Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work... the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
A compelling firsthand investigation of how social media and big data have amplified the close relationship between privacy and inequality Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this--it is a matter of social justice. Alice E. Marwick offers a new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities--including immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and victims of online harassment. Marwick shows that there are few resources or regulations for preventing personal information from spreading on the internet. Through a new theory of "networked privacy," she reveals how current legal and technological frameworks are woefully inadequate in addressing issues of privacy--often by design. Drawing from interviews and focus groups encompassing a diverse group of Americans, Marwick shows that even heavy social media users care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive "privacy work" to protect it. But people are up against the violation machine of the modern internet. Safeguarding privacy must happen at the collective level.
Internet of Things and the Law: Legal Strategies for Consumer-Centric Smart Technologies is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the legal issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). For decades, the decreasing importance of tangible wealth and power – and the increasing significance of their disembodied counterparts – has been the subject of much legal research. For some time now, legal scholars have grappled with how laws drafted for tangible property and predigital ‘offline’ technologies can cope with dematerialisation, digitalisation, and the internet. As dematerialisation continues, this book aims to illuminate the opposite movement: rematerialisation, namely, the return of data, knowledge, and power within a physical ‘smart’ world. This development frames the book’s central question: can the law steer rematerialisation in a human-centric and socially just direction? To answer it, the book focuses on the IoT, the sociotechnological phenomenon that is primarily responsible for this shift. After a thorough analysis of how existing laws can be interpreted to empower IoT end users, Noto La Diega leaves us with the fundamental question of what happens when the law fails us and concludes with a call for collective resistance against ‘smart’ capitalism.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.
Legal Analytics: The Future of Analytics in Law navigates the crisscrossing of intelligent technology and the legal field in building up a new landscape of transformation. Legal automation navigation is multidimensional, wherein it intends to construct streamline communication, approval, and management of legal tasks. The evolving environment of technology has emphasized the need for better automation in the legal field from time to time, although legal scholars took long to embrace information revolution of the legal field. • Describes the historical development of law and automation. • Analyzes the challenges and opportunities in law and automation. • Studies the current research and development in the convergence of law, artificial intelligence, and legal analytics. • Explores the recent emerging trends and technologies that are used by various legal systems globally for crime prediction and prevention. • Examines the applicability of legal analytics in forensic investigation. • Investigates the impact of legal analytics tools and techniques in judicial decision making. • Analyzes deep learning techniques and their scope in accelerating legal analytics in developed and developing countries. • Provides an in-depth analysis of implementation, challenges, and issues in society related to legal analytics. This book is primarily aimed at graduates and postgraduates in law and technology, computer science, and information technology. Legal practitioners and academicians will also find this book helpful.
This collection of essays addresses the transformations ongoing in the field of competition law by analysing current developments through the prism of Giuliano Amato's Antitrust and the Bounds of Power – thereby building an intellectual bridge between past and present. Giuliano Amato's book, Antitrust and the Bounds of Power: The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy in the History of the Market was published by Hart in 1997. It has predicted, articulated, and explained many of the changes that have taken place in competition law in the last 25 years, and it is referred to by generations of competition lawyers as a key theoretical work. There are many mutually invigorating reasons and explanations for the paradigmatic transformations that have occurred in competition law, economics, and policy since the 1990s. Some are triggered by the internal evolution of competition law; others are determined by the broader societal context. In this book, leading competition law thinkers reflect on these metamorphoses; they explore the state of affairs in the field, connecting it with and advancing their analyses through the ideas developed by Giuliano Amato in his ground-breaking book. With an afterword by Giuliano Amato and a foreword by Frédéric Jenny, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of competition law.
Online content moderation is a well-known phenomenon. However, no consistent pattern exists on how it is done or how it is legally dealt with. This book addresses the complex issue of questionable content removals and account suspensions on social media platforms in the European Union, solving the existing legal ambiguity with a powerful roadmap designed to guide decision-makers in navigating online access rights and moderation issues. The roadmap’s elements are deduced from a technology-neutral comparative case law study of four Member States (Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) based on rigorous selection criteria that highlight the most salient distinctions that characterise legal approaches to social media access and moderation. The ‘layers’ of the roadmap focus on such central issues as the following: the legal basis for social media platforms to impose restrictions; platform operators’ right to shape access, including limitations to the platform’s right to exclude users; the validity and enforceability of terms of service; and users’ and platforms’ remedies for breaches of the terms of service, including the procedural obligations in the Digital Services Act. Unlike previous work on the topic, this book does not focus on one field of law but touches upon and combines European law, constitutional and fundamental rights law, competition law, equality law, property law, and contract law, all reflected on and assessed through both a European and a national lens. By addressing these multifaceted legal aspects, it offers a holistic approach to resolving content moderation challenges and demonstrates which problems are most effectively addressed by which fields of law. The book’s roadmap can be used within the European Union to address and/or resolve any access and moderation problems on social media platforms. It will serve as a valuable resource for judges, social media platforms, and dispute resolution bodies, providing practical insights and guidance in navigating this complex landscape and streamlining decision-making processes. It will prove of immeasurable value in fostering a balanced and fair approach to content moderation in the EU that will ensure that all European users have equal opportunities for redress.
This volume revisits some of the key debates about the nature and shape of contract law, in light of the impact that statutes have had on its development. With contributions from leading contract law scholars, it fills a significant gap in existing theoretical and doctrinal analyses of contract law, which rely primarily on cases to put forward accounts of the general principles and structure of contract law. Statutory rules are, typically, seen as being specific instances of legal regulation that carve out exceptions to these general principles for specific reasons of policy. This treatment of these rules has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the nature of contract law and the principles that underpin it. By drawing specifically on contract statutes, the volume produces a more complete picture of modern contract law. A companion to the ground-breaking Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change (Hart Publishing, 2012) this collection will have a significant impact on the study of contract law.
Weaving together theoretical, historical, and legal approaches, this book offers a fresh perspective on the modern revival of the concept of allegiance, identifying and contextualising its evolving association with theories of citizenship.
