Archive for the ‘Articles and Books’ Category

Contracts in the Real World

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter has been released by Cambridge University Press and is available here (amazon.com) and here (CUP site). We hope that teachers of 1L Contracts will assign it or recommend it next fall and expect student interest to be high. The book reviews classic cases and standard doctrines by applying them to current events.  According to colleagues whose endorsements appear on the jacket:

“In Lawrence Cunningham’s engaging new book, Contracts in the Real World, old chestnuts, the foibles of contemporary celebrities and holes-in-one are delivered with flair and without legalese. The neophyte will be informed by this fun book. I am sure Professor Kingsfield would enjoy it much as I did.”  – Joseph M. Perillo, Fordham

“The stories are fascinating, the issues are important, and the explanations are compelling. Lawrence Cunningham has written a splendid book.”- Steven Lubet, Northwestern

“Contracts in the Real World is a fascinating account of how contract disputes are argued and decided, engaging the reader with stories involving celebrity parties or gut-wrenching disputes without losing scholarly sophistication. It is fit for general readers and students of the law, amply demonstrating the common sense that the common law of contracts brings to bear on the battles inevitably arising when promises are broken.” – Donald Langevoort, Georgetown Read the rest of this post »

  May 22, 2012 at 7:15 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond, Current Events   Print This Post   2 Comments

Harvard Law Review Symposium on Privacy and Technology: Call for Papers

posted by Daniel Solove

The Harvard Law Review is hosting a Symposium this November on the topic of Privacy & Technology.  The Law Review is currently accepting abstracts for papers to be considered for publication in the Symposium Issue.  To be considered for publication, please send an abstract of no more than 750 words to HLRsymposium2012@gmail.com by June 15.  Space in the issue is limited and papers will be selected on a rolling basis, so early submission is recommended.  We strongly prefer abstracts for shorter essays that can be executed in fewer than 12,500 words (about 25 law review pages).

The following proposal gives a taste of what kinds of inquiries we are interested in. We are most interested in papers that challenge old concepts and categories and propose new ones that could potentially drive the development of privacy law in the following decades.

Today, we are witnessing astounding new technologies that efficiently gather, use, and analyze massive amounts of data.  These changes have created a set of profound challenges for regulating privacy, as existing regulatory approaches are straining to keep up with rapid technological advances.  The regulatory ideas and frameworks over the past few decades have failed to adequately respond to the constantly shifting technological landscape. Policymakers—among many different stakeholders—recognize that a new direction is needed for privacy law, but there remains much to be resolved about what direction it should head.  Moreover, deep divides have emerged in how different societies regulate privacy despite the increased need for governments and businesses to share information across borders.  These changes present challenges for the core conceptual underpinnings of privacy itself.  We thus stand at a crossroads about how to regulate privacy and even how to think about privacy.  The road forward will require a deep re-imagining of privacy in both theory and practice.

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  May 21, 2012 at 2:02 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

The AIG Story with Hank Greenberg

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I am pleased to report steady progress on my book project, The AIG Story, which I am writing with Hank Greenberg, who headed the company for 35 years before its nosedive that began in March 2005 and culminated in the government takeover/bailout of September 2008.

The AIG Story chronicles the strategic growth of American International Group (AIG) from a modest collection of insurance enterprises in the late 1960s, to the largest insurance company in the world by 2005. It charts the role, generally under-appreciated by the public, AIG played during the latter half of the 20th century in promoting economic growth worldwide, driving the process of globalization and helping the United States in various ways in many pivotal places in the world, including China and the Soviet Union (including Eastern Europe) as well as Iran, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Without overshadowing that chronicle, the book also addresses how the corporate governance movement of the 1990s weakened AIG, inviting the actions of an ambitious politician/prosecutor, Eliot Spitzer, who further weakened the company in 2005, leading AIG to a period of chaos that led to the 2008 seizure of AIG by the U.S. government amid the financial crisis. The book will include considerable information that has not previously been made public.

The book is a corporate and business history interwoven with much of U.S. and international activity during the latter half of the twentieth century. It is the story of the world’s rough ride toward globalization and the triumph of free markets and open trade over communism, nationalism, protectionism, and isolationism. It is a story of how AIG helped pave the road. It is also a cautionary tale about corporate governance and regulatory zealousness, warning against “one-size-fits-all” regulation and prosecutors in the boardroom.

It is a unique chronicle, with a CEO’s viewpoint leavened by objective research and analysis. The research includes ordinary documentary study as well as FOIA/FOIL requests and interviews I conducted over the past year with 50+ people involved in the tales, ranging from Henry Kissinger and Peter Peterson, about the building and importance of AIG in the world, to the lawyers, accountants and outside directors and managers who presided over its demise.

A table of contents follows.  I’d  be happy to hear suggestions from interested people about what they would like to see addressed in such a book, though I cannot promise being able to include everything one would wish!  Wiley is the publisher; release date is early 2013. Read the rest of this post »

  May 19, 2012 at 8:01 am   Posted in: Accounting, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Corporate Law, Culture, Current Events, Financial Institutions, Insurance Law, Interviews, Law Practice, Legal Ethics, Securities Regulation, Trade   Print This Post   2 Comments

Frischmann Predicts Prometheus

posted by Michael Burstein

Thanks so much to Frank, Danielle, and Deven for inviting me to participate in this symposium. It’s a great pleasure to discuss my colleague Brett Frischmann’s timely, engaging, and important book about infrastructure.

I’m going to focus my comments on Frischmann’s theory of intellectual infrastructure and how it relates to the structure of intellectual property law. Just a few days after the release of Infrastructure, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. That case presented the question whether certain diagnostic claims were within the scope of patentable subject matter under section 101 of the Patent Act. The Court held that they were not, in a manner that is strikingly consistent with Frischmann’s theory. Hence the title of my post. But Frischmann’s theory may also go a long way toward bringing some order to an area of patent law that has long been confused.

Let’s start with the concept of intellectual infrastructure. Frischmann explains that intellectual or cultural resources can be infrastructural in the same manner as physical goods. So long as the resource is a “nonrival input into a wide variety of outputs” (275), it satisfies the characteristics of infrastructure that Frischmann so richly describes. In turn, that suggests that the case for managing the resource as a commons is strong. Frischmann then explains how this concept applies to ideas. Ideas, he writes, often are infrastructure (subject to a number of complications that I’ll put to the side). So in his view, intellectual property should protect implementations of ideas but not the ideas themselves (286). To sort one from the other, Frischmann turns to the concept of abstraction in copyright law and argues that patent law should follow a similar path.

Now consider Prometheus. The inventors in that case discovered a correlation between the effectiveness of a drug and the amount of certain metabolites of that drug in a patient’s blood. Their patent claimed a method of optimizing the dosage of the drug based on that correlation. The method was simple: (1) administer the drug; (2) determine the amount of metabolites in the patient’s blood; (3) make an inference about drug dosage based on the correlation. Doctrinally, the question before the Court was whether this amounted to a claim on a “natural law” – the correlation between drug dosage and metabolism that happens in the human body – which would be unpatentable under a long-standing exception to the scope of patentable subject matter, or a patentable application of that law.

 

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  April 27, 2012 at 10:25 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Infrastructure Symposium, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Symposium (Infrastructure), Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

The Preacher and the Pragmatist: Remembering Derrick Bell

posted by Angela Harris

I’m now old enough to have lived through several moral panics over critical race theory. There was that culture-wars-era (remember those days?) one over whether critical race theorists were destroying the legacy of the Enlightenment by publishing first-person anecdotes; there was the one about whether critical race theorists were anti-Asian and anti-Semitic for criticizing extant standards of “merit” in the context of affirmative action in higher education; connected with that, there was that flap over whether Richard Delgado’s skin was the same color as Richard Posner’s (young people, I swear I am not making this up! Google it!); and, of course, there was that time Jeffrey Rosen blamed O.J. Simpson’s acquittal on, you guessed it, critical race theory.

These are reduced days, and the most recent moral panic over CRT cannot compare in either grandeur or silliness. Still, I experienced a moment of nostalgia when video recently surfaced on YouTube of a sweetly young Barack Obama, then a student at Harvard Law School, introducing Professor Derrick Bell at what appears to be a rally. The tagline attached to the video refers to “radical racist Derrick Bell,” and a related video shows Soledad O’Brien frantically riffing off some clearly inadequate notes as she tries to defend critical race theory as a mainstream academic literature (watching her, I had the urge to shout encouragingly, “EPA!”). The “gotcha” moment that follows shows Bell explaining to an interviewer his sympathy with W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “the wages of whiteness”: the idea that anti-black sentiment has been so hard to eradicate in American society because it serves the function of keeping poor and disempowered white people content with their lot, willing to identify with elite whites based on the symbolic community of race rather than making common cause with poor folks of other backgrounds based on economic interest.

Seeing Bell explaining this argument in his characteristically soft, courtly voice, and thinking about the juxtaposition of Bell and Obama, made me think about the preacher and the pragmatist. Not Bell as preacher and Obama as pragmatist, but the preacher and the pragmatist within Bell himself.

What’s true in the characterization of Bell as a radical is, of course, his thoroughgoing rejection of America’s official liberal pieties about race, the most important of these being the faith that racism either has already disappeared or could very soon, probably in our grandchildren’s generation (if we could just get rid of affirmative action, or fully implement it, depending on whether you skew right or left).  Bell is probably most famous for two concepts: the idea of “interest convergence” and the conviction that “racism is permanent,” and both – especially the second – were and continue to be deeply emotionally upsetting to many. Interest convergence is the idea that black people (about and to whom Bell largely spoke) will only experience improvement in their material condition to the extent that white people as a group believe that it serves their own interests. The idea that racism is permanent links back to DuBois and undermines another liberal faith: the idea that racism is peripheral rather than central to American society. The Bell who believed racism is permanent also believed that the American social contract is founded on racial identity, that Americanness and whiteness are too bound up in one another to ever be teased apart.

This side of Bell counseled pragmatism rather than idealism, rejecting King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the most brutal terms. Under this view, the best strategy for black people is to appeal to white self-interest for moderate reforms; and we will never be post-racial as long as there is an America. Bell was accused of nihilism for taking this position. Yet there was another Bell too, a preacher in addition to a pragmatist.

Re-reading his book Confronting Authority, I get the sense that Bell was not an easy colleague, and not because of his personal style. Bell was always warm, gentle and mild-mannered, funny, and dedicated to dialogue even with those with whom he bitterly disagreed. He never came across as the stereotypical Angry Black Man. But he had the discomfiting habit of trying to live up to his principles and expecting everyone else to, too. His account of his personal strike against Harvard Law School – his decision to take leave unless and until a qualified black woman was hired to the full-time tenure-track faculty – is the best example. Like Peter Singer, the philosopher who tries to get affluent people to use their money and privilege on behalf of the worst-off instead of benefitting their friends and family, Bell was always taking an uncomfortable but principled stand and making you have to explain to yourself why you couldn’t do the same. This Bell was an idealist, not a realist. His answer to those who criticized his “permanence of racism” thesis was similarly disconcertingly idealistic: One fights against racism, even though we know it to be permanent, simply because it is the right thing to do, because we have a moral responsibility to do so. Preachers’ kids sometimes grow up to be odd people in this way: trying to live as God wants us to live rather than making the accommodations to social norms and physical and mental comfort that the rest of us do. I have no idea whether Professor Bell was a preacher’s kid, or whether he considered himself religious, but this aspect of his thought and life has that same unnerving quality.

In his book A Secular Age,  Charles Taylor argues that a signal social division of our time is between those who feel that the pleasures and pains of this world are all there is, and those who feel that there is something more. Derrick Bell placed himself on both sides of the divide. He was both a preacher and a pragmatist, deeply principled and deeply strategic. Both sides of him were uncompromising. People like that are seldom easy company, but they challenge us in a useful way: not only with their ideas, but with the shape of their lives.

  April 9, 2012 at 2:15 pm  Tags: critical race theory, Derrick Bell  Posted in: Articles and Books, Civil Rights, Culture, Current Events, Race, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Don’t use et al.

posted by Dave Hoffman

As a co-authored piece just recently reminded me, I’ve a huge grudge against the Blue Book.  (Which hasn’t yet escalated on their side to using me as an example as a but see.  Or worse!  Actually, I’m not sure that the great platonic blue book guardians even know I’m mad at them.)  As I wrote in 2007:

“Rule 15.1. R. 15.1 states that when there are two or more authors, you have a choice:

Either use the first author’s name followed by “ET AL.” or list all of the authors’ names. Where saving space is desired, and in short form citations, the first method is suggested . . Include all authors’ names when doing so is particular relevant.

This seems to me to express a pretty strong non-listing preference. The “problem” is that much good interdisciplinary work results from collaborations among more than two authors – it is the nature of the beast . . . This seems like a trivial objection, but it will take on increasing weight over the next ten years as empirical legal studies really comes online in the major law reviews.”

The trend toward interdisciplinary, multiple authored, pieces continues.  And though it’s true that law reviews are a dying beast, there is still no good reason at all for omitting the names of authors in the first footnote in which the work is cited. “Saving space” is a terrible argument: we could do that by getting rid of useless and often inaccurate parentheticals “explaining” the source, often written by cite-checking second year students.

If I were running a law review seeking to differentiate itself, or an author negotiating with a few journals, my deal points would be: (1) color graphics on the web version of the article; and (2) no et al. usage.  That has to be more constructive and useful than “lead article” status!

  March 8, 2012 at 12:53 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   2 Comments

LTAAA Symposium: Complexity, Intentionality, and Artificial Agents

posted by Samir Chopra

I would like to respond to a series of related posts made by Ken Anderson, Giovanni Sartor, Lawrence Solum, and James Grimmelmann during the LTAAA symposium. In doing so, I will touch on topics that occurred many times in the debate here: the intentional stance, complexity, legal fictions (even zombies!) and the law. My remarks here will also respond to the very substantive, engaged comments made by Patrick O’Donnell and AJ Sutter to my responses over the weekend. (I have made some responses to Patrick   and AJ in the comments spaces where their remarks were originally made).

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  February 20, 2012 at 4:32 pm  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Cyberlaw, Legal Theory, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents), Technology   Print This Post   4 Comments

LTAAA Symposium: Response to Pagallo on Legal Personhood

posted by Samir Chopra

Ugo Pagallo, with whom I had a very useful email exchange a few months ago, has written a very useful response to A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents.  I find it useful because I think in each of his four allegedly critical points, we are in greater agreement than Ugo imagines.
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  February 19, 2012 at 6:40 pm  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Cyberlaw, Legal Theory, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents), Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

LTAAA Symposium: Response to Surden on Artificial Agents’ Cognitive Capacities

posted by Samir Chopra

I want to thank Harry Surden for his rich, technically-informed response  to A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, and importantly, for seizing on an important distinction we make early in the book when we say:

There are two views of the goals of artificial intelligence. From an engineering perspective, as Marvin Minsky noted, it is the “science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men” (Minsky 1969, v). From a cognitive science perspective, it is to design and build systems that work the way the human mind does (Shanahan 1997, xix). In the former perspective, artificial intelligence is deemed successful along a performative dimension; in the latter, along a theoretical one. The latter embodies Giambattista Vico’s perspective of verum et factum convertuntur, “the true and the made are…convertible” (Vico 2000); in such a view, artificial intelligence would be reckoned the laboratory that validates our best science of the human mind. This perspective sometimes shades into the claim artificial intelligence’s success lies in the replication of human capacities such as emotions, the sensations of taste and self-consciousness. Here, artificial intelligence is conceived of as building artificial persons, not just designing systems that are “intelligent.”

The latter conception of AI as being committed to building ‘artificial persons’ is what, it is pretty clear, causes much of the angst that LTAAA’s claims seem to occasion. And even though I have sought to separate the notion of ‘person’ from ‘legal persons’ it seems that some conflation has continued to occur in our discussions thus far.

I’ve personally never understood why artificial intelligence was taken to be, or ever took itself to be, dedicated to the task of replicating human capacities, faithfully attempting to build “artificial persons” or “artificial humans”. This always seemed such like a boring, pointlessly limited task. Sure, the pursuit of cognitive science is entirely justified; the greater the understanding we have of our own minds, the better we will be able to understand our place in nature. But as for replicating and mimicking them faithfully: Why bother with the ersatz when we have the real? We already have a perfectly good way to make humans or persons and it is way more fun than doing mechanical engineering or writing code. The real action, it seems to me, lay in the business of seeing how we could replicate our so-called intellectual capacities without particular regard for the method of implementation; if the best method of implementation happened to be one that mapped on well to what seemed like the human mind’s way of doing it, then that would be an added bonus. The multiple-realizability of our supposedly unique cognitive abilities would do wonders to displace our sense of uniqueness, acknowledge the possibility of other modes of existence, and re-invoke the sense of wonder about the elaborate tales we tell ourselves about our intentionality, consciousness, autonomy or freedom of will.

Having said this, I can now turn to responding to Harry’s excellent post.
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  February 19, 2012 at 3:26 pm  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Cyberlaw, Legal Theory, Psychology and Behavior, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents), Technology   Print This Post   6 Comments

LTAA Symposium: Response to Sutter on Artificial Agents

posted by Samir Chopra

I’d like to thank Andrew Sutter for his largely critical, but very thought-provoking, response to A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. In responding to Andrew I will often touch on themes that I might have already tackled. I hope this repetition comes across as emphasis, rather than as redundancy. I’m also concentrating on responding to broader themes in Andrew’s post as opposed to the specific doctrinal concerns (like service-of-process or registration; my attitude in these matters is that the law will find a way if it can discern the broad outlines of a desirable solution just ahead; service-of-process seemed intractable for anonymous bloggers but it was solved somehow).
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  February 18, 2012 at 3:05 pm  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Cyberlaw, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents), Technology   Print This Post   7 Comments

LTAAA Symposium: Artificial Agents and the Law of Agency

posted by Samir Chopra

I am gratified that Deborah DeMott, whose work on agency doctrines was so influential in our writing has written such an engaged (and if I may so, positive)  response to our attempt, in A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, to co-opt the common law agency doctrine for use with artificial agents. We did so, knowing the fit would be neither exact, nor precise, and certainly would not mesh with all established intuitions.
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  February 18, 2012 at 12:47 pm  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond, Cyberlaw, Legal Theory, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents)   Print This Post   No Comments

LTAAA Symposium: Legal Personhood for Artificial Agents

posted by Samir Chopra

In this post, I’d like to make some brief remarks on the question of legal personhood for artificial agents, and in so doing, offer a response to Sonia Katyal’s and Ramesh Subramanian’s thoughtful posts on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. I’d like to thank Sonia for making me think more about the history of personhood jurisprudence, and Ramesh for prompting to me to think more about the aftermath of granting legal personhood, especially the issues of “Reproduction, Representation, and Termination” (and for alerting me to  Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority)

I have to admit that I don’t have as yet, any clearly formed thoughts on the issues Ramesh raises. This is not because they won’t be real issues down the line; indeed, I think automated judging is more than just a gleam in the eye of those folks that attend ICAIL conferences. Rather, I think it is that those issues will perhaps snap into sharper focus once artificial agents acquire more functionality, become more ubiquitous, and more interestingly, come to occupy roles formerly occupied by humans. I think, then, we will have a clearer idea of how to frame those questions more precisely with respect to a particular artificial agent and a particular factual scenario.
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  February 18, 2012 at 10:54 am  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond, Cyberlaw, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Artificial Agents and the Law: Some Preliminary Considerations

posted by Samir Chopra

I am grateful to Concurring Opinions for hosting this online symposium on my book A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. There has already been some discussion here; I’m hoping that once the book has been read and its actual arguments engaged with, we can have a more substantive discussion. (I notice that James Grimmelmann and Sonia Katyal have already posted very thoughtful responses; I intend to respond to those in separate posts later.)

Last week, I spoke on the book at Bard College, to a mixed audience of philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science faculty and students. The question-and-answer session was quite lively and our conversations continued over dinner later.  Some of the questions that were directed at me are quite familiar to me by now: Why make any change in the legal status of artificial agents? That is, why elevate them from non-entities in the ontology of the law to the status of legal agents, or possibly even beyond? How can an artificial agent, which lacks the supposedly distinctively-human characteristics of <insert consciousness, free-will, rationality, autonomy, subjectivity, phenomenal experience here> ever be considered an “agent” or a “person”? Aren’t you abusing language when you say that a program or a robot can be attributed knowledge? How can those kinds of things ever ”know” anything? Who is doing the knowing?

I’ll be addressing questions like these and others during this online symposium; for the time being, I’d like to make a couple of general remarks.

The modest changes in legal doctrine proposed in our book are largely driven by two considerations.

First, existent legal doctrine, in a couple of domains, most especially contracting, which kicks off our discussion and serves as the foundations for the eventual development of the book’s thesis, is placed under considerable strain by its current treatment of highly sophisticated artificial agents. We could maintain current contracting doctrines as is (i.e., merely tweak them to accommodate artificial agents without changing their status vis-a-vis contracting) but run the risk of imposing implausible readings of contract theories in doing so. This might be seen as a reasonable price to pay so that we can maintain our intuitions about the kinds of beings some of us take artificial agents to be. I’d suggest this kind of retention of intuitions starts to become increasingly untenable when we see the disparateness in the entities that are placed in the same legal category. (Are autonomous robots really just the same as tools like hammers?). Furthermore, as we argue in Chapter 1 and 2, there is a perfectly coherent path we can take to start to consider such artificial agents as legal agents (perhaps without legal personality at first). This strategy is philosophically and legally coherent and the argument is developed in detail in Chapter 1 and 2.  The argument in the latter case suggest that they be considered as legal agents for the purpose of contracting; that in the former lays out a prima facieargument for considering them legal agents. Furthermore, in Chapter 2, we say “The most cogent reason for adopting the agency law approach to artificial agents in the context of the contracting problem is to allow the law to distinguish in a principled way between those contracts entered into by an artificial agent that should bind a principal and those that should not.”

Which brings me to my second point. A change in a  legal doctrine can bring about better outcomes. One of the crucial arguments in our Chapter 2, (one I really hope readers engage with) is an assessment in the economic dimension of  contracting by artificial agents considered as legal agents. I share the skepticism of those in the legal academy that economic analysis of law not drive all doctrinal changes but in this case, I’d suggest the risk allocation does work out better. As we note “Arguably, agency law principles in the context of contracting are economically efficient in the sense of correctly allocating the risk of erroneous agent behavior on the least-cost avoider (Rasmusen 2004, 369). Therefore, the case for the application of agency doctrine to artificial agents in the contractual context is strengthened if we can show similar considerations apply in the case of artificial agents as do in the case of human agents, so that similar rules of apportioning liability between the principal and the third party should also apply.”

And I think we do.

An even stronger argument can be made when it comes to privacy. In Chapter 3, the dismissal of the Google defense (“if humans don’t read your email, your privacy is not violated”) is enabled precisely by treating artificial agents as legal  agents. (This follows on the heel of an analysis of knowledge attribution to artificial agents so that they can be considered legal agents for the purpose of knowledge attribution.)

Much more on this in the next few days.

  February 14, 2012 at 12:08 am  Tags: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, artificial agents  Posted in: Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond, Symposium (Autonomous Artificial Agents)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Daily You: A Mandatory Read

posted by Danielle Citron

Over at the Business Insider, Doug Weaver has a terrific review of our guest blogger Joe Turow’s new book The Daily You, demonstrating its practical importance to people in the field like Weaver as well as to policymakers and scholars.Here’s the review:

Listening to the insider discussions and industry reporting about online marketing provides a numbing sense of false comfort.  But every so often, we go outside the bubble and hear civilians talking about what we do.  I’m sure most of us have had someone at a party or family gathering share their ‘creeped out’ moment;  that instance where they finally saw clearly that somehow they were being ‘followed’ online.   Other times, they offer us largely unformed general concerns about online privacy: they don’t really have a sense of what’s going on but they instinctively know they don’t like it.  And once in a great while you’ll hear from someone who’s really done their homework and brings crystal clarity to the issue from the consumer point of view.

That moment came for me when I stumbled on an NPR radio interview with Joseph Turow, author of “The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.”  After using up my ten minute commute, I found myself sitting my car in the parking lot of my office for another 30 minutes just listening to this guy.  It was kind of like hearing someone talk about you in a bathroom when they don’t know you’re in one of the stalls.  Except they’re totally getting it right.  Turow, an associate dean at the Annenberg Communication school at Penn, has done a lot of homework.  The book is detailed and rigorous, but also extremely accessible to the curious consumer.  While it’s probably not going to sell millions of copies, I believe it’s going to be a hugely influential and important book for several reasons.

  February 1, 2012 at 5:47 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Articles and Books, Innovation, Political Economy, Privacy, Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Contracts in the Real World: Ready for Pre-Ordering

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

This new book on contracts, regaling readers with stories ripped from the headlines, will be published soon and can be pre-ordered now on amazon.com and other fine booksellers.  

Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts is intended to be a fun, fast, reliable read. It is very useful for 1Ls struggling with the subject, perfect for anyone thinking about going to law school, and designed to entertain devotees of pop culture. It will also captivate experts in contract law by connecting current events with venerable principles and classic cases.

Stories feature such notables as Eminem, Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, and Sandra Bullock, as well as examples such as your cell phone contract, lottery sharing partnership, and on-line privacy policy.

List price is $33. The table of contents follows. 

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  January 28, 2012 at 6:08 am   Posted in: Amazon, Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond   Print This Post   4 Comments

Cybersecurity Puzzles

posted by Derek Bambauer

Cybersecurity is in the news: a network intrusion allegedly interfered with railroad signals in the Northwest in December; the Obama administration refused to support the Stop Online Piracy Act due to worries about interfering with DNSSEC; and the GAO concluded that the Department of Homeland Security is making things worse by oversharing. So, I’m fortunate that the Minnesota Law Review has just published the final version of Conundrum (available on SSRN), in which I argue that we should take an information-based approach to cybersecurity:

Cybersecurity is a conundrum. Despite a decade of sustained attention from scholars, legislators, military officials, popular media, and successive presidential administrations, little if any progress has been made in augmenting Internet security. Current scholarship on cybersecurity is bound to ill-fitting doctrinal models. It addresses cybersecurity based upon identification of actors and intent, arguing that inherent defects in the Internet’s architecture must be remedied to enable attribution. These proposals, if adopted, would badly damage the Internet’s generative capacity for innovation. Drawing upon scholarship in economics, animal behavior, and mathematics, this Article takes a radical new path, offering a theoretical model oriented around information, in distinction to the near-obsession with technical infrastructure demonstrated by other models. It posits a regulatory focus on access and alteration of data, and on guaranteeing its integrity. Counterintuitively, it suggests that creating inefficient storage and connectivity best protects user capabilities to access and alter information, but this necessitates difficult tradeoffs with preventing unauthorized interaction with data. The Article outlines how to implement inefficient information storage and connectivity through legislation. Lastly, it describes the stakes in cybersecurity debates: adopting current scholarly approaches jeopardizes not only the Internet’s generative architecture, but also key normative commitments to free expression on-line.

Conundrum, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 584 (2011).

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  January 24, 2012 at 4:13 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Articles and Books, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Law Rev (Minnesota), Military Law, Politics, Privacy (National Security), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

The Year in Privacy Books 2011

posted by Daniel Solove

Here’s a list of notable privacy books published in 2011.

Previous lists:

Privacy Books 2010

Privacy Books 2009

Privacy Books 2008

 

Saul Levmore & Martha Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet (Harvard 2011)   This is a great collection of essays about the clash of free speech and privacy online.  I have a book chapter in this volume along with Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, Brian Leiter, Danielle Citron, Frank Pasquale, Geoffrey Stone, and many others.
Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale 2011)   Nothing to Hide “succinctly and persuasively debunks the arguments that have contributed to privacy’s demise, including the canard that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. Privacy, he reminds us, is an essential aspect of human existence, and of a healthy liberal democracy—a right that protects the innocent, not just the guilty.” — David Cole, New York Review of Books
Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (Simon & Schuster 2011)   I strongly disagree with a lot of what Jarvis says, but the book is certainly provocative and engaging.
Daniel J. Solove & Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy Law Fundamentals (IAPP 2011)   “A key resource for busy professional practitioners. Solove and Schwartz have succeeded in distilling the fundamentals of privacy law in a manner accessible to a broad audience.” – Jules Polonetsky, Future of Privacy Forum
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (Penguin 2011)   An interesting critique of the personalization of the Internet.  We often don’t see the Internet directly, but through tinted goggles designed by others who determine what we want to see.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (U. California 2011)   A vigorous critique of Google and other companies that shape the Internet.  With regard to privacy, Vaidhyanathan explains how social media and other companies encourage people’s sharing of information through their architecture — and often confound people in their ability to control their reputation.
Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security? The Risk Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT 2011)   A compelling argument for how designing technologies around surveillance capabilities will undermine rather than promote security.
Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires (Little Brown 2011)   A fascinating account of the exploits of Kevin Mitnick, the famous ex-hacker who inspired War Games.  His tales are quite engaging, and he demonstrates that hacking is often not just about technical wizardry but old-fashioned con-artistry.
Matt Ivester, lol . . . OMG! (CreateSpace 2011)   Ivester created Juicy Campus, the notorious college gossip website.  After the site’s demise, Ivester changed his views about online gossip, recognizing the problems with Juicy Campus and the harms it caused.  In this book, he offers thoughtful advice for students about what they post online.
Joseph Epstein, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011)   A short engaging book that is filled with interesting stories and quotes about gossip.  Highly literate, this book aims to expose gossip’s bad and good sides, and how new media are transforming gossip in troublesome ways.
Anita Allen, Unpopular Privacy (Oxford 2011)   My blurb: “We live in a world of increasing exposure, and privacy is increasingly imperiled by the torrent of information being released online. In this powerful book, Anita Allen examines when the law should mandate privacy and when it shouldn’t. With nuance and thoughtfulness, Allen bravely tackles some of the toughest questions about privacy law — those involving the appropriate level of legal paternalism. Unpopular Privacy is lively, engaging, and provocative. It is filled with vivid examples, complex and fascinating issues, and thought-provoking ideas.”
Frederick Lane, Cybertraps for the Young (NTI Upstream 2011)   A great overview of the various problems the Internet poses for children such as cyberbullying and sexting.  This book is a very accessible overview for parents.
Clare Sullivan, Digital Identity (University of Adelaide Press 2011)   Australian scholar Clare Sullivan explores the rise of “digital identity,” which is used for engaging in various transactions.  Instead of arguing against systematized identification, she sees the future as heading inevitably in that direction and proposes a robust set of rights individuals should have over such identities.  This is a thoughtful and pragmatic book, with a great discussion of Australian, UK, and EU law.

  December 29, 2011 at 11:12 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical)   Print This Post   No Comments

New Edition of Information Privacy Law Casebooks

posted by Daniel Solove

The new edition of my casebook, Information Privacy Law (4th edition) (with Paul M. Schwartz) is hot off the presses.  And there’s a new edition of my casebook, Privacy, Information, and Technology (3rd edition) (with Paul M. Schwartz).   Copies should be sent out to adopters very soon.  If you’re interested in adopting the book and are having any difficulties getting a hold of a copy, please let me know.

You also might be interested in my concise guide to privacy law, also with Paul Schwartz, entitled Privacy Law Fundamentals.   This short book was published earlier this year.  You can order it on Amazon or via IAPP.  It might make for a useful reference tool for students.

 

  December 13, 2011 at 1:31 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   No Comments

The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information

posted by Daniel Solove

My article, The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information (with Professor Paul Schwartz), is now out in print.   You can download the final published version from SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

Personally identifiable information (PII) is one of the most central concepts in information privacy regulation. The scope of privacy laws typically turns on whether PII is involved. The basic assumption behind the applicable laws is that if PII is not involved, then there can be no privacy harm. At the same time, there is no uniform definition of PII in information privacy law. Moreover, computer science has shown that in many circumstances non-PII can be linked to individuals, and that de-identified data can be re-identified. PII and non-PII are thus not immutable categories, and there is a risk that information deemed non-PII at one time can be transformed into PII at a later juncture. Due to the malleable nature of what constitutes PII, some commentators have even suggested that PII be abandoned as the mechanism by which to define the boundaries of privacy law.

In this Article, we argue that although the current approaches to PII are flawed, the concept of PII should not be abandoned. We develop a new approach called “PII 2.0,” which accounts for PII’s malleability. Based upon a standard rather than a rule, PII 2.0 utilizes a continuum of risk of identification. PII 2.0 regulates information that relates to either an “identified” or “identifiable” individual, and it establishes different requirements for each category. To illustrate this theory, we use the example of regulating behavioral marketing to adults and children. We show how existing approaches to PII impede the effective regulation of behavioral marketing, and how PII 2.0 would resolve these problems.

  December 6, 2011 at 9:20 am   Posted in: Advertising, Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Medical), Technology   Print This Post   One Comment

The Month Ahead: Spies, Lies, Russia, and Terrorist Watchlists

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

It’s great to be back at Concurring Opinions (and thanks to Danielle for the generous (re)introduction last week).  This month, I plan to blog on a few ongoing projects and some upcoming news events.  Here are two topics soon to come, with two more after the break.

(1)  Spies.  Immigration authorities seize a suspected spy in Manhattan on the grounds that he entered the country unlawfully.  Rather than process him through the immigration system, or transfer him to the criminal justice system, he is secretly flown more than a thousand miles away, interrogated without a lawyer, and kept virtually incommunicado for almost seven weeks in a government facility on the Texas-Mexican border.  When he doesn’t break, he is transferred back to New York to be tried in federal court for a capital offense.  The evidence from his warrantless arrest and secret detention helps to convict him. 

When did this happen?

No surprise that the story resonates with our national security debates today.  But it all happened during the Eisenhower Administration.  Rudolf Abel was the top Soviet spy in North America before he was convicted of atomic espionage.  Thanks to his lawyer, his life was spared (and he was later exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers).  I think that there are lessons to be learned from this history today, but mine seems to be the minority view.

(2)  Lies.  Okay, not lies exactly, but pretext.  (You try rhyming pretext with anything.  You’ll wind up perplexed, if not vexed, with the text that comes next.)  Pretextual use of the law is all around us.  The most common example is the law governing arrests.  In Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the police were free to do “under the guise of enforcing the traffic code what they would like to do for different reasons,” namely, stop and search Whren’s car for drugs.  Abel’s case (referenced in Whren) presented another classic instance of pretext: his detention for an immigration violation was used for the unintended purpose of counterespionage, neatly skirting in the process constitutional protections against warrantless searches and seizures, not to mention official disappearances.  When Abel’s able lawyer argued pretext, however, the Supreme Court sustained the conviction.

Sometimes the law abhors pretext.  For example, in Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court categorically rejected the idea that the state may take property under the pretext of a public purpose.  How should citizens regard the pretextual use of the law by state officials?  Does such use tend to weaken the rule of law in ways that should matter to us as individuals or as a society?  When tempted to use a law for an unintended purpose, how should the “good” official distinguish an innovative pretextual use from a destructive one?  The Supreme Court dodged these questions just last term in Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd and I’d like to think hard about why.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 6, 2011 at 1:17 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, Government Secrecy, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

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