Law Commons^™

The Rise Of Transparency And The Decline Of Secrecy In The Age Of Global And Social Media, P.J. Crowley

Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs

News reporting of a wide range of sensitive government policies, operations, and internal deliberations has raised understandable concerns that U.S. national security is being compromised. In response, there is an increase in investigations and prosecutions and proposed legislation to plug government leaks. But a broader reality may be at work. In the increasingly interconnected and transparent world of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, satellite television, WikiLeaks, omniscient cellphones and technology-enhanced revolutions such as the Arab Awakening, governments have lost their ability to control the flow of information. More people have access to more information, with the ability to communicate anything from …

The Transparency Fix: Advocating Legal Rights And Their Alternatives In The Pursuit Of A Visible State, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The administrative norm of transparency, which promises a solution to the problem of government secrecy, requires political advocacy organized from outside the state. The traditional approach, typically the result of organized campaigns to make the state visible to the public, has been to enact freedom of information laws (FOI) that require government disclosure and grant enforceable rights to the public. The legal solution has not proven wholly satisfactory, however. In the past two decades, numerous advocacy movements have offered different fixes to the information asymmetry problem that the administrative state creates. These alternatives now augment and sometimes compete with legal …

Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

Open Secret: Why The Supreme Court Has Nothing To Fear From The Internet, Keith J. Bybee

Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media at Syracuse University

The United States Supreme Court has an uneasy relationship with openness: it complies with some calls for transparency, drags its feet in response to others, and sometimes simply refuses to go along. I argue that the Court’s position is understandable given that the internet age of fluid information and openness has often been heralded in terms that are antithetical to the Court’s operations. Even so, I also argue the Court actually has little to fear from greater transparency. The understanding of the Court with the greatest delegitimizing potential is the understanding that the justices render decisions on the basis of …

Transparency Through Insurance: Mandates Dominate Discretion, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter describes how liability insurance has contributed to the transparency of the civil justice system. The chapter makes three main points. First, much of what we know about the empirics of the civil justice system comes from access to liability insurance data and personnel. Second, as long as access to liability insurance data and personnel depends on the discretion of liability insurance organizations, this knowledge will be incomplete and, most likely, biased in favor of the public policy agenda of the organizations providing discretionary access to the data. Third, although mandatory disclosure of liability insurance data would improve transparency, …