Law Commons^™

Artificial Intelligence And Trade, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Artificial Intelligence is already powering trade today. It is crossing borders, learning, making decisions, and operating cyber-physical systems. It underlies many of the services that are offered today – from customer service chatbots to customer relations software to business processes. The chapter considers AI regulation from the perspective of international trade law. It argues that foreign AI should be regulated by governments – indeed that AI must be ‘locally responsible’. The chapter refutes arguments that trade law should not apply to AI and shows how the WTO agreements might apply to AI using two hypothetical cases . The analysis reveals …

Is Data Localization A Solution For Schrems Ii?, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For the second time this decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has struck a blow against the principal mechanisms for personal data transfer to the United States. In Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland, Maximillian Schrems, the Court declared the EU-US Privacy Shield invalid and placed significant hurdles to the process of transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States via the mechanism of Standard Contractual Clauses. Many have begun to suggest data localization as the solution to the problem of data transfer; that is, don’t transfer the data at all. I argue …

Making News: Balancing Newsworthiness And Privacy In The Age Of Algorithms, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In deciding privacy lawsuits against media defendants, courts have for decades deferred to the media. They have given it wide berth to determine what is newsworthy and so, what is protected under the First Amendment. And in doing so, they have often spoken reverently of the editorial process and journalistic decision-making.

Yet, in just the last several years, news production and consumption has changed dramatically. As we get more of our news from digital and social media sites, the role of information gatekeeper is shifting from journalists to computer engineers, programmers, and app designers. The algorithms that the latter write …

The Dawn Of Social Intelligence (Socint), Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

More information about citizens’ lives is recorded than ever before. Because the data is digitized, it can be accessed, analyzed, shared, and combined with other information to generate new knowledge. In a post-9/‌11 environment, the legal standards impeding access to such data have fallen. Simultaneously, the advent of global communications and cloud computing, along with network convergence, have expanded the scope of information available. The U.S. government has begun to collect and to analyze the associated data.

The result is the emergence of what can be termed “social intelligence” (SOCINT), which this Article defines as the collection of digital data …

Configuring The Networked Citizen, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among legal scholars of technology, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that the design of networked information technologies has regulatory effects. For the most part, that discussion has been structured by the taxonomy developed by Lawrence Lessig, which classifies "code" as one of four principal regulatory modalities, alongside law, markets, and norms. As a result of that framing, questions about the applicability of constitutional protections to technical decisions have taken center stage in legal and policy debates. Some scholars have pondered whether digital architectures unacceptably constrain fundamental liberties, and what "public" design obligations might follow from such a conclusion. Others …

Privacy, Visibility, Transparency, And Exposure, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay considers the relationship between privacy and visibility in the networked information age. Visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy, but a persistent tendency to conceptualize privacy harms and expectations in terms of visibility has created two problems. First, focusing on visibility diminishes the salience and obscures the operation of nonvisual mechanisms designed to render individual identity, behavior, and preferences transparent to third parties. The metaphoric mapping to visibility suggests that surveillance is simply passive observation, rather than the active production of categories, narratives, and, norms. Second, even a broader conception of privacy harms as a function …

Privacy, Ideology, And Technology: A Response To Jeffrey Rosen, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay reviews Jeffrey Rosen’s The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (2000).

Rosen offers a compelling (and often hair-raising) account of the pervasive dissolution of the boundary between public and private information. This dissolution is both legal and social; neither the law nor any other social institution seems to recognize many limits on the sorts of information that can be subjected to public scrutiny. The book also provides a rich, evocative characterization of the dignitary harms caused by privacy invasion. Rosen’s description of the sheer unfairness of being “judged out of context” rings instantly true. Privacy, Rosen …