Law Commons^™

Facing Injustice: How Face Recognition Technology May Increase The Incidence Of Misidentifications And Wrongful Convictions, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does law enforcement use of face recognition technology paired with eyewitness identifications increase the incidence of wrongful convictions in U.S. criminal law? This Article explores this critical question and posits that the answer may be yes. Facial recognition is frequently used by law enforcement agencies to help generate investigative leads that are then presented to eyewitnesses for positive identification. But erroneous eyewitness accounts are the number one cause of wrongful convictions, and the use of face recognition to generate investigative leads may create the conditions for erroneous eyewitness identifications to take place. This is because face recognition technology is designed …

Contested Sovereignties: States, Media Platforms, Peoples, And The Regulation Of Media Content And Big Data In The Networked Society, Pascale Chapdelaine, Jaqueline Mcleod Rogers

Law Publications

This article examines the legal and normative foundations of media content regulation in the borderless networked society. We explore the extent to which internet undertakings should be subject to state regulation, in light of Canada’s ongoing debates and legislative reform. We bring a cross-disciplinary perspective (from the subject fields of law; communications studies, in particular McLuhan’s now classic probes; international relations; and technology studies) to enable both policy and language analysis. We apply the concept of sovereignty to states (national cultural and digital sovereignty), media platforms (transnational sovereignty), and citizens (autonomy and personal data sovereignty) to examine the competing dynamics …

Achieving Privacy: Costs Of Compliance And Enforcement Of Data Protection Regulation, Anupam Chander, Meaza Abraham, Sandeep Chandy, Yuan Fang, Dayoung Park, Isabel Yu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is privacy a luxury for the rich world? Remarkably, there is a dearth of literature evaluating whether data privacy is too costly for companies to implement, or too expensive for governments to enforce. This paper is the first to offer a review of surveys of costs of compliance, and to summarize national budgets for enforcement. The study shows that while privacy may indeed prove costly for companies to implement, it is not too costly for governments to enforce. This study will help inform governments as they fashion and implement privacy laws to address the “privacy enforcement gap”—the disparity between the …

The Republic Of Letters And The Origins Of Scientific Knowledge Commons, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for knowledge governance. Distinctions and intersections between public purposes and privacy interests are highlighted. Lessons from revisiting the Republic of Letters as knowledge commons may be useful in advancing contemporary discussions of Open Science.

Legal Opacity: Artificial Intelligence’S Sticky Wicket, Charlotte A. Tschider

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Proponents of artificial intelligence (“AI”) transparency have carefully illustrated the many ways in which transparency may be beneficial to prevent safety and unfairness issues, to promote innovation, and to effectively provide recovery or support due process in lawsuits. However, impediments to transparency goals, described as opacity, or the “black-box” nature of AI, present significant issues for promoting these goals.

An undertheorized perspective on opacity is legal opacity, where competitive, and often discretionary legal choices, coupled with regulatory barriers create opacity. Although legal opacity does not specifically affect AI only, the combination of technical opacity in AI systems with legal opacity …

Trademarks As Surveillance Transparency, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We know very little about the technologies that watch us. From cell site simulators to predictive policing algorithms, the lack of transparency around surveillance technologies makes it difficult for the public to engage in meaningful oversight. Legal scholars have critiqued various corporate and law enforcement justifications for surveillance opacity, including contract and intellectual property law. But the public needs a free, public, and easily accessible source of information about corporate technologies that might be used to watch us. To date, the literature has overlooked a free, extensive, and easily accessible source of information about surveillance technologies hidden in plain sight: …

From Lex Informatica To The Control Revolution, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal scholarship on the encounter between networked digital technologies and law has focused principally on how legal and policy processes should respond to new technological developments and has spent much less time considering what that encounter might signify for the shape of legal institutions themselves. This essay focuses on the latter question. Within fields like technology studies, labor history, and economic sociology, there is a well-developed tradition of studying the ways that new information technologies and the “control revolution” they enabled—in brief, a quantum leap in the capacity for highly granular oversight and management—have elicited long-term, enduring changes in the …