Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

Constitutional Law Colloquium

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Loyola University Chicago School of Law is organizing the fourth annual Constitutional Law Colloquium at the Philip H. Corboy Law Center, 25 East Pearson Street, Chicago, IL 60611. The event will begin on Friday morning, November 1 and end midday on Saturday, November 2, 2013.    The conference aims to bring together constitutional law scholars at all stages of their professional development to discuss current projects, doctrinal developments in constitutional law, and future goals. Presentations will be grouped by subject matter.

The conference is organized by Professor John E. Nowak, Raymond and Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law; Professor Juan Perea; Professor Alexander Tsesis; and Professor Michael J. Zimmer

The Law Center is located on Loyola’s Water Tower campus, near Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, Lake Michigan, Millennium Park, the Chicago Art Institute, and Chicago Symphony Center.

This announcement invites abstract submissions of 150 to 200 words from Constitutional Law professors interested in contributing to the current debates concerning constitutional theory and Supreme Court rulings. We also welcome attendees who wish to participate in audience discussions without presenting a paper. The goal of the conference is to allow professors to develop new ideas with the help of supportive colleagues on a wide range of constitutional law topics.

Eligibility: The Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium is aimed at Constitutional Law, Legal History, Political Science, and Philosophy scholars teaching full-time and part-time at the university, law school, and graduate levels on all matters of constitutional law.

Application Procedure: The registration and abstract submission deadline is June 15, 2013. Conference organizers will select abstracts on a rolling basis.

Registration at: http://www.luc.edu/law/conlawcolloquium/register.html

Information at: http://www.luc.edu/law/conlawcolloquium/index.html

Topics, abstracts, papers, questions, and comments should be submitted to: constitutionlaw@luc.edu

Participants are expected to pay their own travel expenses. Loyola will provide facilities, support, and continental breakfasts on Friday and Saturday, lunch on Friday and Saturday, and a dinner on Friday night.

  April 29, 2013 at 10:25 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Call for Papers: National Business Law Scholars Conference

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I am delighted to pass along the following notice from the organizers of the National Business Law Scholars Conference.  I’m also honored to report that they have asked me to deliver the keynote at this year’s conference, and I look forward to doing so.  

Deadline Extended to May 31

We have received an enthusiastic response to the Call for Papers for the National Business Law Scholars Conference, scheduled for June 12-13, at The Ohio State University School of Law.  We will have additional openings for anyone who would like to make a presentation but has not yet responded.  Thus, we have extended the deadline to MAY 31st.  See the Call for Papers, re-posted below with the extended deadline date, for details on how to submit:

National Business Law Scholars Conference: Call-for-Papers

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC)  will be held on Wednesday, June 12th and Thursday, June 13th at The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio.  This is the fourth annual meeting of the NBLSC, a conference which annually draws together dozens of legal scholars from across the United States and around the world.  We welcome all on-topic submissions and will attempt to provide the opportunity for everyone to actively participate.  Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate.

To submit a presentation, email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at echaffee1@udayton.edu with an abstract or paper by MAY 31, 2013.  Please title the email “NBLSC Submission – {Name}”.  If you would like to attend, but not present, email Professor Chaffee with an email entitled “NBLSC Attendance”.  Please specify in your email whether you are willing to serve as a commentator or moderator.  A conference schedule will be circulated in late May.

Conference Organizers:

Barbara Black (University of Cincinnati)
Eric C. Chaffee (University of Dayton)
Steven M. Davidoff (The Ohio State University)

  April 17, 2013 at 9:56 am   Posted in: Accounting, Administrative Announcements, Conferences, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   No Comments

Is Forensics Law?

posted by Ryan Calo

I’ve blogged on these pages before about the claim, popularized by Larry Lessig, that “code is law.”  During the Concurring Opinions symposium on Jonathan Zittrain’s 2010 book The Future of The Internet (And How To Stop It), I cataloged the senses in which architecture or “code” is said to constitute a form of regulation.  “Primary” architecture refers to altering a physical or digital environment to stop conduct before it happens.  Speed bumps are a classic example.  “Secondary” architecture instead alters an environment in order to make conduct harder to get away with—for instance, by installing a traffic light camera or forcing a communications network to build an entry point for law enforcement. Read the rest of this post »

  March 3, 2013 at 7:37 pm   Posted in: Amazon, Architecture, Articles and Books, Conferences, Cyberlaw, Uncategorized   Print This Post   17 Comments

Theorizing the Web

posted by Frank Pasquale

Those near NYC this Saturday might consider visiting the “Theorizing the Web” conference. Provocative presentation titles include:

The Automation of Compliance: Techno-Legal Regulation in the U.S. Trucking Industry
What We Talk About When We Talk Data: Metrics, Mobilization, and Materiality in Performing Health Online
Identity Prosumption and the Quantified Self Movement
Beyond Bridges, Speed-Bumps, And Hotel Keys: A New Design Paradigm for Control Technologies
There is no difference between the “real” and the “virtual”: a brief phenomenology of digital revolution

I am also really looking forward to seeing Rob Horning and Daniel Kreiss present. Having just enjoyed the WIPIP at Seton Hall organized by my colleague Gaia Bernstein, I can say that there really is an embarrassment of riches in internet thought in the NY area these two weeks.

  February 25, 2013 at 10:53 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg headlines Thomas Jefferson Law School Women and Law Conference

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

Last Friday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at the 13th Annual Women and Law Conference at Thomas Jefferson Law School. A packed house listened as panelists discussed a variety of issues relating to women in the judiciary, and the highlight of the day was an extended and candid Q&A with Justice Ginsburg herself. Read the rest of this post »

  February 14, 2013 at 7:57 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Courts, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   No Comments

CELS VII: Low Variance, High Significance

posted by Dave Hoffman

[CELS VII, held November 9-10, 2012 at Stanford, was a smashing success due in no small part to the work of chief organizer Dan Ho, as well as Dawn Chutkow (of SELS and Cornell) and Stanford's organizing committee.  For previous installments in the CELS recap series, see CELS III, IV, V, and VI. For those few readers of this post who are data-skeptics and don’t want to read a play-by-play, resistance is obviously futile and you might as well give up. I hear that TV execs were at CELS scouting for a statistic geek reality show, so think of this as a taste of what’s coming.]

Unlike last year, I got to the conference early and even went to a methods panel. Skipping the intimidating “Spatial Statistics and the GIS” and the ominous “Bureau of Justice Statistics” panels, I sat in on “Internet Surveys” with Douglas Rivers, of Stanford/Hoover and YouGuv. To give you a sense of the stakes, half of the people in the room regularly use mTurk to run cheap e-surveys. The other half regularly write nasty comments in JELS reviewer forms about using mTurk.  (Oddly, I’m in both categories, which would’ve created a funny weighting problem if I were asked my views.) The panel was devoted to the proposition “Internet surveys are much, much more accurate than you thought, and if you don’t believe me, check out some algebraic proof.  And the election.”  Two contrasting data points. First, as Rivers pointed out, all survey subjects are volunteers, and thus it’s a bit tough to distinguish internet convenience samples from some oddball scooped up by Gallup’s 9% survey response rate.  Second, and less comfortingly, 10-15% of the adult population has a reading disability that makes self-administration of a survey prompt online more than a bit dicey.  I say: as long as the disability isn’t biasing with respect to contract psychology or cultural cognition, let’s survey on the cheap!

Lunch next. Good note for presenters: avoid small pieces of spinach/swiss chard if you are about to present. No one will tell you that you’ve spinach on a front tooth.  Not even people who are otherwise willing to inform you that your slides are too brightly colored. Speaking of which, the next panel I attended was Civil Justice I. Christy and I presented Clusters are Amazing.  We tag-teamed, with me taking 9 minutes to present 5 slides and her taking 9 minutes to present the remaining 16 or so.  That was just as well: no one really wanted to know how our work might apply more broadly anyway. We got through it just fine, although I still can’t figure out an intuitive way to describe spectral clustering. What about “magic black box” isn’t working for you?

Read the rest of this post »

  November 12, 2012 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Contract Law & Beyond, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   3 Comments

At CELS 2012

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’m really looking forward to next week’s 7th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, to be held at Stanford.  Here’s the preliminary program.  As usual, I’ll blog the conference after the fact.  If there are particular papers you want to make sure I get to and highlight, drop me a line.  As a taste, here’s a line from an abstract that made me very curious about the presentation to follow: “Our overall estimates suggest that pornography caused between 10 and 25 percent of all divorces in the United States in the sixties and seventies.”  Caused?!  That must be some kicker of an instrumental variable.

  November 2, 2012 at 8:00 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   4 Comments

Privacy: For the Rich or for the Poor?

posted by Omer Tene

Some consider the right to privacy a fundamental right for the rich, or even the rich and famous. It may be no coincidence that the landmark privacy cases in Europe feature names like Naomi Campbell, Michael Douglas, and Princess Caroline of Monaco. After all, if you lived eight-to-a-room in a shantytown in India, you would have little privacy and a lot of other problems to worry about. When viewed this way, privacy seems to be a matter of luxury; a right of spoiled teenagers living in six bedroom houses (“Mom, don’t open the door without knocking”).

 

To refute this view, scholars typically point out that throughout history, totalitarian regimes targeted the right to privacy even before they did free speech. Without privacy, individuals are cowed by authority, conform to societal norms, and self-censor dissenting speech – or even thoughts. As Michel Foucault observed in his interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, the gaze has disciplinary power.

 

But I’d like to discuss an entirely different counter-argument to the privacy-for-the-rich approach. This view was recently presented at the Privacy Law Scholar Conference in a great paper by Laura Moy and Amanda Conley, both 2011 NYU law graduates. In their paper, Paying the Wealthy for Being Wealthy: The Hidden Costs of Behavioral Marketing (I love a good title!), which is not yet available online, Moy and Conley argue that retailers harvest personal information to make the poor subsidize luxury goods for the rich.

 

This might seem audacious at first, but think of it this way: through various loyalty schemes, retailers collect data about consumers’ shopping habits. Naturally, retailers are most interested in data about “high value shoppers.” This is intuitively clear, given that that’s where the big money, low price sensitivity and broad margins are. It’s also backed by empirical evidence, which Moy and Conley reference. Retailers prefer to tend to those who buy saffron and Kobe Beef rather than to those who purchase salt and turkey. To woo the high value shoppers, they offer attractive discounts and promotions – use your loyalty card to buy Beluga caviar; get a free bottle of Champagne. Yet obviously the retailers can’t take a loss for their marketing efforts. Who then pays the price of the rich shoppers’ luxury goods? You guessed it, the rest of us – with price hikes on products like bread and butter.

 

Read the rest of this post »

  July 26, 2012 at 2:05 am  Tags: big data, data protection, discrimination, price discrimination, Privacy  Posted in: Advertising, Conferences, Consumer Protection Law, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology, Uncategorized   Print This Post   6 Comments

The American Law Institute

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’m at the ALI’s Annual Meeting – my first since joining the organization.  If you are here, I hope you’ll find me and say hello – and indeed I’ve already seen some familiar faces in this enormous crowd. Three loosely connected thoughts on the ALI:

1. Justice Stevens gave a lunchtime speech. His topic was nominally how Bush v. Gore might encourage the ALI’s election law restatement to employ equal protection arguments against political gerrymandering.  (He’s still fired up about the case, and in apparently fantastic health.)  I think, however, he was really trying to express frustration with the Court’s politicization, and warning about what would happen to the Section 5 case that is coming down the pike in short order.  He entirely ducked a question about the Affordable Care Act, and was applauded by the crowd for his tact in doing so.
2. I admit to feeling daunted by the (herculean) process of producing Restatements and Principles. The public part of the process, where the room as a whole debates the merits of drafts multiple times over many years, is fascinating to watch. How such a process can survive the modern era, shrinking attention spans, and the politicization of some of these projects, seems like a challenge for the organization to deal with going forward.
3. There was some discussion of the break-up of ALI-ABA, which I confess to previously not knowing much about.  One hypothesis I gathered from an attendee was that ALI-ABA as a joint venture faced increasing competition from for-profit CLE firms, which have turned the business of continuing legal education upside-down by heavily discounting the cost of CLE through selling advertising and delivering the material online.  Thus, like most modern media firms, the “product” of for-profit CLE is increasingly your eyeballs watching a computer screen (sold to third parties), not the content itself.  These developments undermined ALI-ABA’s business model of selling high quality CLE at real locations, and thus required innovation in the relationship.  Maybe that’s the story, and if so it shows how technological disruption can affect the law in unexpected ways.

I’m looking forward to getting to know the organization in the years to come.  The attendees are obviously quite impressive, and their seriousness of purpose is inspiring.

  May 21, 2012 at 5:15 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Loyola Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Some of our readers may be interested in the following conference announcement:

Loyola University Chicago School of Law is organizing the Third Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium at the Philip H. Corboy Law Center, 25 East Pearson Street, Chicago, IL 60611. The event will begin on Friday morning, November 2 and end midday on Saturday, November 3, 2012.

This is the third annual Loyola conference bringing together constitutional law scholars at all stages of their professional development to discuss current projects, doctrinal developments in constitutional law, and future goals. Unless we are overwhelmed, we hope to be able to schedule presentations for all who submit.  In this way, we will provide a forum for the vetting of ideas, invaluable opportunities for informed critiques, and networking opportunities. Presentations will be grouped by subject matter.

The Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium is aimed at Constitutional Law, Legal History, Political Science, and Philosophy scholars teaching at the university, law school, and graduate levels on matters of constitutional law. We welcome applications from full-time, part-time, and adjunct faculty members, as well as post-doctoral fellows from academic discipline related to the study of constitutional issues (anthropology, history, law, literary criticism, philosophy political science, sociology, etc.).

Application Procedure: The registration and abstract submission deadline is May 31, 2012. Conference organizers will select abstracts on a rolling basis.

You can register for the conference here.

  April 23, 2012 at 4:18 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Of Law and Self-Loathing

posted by Angela Harris

“I’m a self-loathing law student,” confessed one of the students in my Critical Race Theory seminar this week. Several others immediately owned up to the same affliction. I will stipulate that self-loathing is probably not an affect we all should strive to achieve. But I was heartened anyway.

Twenty-five years ago when I began teaching law, my social-justice-minded students regularly veered from rage and tears at moral wrongs to a defiant hope. They sustained themselves and one another with a faith that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, as Dr. King is thought to have said. And they ultimately placed their trust in law and especially the courts.

My students were not alone. Even by the mid-1980s, many of us lawyers and law professors were still recovering from the collective daze of delight induced by the Second Reconstruction and the Warren and Burger Court eras. Of course, we were already in the throes of affirmative-action backlash and judicial retrenchment; colorblind constitutionalism was shaped before our very eyes; and even as a law student I had studied Harris v. McRae in my equal protection class and learned that the formal declaration of a constitutional right is not the same as the economic security needed to exercise it. Yet the romance, the belief that getting the courts to pronounce a legal right was a mighty blow for justice, lingered on.

Maybe it was the continued influence of the post-war “idea of America as a normative concept,” as Edward Purcell  put it in 1973: the incorporation throughout social and political debate of “terms that were analytically confused but morally coercive – patriotism, Americanism, free enterprise system, mission, and, most grossly, ‘we’re number one.’” In the culture of legal academia, this logic translated into a faith in the jurisprudence of legal process. In my little corner of the world we were all reading Democracy and Distrust and trying to locate neutral principles. The faith that procedural fairness, at least, could be achieved despite a lack of consensus about the good life reinforced a belief in the American rule of law as an unshakable bulwark of democratic fairness. That sentiment was entwined with a professional loyalty to the law: to have gone to law school was in itself a statement about one’s commitment to the law as the royal (I mean ”democratic”) road to justice.

So when critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, and then critical race theory hit the academy around this time, the crits (like the Legal Realists before them) were accused of “nihilism” and shown the door. Critical legal theory was not just a disloyalty to the civil rights movement but to the rule of law itself. It was subversive, in those mid-1980s days, to pass around The Hollow Hope  and to insist, as the crits were loudly doing, that “reification” and “legitimation” were basic functions of legal reasoning. The trust that the system works – or, at least, could work if we got it right – was now being dubbed “legal liberalism” by the crits, and being skewered in massively long and ponderous articles about fundamental contradictions. But the critics could be challenged by asking them where their “positive program” was. And they could (sometimes) be silenced by demands that they leave the law altogether.

For the crit project seemed deeply and radically anti-law. We junior professors, reading their work and sometimes contributing to it, felt like outlaws (which brought with it a sense of being dangerous and cool, along with a sense of vulnerability heightened by our lack of tenure and the material consequences of being perceived as a nihilist). At the same time, interestingly, the practice of teaching was not too different for us as it was for our older Legal Process colleagues. It was all about puncturing our students’ illusions, showing them the indeterminacy of legal reasoning and teaching them how to surf on it, questioning the use of words like “fairness.” It was just that we had no shining neutral-principles machine to lift from the bottom of Pandora’s box at the end of the day.

I don’t mean to suggest that legal liberalism and faith in the rule of law as central to the American way ever died. At a conference at Santa Clara Law School last week on race and sexuality, some of the lawyers and academics gathered there bemoaned a “politics of civil rights” that has somehow placed marriage equality at the top of the LGBT agenda. The charge was familiar: too many lawyers and non-lawyers alike believe that “gay is the new black;” that the civil rights movement brought about racial equality and “now it’s our turn;” that if we prove we are just like them, we’ll all be free. The rush to assimilate to mainstream institutions and practices throws under the bus, as usual, those most vulnerable to premature death – those without the racial, economic, and bodily privileges (and/or the desire) to get married, move to the suburbs, and blend in.

What was different was that an alternative position, the “politics of dispossession” as Marc Spindelman named it, was also on the table – not as a stance that made one’s commitment to the law suspect from the get-go, but as an accepted ground for lawyering. When thinking about sexuality we might want to begin, under this politics, not with marriage but with the kids doing sex work on International Boulevard in Oakland, as Margaret Russell pointed out. And, after decades of critical theory, it was taken as a truth in that room — if an inconvenient one — that to do this would mean instantly coming up against poverty, racism, and violence, forms of suffering law is not well positioned to ameliorate.

In this way, lawyering for social justice is a contradiction. Not in the “nihilist” sense, the law-as-a-tool-of-the-ruling-class notion that those who want justice ought to give up their bar cards and go protest in the streets. (My friend Norma Alarcón once identified this romantic position as the desire to “be out in the jungle with Che.”) Rather, the politics of dispossession begins with recognizing that the law is not designed to go to root causes; that fundamental changes in the ground rules, which is what the most vulnerable need, come from organizing;  and that lawyering isn’t useless, but that it looks different if it is prison abolition you want and not a marriage license.

More abstractly, the understanding in that room was that, as Patricia Williams said to the crits in one of the founding texts of critical race theory, law is both inadequate and indispensable in the struggle for justice. Post-legal-liberalism lawyering begins here.

What’s also new is that this commitment to living in the contradiction — accepting the tension between law and justice as a place to work rather than as a source of despair — is increasingly expressed not only by battle-scarred veterans at academic conferences but by law students. The desire to make positive social change has not gone away among my students. They still hope and expect that law can be used in the service of justice. But along with a waning of faith in the courts, they express an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the limits of the law more generally. They know, already, that justice and law are not the same. The task is no longer disillusioning them, but helping them develop the skills for finding what works and what doesn’t.

Okay, so “self-loathing” is probably not the best way to say it. But this wry recognition of the imperfection of law seems to me nevertheless an improvement over the wounded attachment to law as a portal to justice that seemed to mark so many progressive law students a generation ago. As the same student said later in the conversation that day, “That’s my contradiction, and I’m sticking to it.” There’s a wisdom there that’s heartening.

  April 20, 2012 at 1:35 pm  Tags: justice, legal process  Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences, Constitutional Law, Courts, Culture, Jurisprudence, Law Student Discussions, Legal Theory, LGBT, Teaching   Print This Post   3 Comments

Cyberbullying and the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys

posted by Derek Bambauer

(This post is based on a talk I gave at the Seton Hall Legislative Journal’s symposium on Bullying and the Social Media Generation. Many thanks to Frank Pasquale, Marisa Hourdajian, and Michelle Newton for the invitation, and to Jane Yakowitz and Will Creeley for a great discussion!)

Introduction

New Jersey enacted the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights (ABBR) in 2011, in part as a response to the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University. It is routinely lauded as the country’s broadest, most inclusive, and strongest anti-bullying law. That is not entirely a compliment. In this post, I make two core claims. First, the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights has several aspects that are problematic from a First Amendment perspective – in particular, the overbreadth of its definition of prohibited conduct, the enforcement discretion afforded school personnel, and the risk of impingement upon religious and political freedoms. I argue that the legislation departs from established precedent on disruptions of the educational environment by regulating horizontal relations between students rather than vertical relations between students and the school as an institution / environment. Second, I believe we should be cautious about statutory regimes that enable government actors to sanction speech based on content. I suggest that it is difficult to distinguish, on a principled basis, between bullying (which is bad) and social sanctions that enforce norms (which are good). Moreover, anti-bullying laws risk displacing effective informal measures that emerge from peer production. Read the rest of this post »

  February 21, 2012 at 10:20 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Blogging, Bright Ideas, Civil Rights, Conferences, Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, First Amendment, Media Law, Politics, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Psychology and Behavior, Race, Religion, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Ben Stein and the ABA’s Facepalm

posted by Derek Bambauer

The American Bar Association is kicking off its 2012 tech show with an address by… Ben Stein. Yes, who better to celebrate the march of technological progress and innovation than a leading defender of intelligent design? Who better to celebrate rigorous intellectual discourse than a man who misquotes Darwin and fakes speeches to college audiences?

This is a pretty embarrassing misstep. The ABA is irrelevant in the IP / tech world, and this facepalm is a nice microcosm of why. (Wait, what is the ABA relevant to? Now that’s a hard question.) We geeks don’t like it when you dis science. Thanks anyway, ABA – maybe you should stick to having your judicial recommendations ignored.

Hat tip: health law expert Margo Kaplan.

Update: I found the perfect keynote speaker for ABA’s 2013 TechShow: Marshall Hall!

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

  February 20, 2012 at 11:27 am   Posted in: Blogging, Bright Ideas, Conferences, Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Education, Humor, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Media Law, Movies & Television, Politics, Science Fiction, Technology   Print This Post   8 Comments

The Intersection of Privacy and Security: Data Privacy Day Event at GW Law School

posted by Daniel Solove

The National Cyber Security Alliance Presents:

Data Privacy Day 2012

The Intersection of Privacy & Security

Featuring: The Honorable Julie Brill
Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission

 Event Sponsored by:

 

---

The convergence of privacy and security: how do we overcome the conflict that seems to be inherent between the two? Is it a philosophical impossibility or an aspiration to be achieved?

Data security, according to common definition is the “confidentiality, integrity and availability” of data. It is the practice of ensuring that the data being stored is safe from unauthorized access and use, ensuring that the data is reliable and accurate and that is available for use when it is needed. Privacy on the other hand, is the appropriate use of data.

Our panel will consider the implications of how privacy and security are two sides of the same coin and what companies can and should do to ensure privacy and security are protected while allowing innovation to flourish.

---

Agenda

9:00 Registration
9:30 Welcome

• Michael Kaiser
  Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance
• Dan Solove
  John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law, The George Washington University School of Law
• Paul Schiff Berman
  Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor of Law, The George Washington University School of Law

9:40 Keynote

The Honorable Julie Brill
Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission

10:10 Panel Discussion

Reflections & Aspirations: The Past, The Present & The Future

Moderator
Christopher Wolf
Founder & Co-Chair, Future of Privacy Forum and Partner, Hogan Lovells US LLP

Panelists

• David Hoffman
  Director of Security Policy and Global Privacy Officer, Intel
• Gerard Lewis
  Vice President, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer, Comcast Cable
• Ari Schwartz
  Senior Internet Policy Advisor, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce

10:50 Panel Discussion

Privacy & Security: Best Practices in Action

Moderator
Christopher Wolf
Co-Chair & Founder, Future of Privacy Forum and Partner, Hogan Lovells US LLP

Panelists

• Rick Buck
  Head of Privacy GSI, eBay
• Erin Egan
  Chief Privacy Officer, Policy, Facebook
• JoAnn C. Stonier
  Global Privacy & Data Protection Officer, MasterCard Worldwide
• Bob Quinn
  Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory & Chief Privacy Officer, AT&T

 

 

 

 

 

  January 22, 2012 at 1:51 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

FTC Facial Recognition Event

posted by Daniel Solove

Today, I’ll be speaking at Face Facts: A Forum on Facial Recognition Technology, an event organized by the FTC.

Here’s the agenda.

The event will be webcast here.

 

  December 8, 2011 at 1:44 am   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   No Comments

Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification

posted by Daniel Solove

On Monday, December 5th, I’ll be speaking at a Future of Privacy Forum conference entitled “Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification.”

I will be speaking about my forthcoming paper,The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information, 86 New York University Law Review (forthcomng 2011) (with Paul M. Schwartz).  The paper should hopefully be out in print any day now.

The conference schedule and participants are great, and I think this should be a terrific event.  More information is here.

Below the fold is the schedule.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 4, 2011 at 9:02 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

Conference Announcement: Rights Working Group

posted by Frank Pasquale

The conference “Securing Our Rights in the Information-Sharing Era” will be held in San Francisco early next month. From the announcement:

This year marks not only the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, but also 15 years since the passage of the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996″ (IIRAIRA), the bill that established the 287(g) program which later set the stage for Secure Communities program . . . . The government has . . . invest[ed] in enforcement strategies that violate our civil liberties and human rights. As the government has expanded these tactics, it has also invested resources to build a massive, complicated information sharing system where law enforcement agencies are given new powers. Law enforcement can now search through emails, listen to phone calls, track purchases and collect files on people who may or may not be suspected of any crimes. Local law enforcement is enforcing federal immigration laws, engaging in racial profiling and funneling migrants into detention and deportation. These enforcement tactics employed across the country and at the borders in the name of national security and immigration enforcement are affecting the rights of everyone in the United States.

For those interested in an academic treatment of information-sharing, Citron and I wrote this piece last year.

  November 16, 2011 at 10:55 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences   Print This Post   One Comment

CELS VI: Half a CELS is Statistically Better Than No CELS

posted by Dave Hoffman

As promised, I’m filing a report from the Sixth Annual Empirical Studies Conference, held 11/4-11/5 at Northwestern Law School.  Several of the attendees at the Conference approached me and remarked on my posts from CELS V, IV, and III. That added pressure, coupled with missing half of the conference due to an unavoidable conflict, has delayed this post substantially.  Apologies!  Next time, I promise to attend from the opening ceremonies until they burn the natural law figure in effigy.  Next year’s conference is at Stanford.  I’ll make a similar offer to the one I’ve made in the past: if the organizing committee pays my way, I promise not only to blog the whole thing, but to praise you unstintingly.  Here’s an example: I didn’t observe a single technical or organization snafu at Northwestern this year.  Kudos to the organizing committee: Bernie Black, Shari Diamond, and Emerson Tiller.

What I saw

I arrived Friday night in time for the poster session.  A few impressions.  Yun-chien Chang’s Tenancy in ‘Anticommons’? A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Co-Ownership won “best poster,” but I was drawn to David Lovis-McMahon & N.J. Schweitzer’s Substantive Justice: How the Substantive Law Shapes Perceived Fairness.  Overall, the trend toward professionalization in poster display continues unabated.  Even Ted Eisenberg’s poster was glossy & evidenced some post-production work — Ted’s posters at past sessions were, famously, not as civilized. Gone are the days where you could throw some powerpoint slides onto a board and talk about them over a glass of wine!  That said, I’m skeptical about poster sessions generally.  I would love to hear differently from folks who were there.

On Saturday, bright eyed and caffeinated, I went to a Juries panel, where I got to see three pretty cool papers.  The first, by Mercer/Kadous, was about how juries are likely to react to precise/imprecise legal standards.  (For a previous version, see here.) Though the work was nominally about auditing standards, it seemed generalizable to other kinds of legal rules.  The basic conclusion was that imprecise standards increase the likelihood of plaintiff verdicts, but only when the underlying conduct is conservative but deviates from industry norms.  By contrast, if the underlying conduct is aggressive, jurors return fewer pro-plaintiff verdicts.  Unlike most such projects, the authors permitted a large number of mock juries to deliberate, which added a degree of external validity.  Similarly worth reading was Lee/Waters’ work on jury verdict reporters (bottom line: reporters aren’t systematically pro-plaintiff, as the CW suggests, but they are awfully noise measures of what juries are actually doing).  Finally, Hans/Reyna presented some very interesting work on the “gist” model of jury decisionmaking.

At 11:00, I had to skip a great paper by Daniel Klerman whose title was worth the price of admission alone – the Selection of Thirteenth-Century Disputes for Litigation.  Instead, I went to Law and Psychology III.  There, Kenworthey Bilz presented Crime, Tort, Anger, and Insult, a paper which studies how attribution & perceptions of dignitary loss mark a psychological boundary between crime and tort cases.  Bilz presented several neat experiments in service of her thesis, among them a priming survey- – people primed to think about crimes complete the word “ins-” as “insult,” while people primed to think about torts complete it as “insurance.”  (I think I’ve got that right – - the paper isn’t available online, and I’m drawing on two week old memories.)

At noon, Andrew Gelman gave a fantastic presentation on the visualization of empirical data.  The bottom line: wordles are silly and convey no important information.  Actually, Andrew didn’t say that.  I just thought that coming in.  What Andrew said was something more like “can’t people who produce visually interesting graphs and people who produce graphs that convey information get along?”

Finally, I was the discussant at an Experimental Panel, responding to Brooks/Stremitzer/Tontrup’s Framing Contracts:Why Loss Framing Increases Effort.  Attendees witnessed my ill-fated attempt to reverse the order of my presentation on the fly, leading me to neglect the bread in the praise sandwich.  This was a good teaching moment about academic norms. My substantive reaction to Framing Contracts is that it was hard to know how much the paper connected to real-world contracting behavior, since the kinds of decision tasks that the experimental subjects were asked to perform were stripped of the relational & reciprocal norms that characterize actual deals.

CELS: What I missed

The entire first day!  One of my papers with the cultural cognition project, They Saw a Protest, apparently came off well.  Of course, there was also tons of great stuff not written from within the expanding cultural cognition empire.  Here’s a selection: on lawyer optimism; on public housing, enforcement and race; on probable cause and hindsight judging; and several papers on Iqbal, none of which appear to be online.

What did you see & like?

  November 15, 2011 at 3:26 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   No Comments

CELS VI

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’m off to CELS VI in Chicago tomorrow.  As with previous years, I’ll try to provide a recap post after the conference. Unfortunately, due to work obligations, I’m missing the entire first day.  So if you happen to be at the conference and see a nice presentation or interesting paper that deserves highlighting, please do so in the comment thread.

  November 3, 2011 at 11:05 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Aging Conference at Temple

posted by Dave Hoffman

On behalf of my colleague Nancy Knauer, I’m happy to announce that Temple Law School will host a one day symposium titled Aging in the US:  The Next Civil Rights Movement? In this Symposium, participants will explore elder law and aging policy from a civil rights perspective and begin the important task of rethinking equality across the lifespan.  Over twenty leading scholars and advocates will engage cutting edge public policy issues regarding health care, guardianships, caregiving, institutionalized elders, and the special needs of minority populations. Featured speakers include Nina Kohn from Syracuse Law School and 2011 MacArthur Fellow M.T. Connolly of Lifelong Justice, among many others.  The goal of the Symposium is to move the national conversation surrounding aging beyond the traditional elder law topics of estate planning, benefit eligibility, and health care financing and ask whether elder rights should be the next civil rights movement.  Papers will be published in a special issue of the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review.

Information regarding the conference and registration is available at www.law.temple.edu/aging.

  September 28, 2011 at 9:41 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

• « Older Entries