
[TALK] Smart Contracts at University of Miami Law
March 08, 2024Smart contracts often get confused with a similar concept called "computable contracts." This talk explains the difference between smart contracts and computable contracts, and counters some of the common arguments made by legal scholars against smart contracts.
The Curious Case of MD5
December 31, 2023Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.
[TALK] Authenticated Databases (with Starling Lab at Stanford University)
November 07, 2023Starling Lab hosted a three-part Seminar Series at Stanford University on new ways to guarantee the authenticity, availability, and persistence of images, as well as metadata and attestations about the images. I was invited to give the initial presentation to kick off the second part of the series, Authenticated Databases, which included a panel discussion with speakers from Ceramic, Fission, and Fireproof Storage.
[TALK] Combating AI-Generated Fake Images (QCon SF 2023)
October 04, 2023I had the opportunity to speak at Qcon SF on combating AI-generated fake images, as part of a fantastic track including Ryan Dahl (creator of Node.js) and Miško Hevery (creator of Angular.) The talk explored my work with Starling Lab. Rather than trying to detect AI-generated photos by various means, a more promising approach is to preemptively timestamp real images and their metadata.
[TALK] Tamper-Evident Logs and Unalterable Docs
October 05, 2022I gave this lightning talk at the Foresight Crypto, Security, and AI Workshop in 2022 to a group that included software engineers and economists. I talk about how we have expensive auditing and financial control processes in business, and how we have cheap cryptographic tools that can solve some of these problems instead. Importantly, despite the hype, these tools aren't blockchains themselves.
[TALK] The Most Popular Blockchain Books Are Really Bad (AKA Blockchain Education as a Public Good)
June 25, 2022Out of curiosity, I had tried reading a few blockchain books for the general public and was horrified at what I found. This talk pinpoints where exactly the authors of these books went wrong and explores how to fix the misconceptions, even when there is no apparent market incentive to do so.
Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) Should Be Signed Claims
June 06, 2022Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin argue that we should create non-transferable, initially public, “soulbound” tokens to represent commitments, credentials, and affiliations. This is a bad idea. Instead, we should make off-chain statements digitally signed with Ethereum private keys.
[TALK] Trust But Verify Cheaply (APEE)
April 05, 2022Some of the largest frauds in history occurred because an agent contracted to act on someone's behalf, decided to act in their own self-interest instead. This talk given to economists at APEE explains how basic cryptography could have prevented some of those major frauds and changed the nature of the principal-agent problem.
[TALK] NFTs and Engineering Property Rights
August 05, 2021In contract law, we are allowed to add custom rules, but we aren't allowed to do the same in property law. Property (both real and virtual) has a limited number of forms. One explanation given by academics is that new forms of property would degrade the market for everyone else, because buyers would have to research what kind of strange rules were attached to the particular property they were considering. NFTs — non-fungible property defined and transferred by smart contracts — might allow us to define custom properties in ways that don't degrade the market in the same way. This is not a talk supportive of specific NFT projects (unfortunately, as is often the case in the blockchain world, many of the projects are scammy), but rather an attempt to connect traditional property law with the new affordances of smart contracts.
[TALK] Making 'npm install' Safe
June 26, 201997% of the code in a modern web application comes from NPM, and JavaScript has a rich culture of code reuse. But using someone else's code means leaving yourself potentially vulnerable to attackers. Or does it? By using patterns from Object Capabilities, along with code isolation enforced by SES, you can use other people's code much more safely.
Smart contracts aren't trustless, nor should they be
July 18, 2018Criticizing smart contracts for not being completely “trustless” instruments completely misses the point.
Podcast: How Smart are Smart Contracts?
July 12, 2018Kate Sills joins the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss the so-called Oracle Problem and other critiques of smart contracts
The Forgotten Contracts
June 05, 2018“Smart contracts aren’t legal contracts,” they say. They’re right. But that’s missing the point.
Code is Capital
May 09, 2018New technologies might help integrate communities living under local, customary property law into the global economy.
Property Rights Are Already Virtual
March 27, 2018Property rights aren't the physical objects themselves, but a social agreement with our neighbors that can be digitized.
The Dream of the 90's is Alive in Cryptocurrencies
March 06, 2018Because of the Internet, our lives are significantly different. But early Internet advocates thought digital cash would make it truly transformational.
The Promise of Smart Contracts
February 13, 2018Blockchain technology and other advances help expand our ability to make enforceable agreements without the state.
'Sovereign' and the Problems with Internet Voting
September 16, 2017Distinguishing between fake and real accounts is an incredibly hard problem, and the solution proposed by The Democracy Earth Foundation, as stated, will not work.