Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- File Type
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle
Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle
John Copeland Nagle
Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …
Regulating Mass Surveillance As Privacy Pollution: Learning From Environmental Impact Statements, A. Michael Froomkin
Regulating Mass Surveillance As Privacy Pollution: Learning From Environmental Impact Statements, A. Michael Froomkin
A. Michael Froomkin
US law has remarkably little to say about mass surveillance in public, a failure which has allowed the surveillance to grow at an alarming rate – a rate that is only set to increase. This article proposes ‘Privacy Impact Notices’ (PINs) — modeled on Environmental Impact Statements — as an initial solution to this problem. Data collection in public (and in the home via public spaces) resembles an externality imposed on the person whose privacy is reduced involuntarily; it can also be seen as a market failure caused by an information asymmetry. Current doctrinal legal tools available to respond to …
“Smut And Nothing But”: The Fcc, Indecency, And Regulatory Transformations In The Shadows, Lili Levi
“Smut And Nothing But”: The Fcc, Indecency, And Regulatory Transformations In The Shadows, Lili Levi
Lili Levi
For almost a century, American broadcasting has received a lesser degree of constitutional protection than the print medium. Although many of the FCC’s regulations in “the public interest” have been upheld against First Amendment challenge on the ground that broadcasting is exceptional, the traditional reasons given for such exceptionalism – scarcity and pervasiveness – have become increasingly careworn. Fighting that consensus, the FCC has aggressively pursued the regulation of indecency on radio and television since 2003. When the FCC’s enhanced indecency prohibitions swept up U2 front-man Bono’s fleeting expletive on a music awards show, broadcasters finally thought they had found …
Commentary On Predicting Crime, Tom Bell
Commentary On Predicting Crime, Tom Bell
Tom W. Bell
The market mechanisms proposed in Predicting Crime offer many virtues. The authors describe several of these—unbiased information collection; incentives that encourage disclosure; opinions weighted by conviction; information aggregation; instantaneous and continuous feedback—and convincingly argue that these structural features stand to help prediction markets outperform alternative institutions in forecasting the interplay of crime rates and crime polices. In that, Predicting Crime adopts an economic point of view and speaks in terms of practical experience. After all, similar structural features have already appeared in other successful prediction markets, such as those offering trading in claims about the weather, flu outbreaks, or box …