Law Commons^™

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake E. Reid

Publications

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach …

Platforms And The Fall Of The Fourth Estate: Looking Beyond The First Amendment To Protect Watchdog Journalism, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Journalists see the First Amendment as an amulet, and with good reason. It has long protected the Fourth Estate—an independent institutional press—in its exercise of editorial discretion to check government power. This protection helped the Fourth Estate flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and ably perform its constitutional watchdog role.

But in the last two decades, the media ecology has changed. The Fourth Estate has been subsumed by a Networked Press in which journalists are joined by engineers, algorithms, audience, and other human and non-human actors in creating and distributing news. The Networked Press’s most powerful members …

Tools For Data Governance, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This article describes the challenges of data governance in terms of the broader framework of knowledge commons governance, an institutional approach to governing shared knowledge, information, and data resources. Knowledge commons governance highlights the potential for effective community- and collective-based governance of knowledge resources. The article focuses on key concepts within the knowledge commons framework rather than on specific law and public policy questions, directing the attention of researchers and policymakers to critical inquiry regarding relevant social groups and relevant data “things.” Both concepts are key tools for effective data governance.

Do Blockchain Technologies Make Us Safer? Do Cryptocurrencies Necessarily Make Us Less Safe?, Sarah Jane Hughes

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay is based on a presentation made on January 24, 2020 at the invitation of the Texas Journal of International Law and the Strauss Center for National Security at the University of Texas. That presentation focused on the two questions mentioned in the title of this essay – Do Blockchain Technologies Make Us Safer? And Do Cryptocurrencies Necessarily Make Us Less Safe? The essay presents answers to the two questions: “yes” and “probably yes.” This essay begins with some level-setting on different types of blockchain technologies and of cryptocurrencies, and gives some background materials on global and national responses …

Data Governance And The Emerging University, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

Knowledge and information governance questions are tractable primarily in institutional terms, rather than in terms of abstractions such as knowledge itself or individual or social interests. This chapter offers the modern research university as an example. Practices of data-intensive research by university-based researchers, sometimes reduced to the popular phrase “Big Data,” pose governance challenges for the university. The chapter situates those challenges in the traditional understanding of the university as an institution for understanding forms and flows of knowledge. At a broad level, the chapter argues that the new salience of data exposes emerging shifts in the social, cultural, and …

Classroom To Cyberspace: Preserving Street Law's Interactive And Student-Centered Focus During Distance Learning, Amy Wallace

Articles & Chapters

The Street Law program at New York Law School (NYLS) is a faculty taught, credit-bearing course that trains law students to teach interactive lessons covering practical legal topics at The Charter High School for Law & Social Justice (CHSLSJ), in the Bronx, New York.

On March 3, 2020, NYLS moved online due to the rapid rise of COVID cases in New York City. Like many clinical and experiential programs, we weighed options that would provide both valuable experiences for our high school and law students while keeping everyone safe.

On Sunday March 15, 2020, the New York City public schools …

A Law-Themed Charter High School Born At New York Law School Remains Indelibly Linked, Amy Wallace

Articles & Chapters

It was a confluence of unrelated events at New York Law School in the spring of 2009 that led to the founding of the Charter High School for Law and Social Justice (CHSLSJ) in the Bronx, New York. Dedicated law school faculty members were crucial to the school’s launch and the law school, its law students and faculty continue to nurture this unique and reciprocal relationship. Professor Richard Marsico was the unstoppable force behind the founding of the charter school and its close connection to New York Law School (NYLS). This article details the origins of CHSLSJ, the current relationship …

A United States Perspective On Digital Single Market Directive Art. 17, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

To a US appraiser, article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive suggests the EU has learned from American mistakes (and from its own) in the allocation of internet intermediaries’ liability for hosting and communicating user-posted content. Before the DSM Directive, art. 14 of the 2000 eCommerce Directive set out a notice-and-takedown system very similar to the regime provided in 17 U.S.C. section 512(c). Both regimes replaced the normal copyright default, which requires authorization to exploit works, with a limitation on the liability of service providers who complied with statutory prerequisites. Because the limitation ensured that service providers would not …

Cyberattacks And The Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to popular view, cyberattacks alone are rarely exercises of constitutional war powers – and they might never be. They are often instead best understood as exercises of other powers pertaining to nonwar military, foreign affairs, intelligence, and foreign commerce, for example. Although this more fine-grained, fact-specific conception of cyberattacks leaves room for broad executive leeway in some contexts, it also contains a strong constitutional basis for legislative regulation of cyber operations.

The Promise And Limits Of Cyber Power In International Law: Remarks, Monica Hakimi, Ann Väljataga, Zhixiong Huang, Charles Allen, Sue Robertson, Doug Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Hi, everyone. I am Monica Hakimi from the University of Michigan Law School, and I would like to welcome you to our panel on cyber power and its limits. The topic almost does not need an introduction. We all know just from reading the news that our collective dependence on cyberspace is also a huge vulnerability, and state and non-state actors exploit this vulnerability to do one another harm. They use cyber technologies not just to spy on one another, but also, for example, to interfere in national elections, to steal trade secrets or other valuable information, to disrupt the …

Iran, Diane M. Zorri

Publications

Internet access in Iran is characterized by strong censorship, limited access, surveillance, and widespread state-sanctioned propaganda. The regime in Tehran views internet freedom as a critical threat to its national security (Henry, Pettyjohn, and York 2014). Using an index of variables such as obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights, the nongovernmental organization Freedom House rates Iran’s internet access as “not free” (Freedom House 2018). On a scale of zero to one hundred, where zero is “free” and one hundred is “not free,” Freedom House scores Iran at an eighty-five, making it the least free nation …