Law Commons^™

Power, Process, And Automated Decision-Making, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Many decisions that used to be made by humans are now made by machines. And yet, automated decision-making systems based on “big data” – powered algorithms and machine learning are just as prone to mistakes, biases, and arbitrariness as their human counterparts. The result is a technologically driven decision-making process that seems to defy interrogation, analysis, and accountability and, therefore, undermines due process. This should make algorithmic decision-making an illegitimate source of authority in a liberal democracy. This Essay argues that algorithmic decision-making is a product of the neoliberal project to undermine social values like equality, nondiscrimination, and human flourishing …

When Law Frees Us To Speak, Danielle Citron, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

A central aim of online abuse is to silence victims. That effort is as regrettable as it is successful. In the face of cyber harassment and sexual privacy invasions, women and marginalized groups retreat from online engagement. These documented chilling effects, however, are not inevitable. Beyond its deterrent function, law has an equally important expressive role. In this article, we highlight law’s capacity to shape social norms and behavior through education. We focus on a neglected dimension of law’s expressive role—its capacity to empower victims to express their truths and engage with others. Our argument is theoretical and empirical. We …

Global Platform Governance: Private Power In The Shadow Of The State, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Online intermediaries—search engines, social media platforms, even e-commerce businesses—are increasingly required to make critical decisions about free expression, individual privacy, and property rights under domestic law. These requirements arise in contexts that include the right to be forgotten, hate speech, “terrorist” speech, and copyright and intellectual property. At the same time, these disputes about online speech are increasingly borderless. Many laws targeting online speech and privacy are explicitly extraterritorial in scope. Even when not, some courts have ruled that they have jurisdiction to enforce compliance on a global scale. And governments are also demanding that platforms remove content—on a global …

Data Mining And The Challenges Of Protecting Employee Privacy Under U.S. Law, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

Concerns about employee privacy have intensified with the introduction of data mining tools in the workplace. Employers can now readily access detailed data about workers’ online behavior or social media activities, purchase background information from data brokers, and collect additional data from workplace surveillance tools. When data mining techniques are applied to this wealth of data, it is possible to infer additional information about employees beyond the information that is collected directly. As a consequence, these tools can alter the meaning and significance of personal information depending upon what other information it is aggregated with and how the larger dataset …

Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In Herring v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts reframed the Supreme Court’s understanding of the exclusionary rule: “As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence.” The open question remains: how can defendants demonstrate sufficient recurring or systemic negligence to warrant exclusion? The Supreme Court has never answered the question, although the absence of systemic or recurring problems has figured prominently in two recent exclusionary rule decisions. Without the ability to document recurring failures, or patterns of police misconduct, courts can dismiss …

Policing, Databases, And Surveilance: Five Regulatory Categories, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Databases are full of personal information that law enforcement might find useful. Government access to these databases can be divided into five categories: suspect-driven; profile-driven; event-driven; program-driven and volunteer-driven. This chapter recommends that, in addition to any restrictions imposed by the Fourth Amendment (which currently are minimal), each type of access should be subject to its own regulatory regime. Suspect-driven access should depend on justification proportionate to the intrusion. Profile-driven access should likewise abide by a proportionality principle but should also be subject to transparency, vetting, and universality restrictions. Event-driven access should be cabined by the time and place of …

Privacy's Law Of Design, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Privacy by design is about making privacy part of the conception and development of new data collection tools. But how should we interpret “privacy by design” as a legal mandate? As it transitions from an academic buzzword into binding law, privacy by design will, for the first time, impose real responsibilities on real people to do specific things at specific times. And yet, there remains significant disagreement about what privacy by design actually means in practice: we have yet to define its who, what, when, why, and how. Different approaches to privacy by design have tried to answer those questions …

Facebook V. Sullivan: Public Figures And Newsworthiness In Online Speech, Thomas E. Kadri, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

In the United States, there are now two systems to adjudicate disputes about harmful speech. The first is older and more established: the legal system in which judges apply constitutional law to limit tort claims alleging injuries caused by speech. The second is newer and less familiar: the content-moderation system in which platforms like Facebook implement the rules that govern online speech. These platforms are not bound by the First Amendment. But, as it turns out, they rely on many of the tools used by courts to resolve tensions between regulating harmful speech and preserving free expression—particularly the entangled concepts …

Discipline And Policing, Kate Levine

Faculty Publications

A prime focus of police-reform advocates is the transparency of police discipline. Indeed, transparency is one of, the most popular accountability solutions for a wide swath of policing problems. This Article examines the “transparency cure” as it applies to Police Disciplinary Records (“PDRs”). These records are part of an officer’s personnel file and contain reported wrongdoing from supervisors, Internal Affairs Bureaus, and Citizen Complaint Review Boards.

This Article argues that making PDRs public is worthy of skeptical examination. It problematizes the notion that transparency is a worthy end goal for those who desire to see police-reform in general. Transparency is …

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Harvesting: What You Need To Know, Ikhlaq Ur Rehman

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In 2018, it became public knowledge that millions of Facebook users’ data had been harvested without their consent. At the heart of the issue was Cambridge Analytica (CA) which in partnership with Cambridge researcher, Aleksandr Kogan harvested data from millions of Facebook profiles. Kogan had developed an application called “thisisyourdigitallife” which featured a personality quiz and CA paid for people to take it. The app recorded results of each quiz, collected data from quiz taker’s Facebook account such as personal information and Facebook activity (e.g., what content was “liked”) as well as their Facebook friends which led to data harvesting …

Privacy In The Age Of Medical Big Data, W. Nicholson Price Ii, I. Glenn Cohen

Articles

Big data has become the ubiquitous watch word of medical innovation. The rapid development of machine-learning techniques and artificial intelligence in particular has promised to revolutionize medical practice from the allocation of resources to the diagnosis of complex diseases. But with big data comes big risks and challenges, among them significant questions about patient privacy. Here, we outline the legal and ethical challenges big data brings to patient privacy. We discuss, among other topics, how best to conceive of health privacy; the importance of equity, consent, and patient governance in data collection; discrimination in data uses; and how to handle …