#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, [...]]]> In the spirit of the excellent colloquy here about Marvin’s thinking on First Amendment architectures, I bring up this news item: Arizona State University blocked both Web access to, and e-mail from, the change.org Web site. ASU students had begun a petition demanding that the university reduce tuition. The university essentially made three claims as to why it did so (below, in order of increasing stupidity):

1. It was a technical mistake;
2. Change.org was spamming ASU; and
3. ASU needs to “protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research and administrative uses.”

#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, and sign it, you do need to block access to the Web site.

For #2, sorry, ASU, this isn’t spam. Spam is unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail. Change.org is, allegedly, sending unsolicited political e-mail. And that’s protected by the First Amendment – see, for example, the Virginia Supreme Court’s analysis of that state’s anti-spam law that covered political messages. Potential political spammers have a sharp disincentive to fill recipient’s inboxes – it’s a sure-fire way to annoy them into opposing your position.

For #3, ASU doesn’t get to determine what academic and research uses are “legitimate.” If they throttle P2P apps, that’s fine. If they limit file sizes for attachments, no problem. But deciding that the message from Change.org is not “legitimate” is classic, and unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination.

This looks like censorship. I think it’s more likely to be stupidity: someone in ASU’s IT department decided to block these messages as spam, and to filter outbound Web requests to the site contained within those messages. But: with great power over the network comes great responsibility. Well-intentioned constitutional violations are still unlawful. It would also help if ASU’s spokesperson simply admitted the mistake rather than engaging in idiotic justification.

As I mention in Orwell’s Armchair, public actors are increasingly important sources of Internet access. But when ASU and other public universities take on the role of ISP, they need to remember that they are not AOL: their technical decisions are constrained not merely by tech resources, but by our commitment to free speech. Let’s hope the Sun Devils cool off on the filtering…

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

There is an introduction [...]]]> On February 14-16, we will host an online symposium on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, by Samir Chopra and Laurence White. Given the great discussions at our previous symposiums for Tim Wu’s Master Switch  and Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet, I’m sure this one will be a treat.  Participants will include Ken Anderson, Ryan Calo, James Grimmelmann, Sonia Katyal, Ian Kerr, Andrea Matwyshyn, Deborah DeMott, Paul Ohm,  Ugo Pagallo, Lawrence Solum, Ramesh Subramanian and Harry Surden.  Chopra will be reading their posts and responding here, too.  I discussed the book with Chopra and Grimmelmann in Brooklyn a few months ago, and I believe the audience found fascinating the many present and future scenarios raised in it.  (If you’re interested in Google’s autonomous cars, drones, robots, or even the annoying little Microsoft paperclip guy, you’ll find something intriguing in the book.)

There is an introduction to the book below the fold.  (Chapter 2 of the book was published in the Illinois Journal of Law, Technology and Policy, and can be found online at SSRN).  We look forward to hosting the discussion!

Social and economic interactions today increasingly feature a new category of being: the artificial agent. It buys and sells goods; determines eligibility for legal entitlements like healthcare benefits; processes applications for visas and credit cards; collects, acquires and processes financial information; trades on stock markets; and so on. We use language inflected with intentions in describing our interactions with an artificial agent, as when we say “the shopping cart program wants to know my shipping address.” This being’s competence at settling into our lives, in taking on our tasks, leads us to attribute knowledge and motivations, and to delegate responsibility, to it. Its abilities, often approximating human ones and sometimes going beyond them, make it the object of fear and gratitude: it might spy on us, or it might relieve us of tedium and boredom.

The advances in the technical sophistication and autonomous functioning of these systems represent a logical continuation of our social adoption of technologies of automation. Agent programs represent just one end of a spectrum of technologies that automate human capacities and abilities, extend our cognitive apparatus, and become modeled enhancements of ourselves. More than ever before, it is coherent to speak of computer programs and hardware systems as agents working on our behalf. The spelling checker that corrects this page as it is written is a lexicographic agent that aids in our writing, as much an agent as the automated trading system of a major Wall Street brokerage, and the PR2 robot, a prototype personal robotic assistant (Markoff 2009). While some delegations of our work to such agents are the oft-promised ones of alleviating tedious labor, others are ethically problematic, as in robots taking on warfare roles (Singer 2009). Yet others enable a richer, wider set of social and economic interconnections in our networked society, especially evident in e-commerce (Papazoglu 2001).

As we increasingly interact with these artificial agents in unsupervised settings, with no human mediators, their seeming autonomy and increasingly sophisticated functionality and behavior, raises legal and philosophical questions. For as the number of interactions mediated by artificial agents increase, as they  become actors in literal, metaphorical and legal senses, it is ever more important to understand, and do justice to, the artificial agent’s role within our networks of social, political and economic relations. What is the standing of these entities in our socio-legal framework? What is the legal status of the commercial transactions they enter into? What legal status should artificial agents have? Should they be mere things, tools, and instrumentalities?  Do they have any rights, duties, obligations? What are the legal strategies to make room for these future residents of our polity and society? The increasing sophistication, use, and social embedding of computerized agents makes the coherent answering of older questions raised by mechanical automation ever more necessary.

Carving out a niche for a new category of legal actor is a task rich with legal and philosophical significance. The history of jurisprudence addressing doctrinal changes in the law suggests legal theorizing to accommodate artificial agents will inevitably find its pragmatic deliberations colored by philosophical musings over the nature and being of these agents. Conversely, the accommodation, within legal doctrines, of the artificial agent, will influence future philosophical theorizing about such agents, for such accommodation will invariably include conceptual and empirical assessments of their capacities and abilities. This interplay between law and philosophy is not new: philosophical debates on personhood, for instance, cannot proceed without an acknowledgement of the legal person, just as legal discussions on tort liability are grounded in a philosophical understanding of responsibility and causation.

This book seeks to advance interdisciplinary legal scholarship in answer to the conundrums posed by this new entity in our midst. Drawing upon both contemporary and classical legal and philosophical analysis, we attempt to develop a prescriptive legal theory to guide our interactions with artificial agents, whether as users or operators entering contracts, acquiring knowledge or causing harm through agents, or as persons to whom agents are capable of causing harm in their own right. We seek to apply and extend existing legal and philosophical theories of agency, knowledge attribution, liability, and personhood, to the many roles artificial agents can be expected to play and the legal challenges they will pose while so doing. We emphasize legal continuity, while seeking to refocus on deep existing questions in legal theory.

The artificial agent is here to stay; our task is to accommodate it in a manner that does justice to our interests and its abilities.

My take is that the panel majority really wants to say that any ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.  But due to a concern that the Supreme Court will not agree, they came up with a narrower rationale. Because the CA Supreme Court read the State Constitution to say that same-sex couples could marry (and many did), it is unconstitutional to remove that right even if it might be constitutional not to grant the right in the first place.

This line of reasoning, if you take it seriously, is dangerous.  First, it basically says that people [...]]]> The Ninth Circuit’s decision invalidating Proposition 8, which overruled the California Supreme Court’s holding that the state could not prohibit same-sex marriage, is here.  I am unpersuaded by the majority’s analysis.

My take is that the panel majority really wants to say that any ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.  But due to a concern that the Supreme Court will not agree, they came up with a narrower rationale. Because the CA Supreme Court read the State Constitution to say that same-sex couples could marry (and many did), it is unconstitutional to remove that right even if it might be constitutional not to grant the right in the first place.

This line of reasoning, if you take it seriously, is dangerous.  First, it basically says that people have a vested right in a State Supreme Court’s interpretation of its constitution. Really?  I wonder what the Ninth Circuit would have said if the California Supreme Court had simply reversed itself –is stare decisis now constitutionally mandated in some cases? Second, the only mechanism for people to express their disapproval for a state supreme court opinion that they dislike will be to recall, impeach, or not retain the judges, as was done in Iowa after that state’s same-sex marriage decision.  I submit that we are better off with a system where some states use referenda to repeal unpopular decisions (even ones you like) than having all states eject judges when the voters don’t like one of their many decisions. Third, the Court’s analysis would render many state referenda constitutionally suspect (at least those that were done in response to a court decision). Finally, how would this analysis apply to the Federal Constitution?  Are “We The People” prohibiting from amending the Constitution to overrule Citizens United because that would take away a First Amendment right from corporations that they are now happily exercising?

Of course, I don’t take the panel’s reasoning seriously.  Neither will the en banc Court, I think.  Whether they will bite the bullet and just say that a prohibition on same-sex marriage is invalid–pure and simple–is another question.

UPDATE:  I hasten to add that President Obama still officially holds the view described by the Ninth Circuit as irrational.

Ordinarily, the school’s letter would not constitute the formation of a contract. Contracts for college matriculation are [...]]]> Six dozen applicants for admission to Vassar College were thrown a boomerang over the weekend, first receiving electronic letters of acceptance only to be followed an hour later by electronic messages of apology saying the first batch were erroneous. At least some of the disappointed hopefuls object that the college is in breach of contract. They say Vassar’s first letter was binding because the deal was described as binding early admissions decision. As a matter of law, this is not a winning argument; but as a matter of public and student relations, the college may wish to do more than send what appear to be mere mass form apologies.

Ordinarily, the school’s letter would not constitute the formation of a contract. Contracts for college matriculation are formed after students first file an application for admission, which has zero contractual significance. The first step in the process with contractual significance is the letter of admission schools send. This would be considered to be an offer of admission. It creates in the student the power to accept, by following stated procedures, such as submitting a deposit by a stated deadline and committing to matriculating.

But offers to form contracts may be revoked at any time until the offeree has accepted or, in limited circumstances when the offeror seeks action in return, begun the requested action in reliance. Accordingly, Vassar’s letters of acceptance had no legal effect unless and until the students accepted, which none of the recipients over the weekend had done. It does not matter that the context involved early admission decisions described as binding. The decisions are binding only once the offer has been made and accepted.

Even if the college’s letters were somehow seen to form a binding contract, another basic contract law doctrine comes into play: mistake. In most cases, excuse from contractual obligation on the basis of mistake is granted only when both parties are mistaken (mutual mistake) and then only when it is evident that some risk existed that the parties did not intend to exchange or allocate. Classic examples are mistakes about the attributes of an animal (such as whether a cow was a breeder or barren) or provenance of a coin or instrument (such as whether a dime was minted in 1916 at Denver or whether a violin was made by Stradivari or not).  [I analyzed those in the pending case about a Madoff Ponzi scheme account.]

But there is also a class of cases allowing rescission of a contract based merely on unilateral mistake–mistake by one side only. Excuse based on unilateral mistake requires that the mistake be made honestly not with any whiff of bad faith; involve a clerical matter rather than a matter of judgment; be reported to the other side promptly upon discovery; and not prejudice the other side as a result of its reliance. The case favoring the excuse is strengthened when insisting on enforcement of the contract would result in a windfall to the other party.

All those elements are present in the Vassar case: college officials made an honest computer mistake to which it alerted students within an hour after they had done nothing in reliance. To enforce the letters as contracts would create a windfall–a spot at Vassar that the school’s admissions office had declined to award.

On the other hand, the school’s response to its error seems both glib and insensitive. It sounds as if the school is treating these students as the clinical subjects of the type that appear in the kind of legal analysis I just offered. The school should not forget the human dimension of its error. Perhaps it can could offer something more substantive to these students for its mistake. At minimum, the school should refund any application fee students paid, since the school botched the application process that those fees pay for.

Leaving $50 million on the table is an embarrasment, though it may seem a small sum in the context of the $182 billion of funds government poured through AIG to salvage neighboring Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs. But over the past three years many crown-jewel AIG assets [...]]]> Accompanying pictures of 70 Pine Street, Lower Manhattan, were taken today, a busy Friday in downtown New York, with no one in sight but me and a security guard. Home for more than 30 years to AIG, the US-government owned company sold the iconic tower two years ago for a song: the buyer paid $150 million and then resold the building one year later for $200 million. The second buyer closed the office building and is turning it to condos.  

Leaving $50 million on the table is an embarrasment, though it may seem a small sum in the context of the $182 billion of funds government poured through AIG to salvage neighboring Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs. But over the past three years many crown-jewel AIG assets have been sold for total consideration of $50 billion.  The terms of many show a good chance of leaving a proportionate $10 to $15 billion or more on the table, a serious cost by any reference.  A quick run down on the sales follows, but first a few notes on this marvelous piece of the New York skyline that AIG, under government control, sold for a song.

Completed in 1932, this was the last of the great jazz-age, pre-War downtown towers. Designed by Clinton & Russell, Holton & George, the building soars 952 feet, making it the seventh tallest U.S. building when AIG bought it. The base is of dark granite and the rest of brick, in tones that lighten as the tower rises, so that it becomes white at the top, like a snowcapped mountain. At the upper floors, every third brick is rounded instead of squared, animating the structure.  A granite model of the building flanks the entrance on Pine Street (photo shown upper left).

In its vast two-story marble lobby, a symphony of Art Deco butterflies and sunflowers rendered in colorful aluminum adorn the walls (example at right).  The building’s original double-decker elevators were the first ever installed in New York City: the upper cabs served even-numbered floors while lower cabs opened onto odd-numbered floors (upper cabs shown left).

The building’s skyline drama is highlighted by massive floodlights from the 55th to the top floor and a 27-foot lantern above a roof deck observatory. To guide planes, on top of the building stood a 97-foot stainless steel beacon with neon lights on top.

AIG acquired the building from Citgo in 1976 after Citgo had just completed a $22 million overhaul and upgrading project. AIG paid $15 million for the place.  That was a big New York real estate transaction given the City’s fiscal woes. Mayor Abraham Beame symbolized the significance by hosting the signing at a press conference in his office.

AIG renamed it the American International Building. The timing of AIG’s purchase, if not the event, marked the turning point for the City. Mayor Beame began to reinvigorate New York and his successor, Ed Koch, amplified the effort with the memorable national campaign: “I love New York.” The troubled New York of the 1970s turned into the prosperous New York of the 1980s that has thrived ever since. Real estate investments made in the New York of the 1970s returned enormous value and stand as symbols of American achievement.

Today, it is a different symbol, and perhaps it is fitting that it should be retired as a center of commerce in favor of residential use.  Though the government, dutifully followed by media, announced that the billions it funneled through AIG were intended to “save” it, “rescue” it, or “bail it out,” it did nothing of the sort, but destroy AIG and save, rescue and bail out Goldman Sachs and other recipients of the billions. The destruction of AIG, at a significant cost to taxpayers, is symbolized by the clumsy sale of this building at a discount to market value. Among other such sales underscoring both the destruction of AIG and the potential cost to taxpayers of money left on the table:

12/08  Hartford Steam Boiler $742 million (less than a year’s worth of earnings)

2/09 Tokyo office building $1.2 billion (huge tax bill on asset buyers had bid $2 billion for in past decade)

4/09 21st Century $2 billion

6/09 TransAtlantic $1.14 billion (subject of heated takeover battle this past summer with escalating bid)

3/10 ALICO $15.5 billion to Met Life (what a deal for an iconic franchise of a business)

10/10 AIA $25 billion (the crown jewel of AIG and heart of the company’s origins and essence, though in a public offering the price was not terrible)

1/11 Nan Shan $2.16 billion (venerable Taiwan life insurer with powerful position)

That adds to nearly $50 billon of consideration received; the value of the assets transferred is almost certainly not double that but it likely is short at least in the double digit billions, alas.

The old Directory at 70 Pine, about to be banished to the dust bins of history.  AIG, RIP.

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by William B. Gould IV entitled The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely. Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, provides a succinct postmortem on the 2011 lockout:

The backdrop for the 2011 negotiations was the economic weapon once regarded as a dirty word in the lexicon of American labor-management relations—the lockout. This economic weaponry, endorsed by the Supreme Court since 1965, became the flavor of the two prior decades; baseball flirted with it in 1990, basketball in 1995 and 1999. One of hockey’s lockouts even resulted in the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season. The lockout again was utilized in 2011 by recently peaceable football as well [...]]]>

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published an Essay by William B. Gould IV entitled The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely. Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, provides a succinct postmortem on the 2011 lockout:

The backdrop for the 2011 negotiations was the economic weapon once regarded as a dirty word in the lexicon of American labor-management relations—the lockout. This economic weaponry, endorsed by the Supreme Court since 1965, became the flavor of the two prior decades; baseball flirted with it in 1990, basketball in 1995 and 1999. One of hockey’s lockouts even resulted in the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season. The lockout again was utilized in 2011 by recently peaceable football as well as by basketball. The owners gravitated towards the lockout tactic because in the event of strike (protesting changes in conditions in employment, which proved ineffective), players who crossed the union picket line could play and still sue in antitrust simultaneously. The lockout put more pressure on the players to settle. . . . The union now was represented by David Boies, who had only a few months before represented the NFL and successfully deprived that union of its only effective antitrust remedy—i.e., an injunction against the lockout, which would have required the owners to open the camps in early summer. Thus the basketball union now would not pursue the injunction remedy, notwithstanding the persuasiveness of Judge Bye’s dissenting opinion in the football case. Of course, Boies would have met himself coming around the corner if he argued for it in basketball.

He concludes:

Nonetheless, even though the union was stripped of its most effective antitrust remedy, litigation seems to have moved the parties together. It most certainly called the NBA’s bluff, in that the league’s regressive or inferior option was quickly forgotten. True, the NBA obtained givebacks that are estimated to be worth more than $300 million. Not only did it win on revenue sharing with the players—the players will possess between 49% and 51% as opposed to 57%—but more stringent luxury tax penalties for violators also have been instituted. As National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Billy Hunter said, the latter element constitutes the “harshest element of the new system.” At the same time, guaranteed contracts were preserved, restricted free agents will benefit from the reduction of the so-called “match period” when teams may match competing offers from seven to three days, which may encourage bidding on these players. The cap remains soft in that the so-called incumbent “Bird” players (named for Celtics superstar Larry Bird) may exceed the cap and have more expansive increases and lengths of contracts than other players. A so-called “amnesty” for bad contracts was permitted, in that even though the contracts must be paid, a player on each club may be waived and his salary not counted towards his team’s cap. What appeared to be a rout of the players in November emerged as a reasonable face-saving compromise.

Read the full article, The 2011 Basketball Lockout: The Union Lives to Fight Another Day—Just Barely by William B. Gould IV, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

Note: Updated quotation.

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. [...]]]> 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.

Scalia’s theory is basically Katz (reasonable expectation of privacy) plus trespass. For Scalia, the conduct in Jones – law enforcement attaching a GPS transmitter to Jones’s car, and then tracking its movements – is a search because “The Government physically occupied [...]]]> The Supreme Court handed down its decision in U.S. v. Jones yesterday, and the blogosphere is abuzz about the case. (See Margot Kaminski, Paul Ohm, Howard Wasserman, Tom Goldstein, and the terrifyingly prolific Orin Kerr.) The verdict was a clean sweep – 9-0 for Jones – but the case produced three opinions, including a duel between Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Thus far, most privacy and constitutional law thinkers favor Alito’s position. That’s incorrect: Justice Scalia’s opinion is far more privacy protective. Here’s why:

Scalia’s theory is basically Katz (reasonable expectation of privacy) plus trespass. For Scalia, the conduct in Jones – law enforcement attaching a GPS transmitter to Jones’s car, and then tracking its movements – is a search because “The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.” But, that’s not quite precise enough: the key is that the government must “physically intrud[e] on a constitutionally protected area.” (emphasis mine) The tricky part, naturally, is deciding what counts as such an area. Scalia disposes of Oliver (the open fields case) by emphasizing that a field “is not one of those protected areas enumerated in the Fourth Amendment.” Katz is still around for “Situations involving merely the transmission of electronic signals without trespass.”

Scalia thus wants to create magic places: spots where any governmental intrusion, with any physicality, is a search. The home is certainly such a place (see Kyllo) – Jane Yakowitz pointed out to me that this has to explain why the Court took cert in Florida v. Jardines, when we already have Caballes and Place on the books. Determining which places are magic is hard. It’s here that Scalia’s originalism does its work: Scalia wants to apply the understanding and expectations from 1791 to sort places into protected/magic and unprotected.

Alito thinks this is rubbish: his footnote 3 openly makes fun of Scalia’s contention that we can analogize the Jones facts to a constable hiding in a coach (“this would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both”). His method would instead simply apply the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test, which he rightly points out is more consonant with the Court’s jurisprudence since its rejection of the physical trespass test set out in Olmstead. This approach looks analytically cleaner, although Alito forthrightly acknowledges the circularity inherent in the reasonable expectations test – expectations derive from the law, in addition to driving it. And, of course, there is the one-way ratchet worry: the government can reduce our reasonable expectations of privacy by abusing our privacy.

Alito, though, proceeds to mess up a previously tidy picture by inventing two new considerations for Fourth Amendment analysis: the duration of the information-gathering (such as GPS tracking), and the severity of the crime. Scalia rightly smacks Alito around for this, as he fails to ground this analysis in anything remotely resembling precedent. At best, this is judicial activism, and at worst, it’s an invitation for a wave of new cases where the government tests boundaries and magnifies the threat posed by those surveilled.

I like Scalia’s approach much better. It sets out clearly that there are some spaces that get heightened privacy protection: we don’t have to engage in the weighing involved in the reasonable expectations test, so it’s cheaper, and there won’t be instances where judges decide that in fact society is willing to permit certain observations in the home, for example. Scalia’s approach is a firewall: it offers a redoubt for privacy. And, it maintains the viability of Katz in other instances. Alito’s two additional considerations point towards the worry that makes me prefer Scalia. Imagine observation of the interior of a home – say, using tiny drones – that would clearly constitute a search under the magic places theory. If the observation is fairly short, or if the crime involved is serious (drug smuggling, terrorism, child pornography), Alito’s analysis would find that there isn’t a search, and hence no need for a warrant. Scalia’s approach always forces the cops to get a warrant. That reassures me.

There are two issues that neither Alito nor Scalia deals with, although to her credit Justice Sonia Sotomayor tackles both: pervasive surveillance, and cloud computing. Pervasive surveillance involves the government’s increasing capabilities to deploy low-cost observation technology – everything from traffic cameras to facial recognition technology – and to store, index, and analyze the resulting torrent of data. Cloud computing involves the shift from maintaining information on devices we control to storing it on devices controlled by Google or Apple or Amazon. The former presents the mosaic theory that the D.C. Circuit endorsed in its opinion in Jones. The latter invites us to re-visit the third party doctrine, whereby one loses any reasonable expectation of privacy if one turns over data to someone else (unless that someone is, say, a priest or lawyer). One failing of the two major opinions in Jones is that they fail to provide any guide for how the Court thinks about these issues – other than to hope mightily that Congress will take care of it for them.

I like Scalia’s hybrid with its magic places. What our privacy rights are when we venture outside the castle walls is a topic the court reserves for another day.

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

SOPA has spawned a powerful alliance of netizens to support basic principles of due process, free expression, and accountability online. But this battle is merely a prelude to a much more contested debate about the proper allocation of digital revenues. Like health care battles between providers and insurers, struggles between content owners and intermediaries will profoundly shape our common life. Stopping SOPA is only one small step toward preserving a fair, free, and democratic culture online.

For other Co-Op commentary, here’s Danielle Citron, [...]]]> I have an essay on the SOPA controversy at the Boston Review. My main point: SOPA and its ilk are terrible, but its opponents should rally behind a constructive alternative to promote funding for arts and culture. As I argue there:

SOPA has spawned a powerful alliance of netizens to support basic principles of due process, free expression, and accountability online. But this battle is merely a prelude to a much more contested debate about the proper allocation of digital revenues. Like health care battles between providers and insurers, struggles between content owners and intermediaries will profoundly shape our common life. Stopping SOPA is only one small step toward preserving a fair, free, and democratic culture online.

For other Co-Op commentary, here’s Danielle Citron, Gerard Magliocca, and Derek Bambauer.

In a Note just published by the Stanford Law Review Online, Daniel J. Hemel discusses a jurisdictional issue that might delay a ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and a novel way in which the Solicitor General could bypass that hurdle. In How to Reach the Constitutional Question in the Health Care Cases, he writes:

Although the Supreme Court has agreed to hear three suits challenging the 2010 health care reform legislation, it is not at all clear that the Court will resolve the constitutional questions at stake in those cases. Rather, the Justices may decide that a Reconstruction-era statute, the Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TA-IA), requires them to defer a ruling on the merits of the [...]]]>

In a Note just published by the Stanford Law Review Online, Daniel J. Hemel discusses a jurisdictional issue that might delay a ruling by the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and a novel way in which the Solicitor General could bypass that hurdle. In How to Reach the Constitutional Question in the Health Care Cases, he writes:

Although the Supreme Court has agreed to hear three suits challenging the 2010 health care reform legislation, it is not at all clear that the Court will resolve the constitutional questions at stake in those cases. Rather, the Justices may decide that a Reconstruction-era statute, the Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TA-IA), requires them to defer a ruling on the merits of the constitutional challenges until 2015 at the earliest. . . . Fortunately (at least for those who favor a quick resolution to the constitutional questions at stake in the health care litigation), there is a way for the Solicitor General to bypass the TA-IA bar—even if one agrees with the interpretation of the TA-IA adopted by the Fourth Circuit and Judge Kavanaugh. Specifically, the Solicitor General can initiate an action against one or more of the fourteen states that have announced their intention to resist enforcement of the health care law, and he can bring this action directly in the Supreme Court under the Court’s original jurisdiction. Such an action would be a suit for the purpose of facilitating—not restraining—the enforcement of the health care law. Thus, it would open up an avenue to an immediate adjudication of the constitutional challenges.

Read the full Note, How to Reach the Constitutional Question in the Health Care Cases by Daniel J. Hemel, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

Anyone who believes the Internet to be exclusively, or even primarily, a site for the democratisation of the media or a mechanism to enhance participation in public discourse needs to read this book. This outstanding collection tackles the dark side of the Internet, its use by ‘cyber mobs’, liars, aggressive misogynists and purveyors of hate to distribute their views largely with impunity, while their targets [...]]]> Katharine Gelber offers a thoughtful review of The Offensive Internet in the Australian Review. (David Levine conducted an interview with the book’s editors, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, available here.) I contributed an essay to this volume, and I found both the other essays in it and the conference it was based on very illuminating. As Gelber notes,

Anyone who believes the Internet to be exclusively, or even primarily, a site for the democratisation of the media or a mechanism to enhance participation in public discourse needs to read this book. This outstanding collection tackles the dark side of the Internet, its use by ‘cyber mobs’, liars, aggressive misogynists and purveyors of hate to distribute their views largely with impunity, while their targets suffer the consequences of this predominantly unregulated arena for speech. . . .

The ubiquity of the Internet, the permanence of posts, and the accessibility of data through search engines that do the looking for you mean that material that makes its way online can affect people’s lives over the long term and in profound ways. When you combine these features with the anonymity of posters and the difficulty of regulating the Internet, it means that people do things and say things on the Internet that they would not do or say in face to face conversations, or at least if they did there would be legal and moral consequences. The Internet as a medium provides a uniquely powerful and wide reaching mechanism with which to do bad things, yet relatively little work to date has acknowledged this aspect of it.

A growing feminist literature, ranging from the work of co-blogger Danielle Citron and that of Ann Bartow, to interventions in social web and other communities, also highlights these problems.

Some will say: if you don’t like a given online community, just join another one. But the ubiquity of options on the internet often amounts to little more than a mirage of choice. You may really like Google+ or Instagram and find it to be a more congenial environment than Facebook or Twitter. (As Liz Kelley put it, “Instagram is homey; Twitter is noisy.”) But just try dragging all your friends or followers to them.

Moreover, digital networks aren’t just leisure activities for many people. Public deliberation occurs on them. Entities like Klout have started a competitive game of influence accumulation with career implications. And they can be important forums for the development of identity, as Rob Horning explains:

The more effort we put into crafting identity online, the more material we supply to Facebook and search engines to associate with contextual ads and other marketing initiatives. For this organizational work we are compensated not with wages but with a stronger sense of self, measurable in hard, quantifiable terms. How many friends do you have? How often do they update? How many photos have you shared? How many times have they been looked at? And so on.

All of this is to say that as Web 2.0 has infiltrated our everyday life, it has transformed our habitus — sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term for our manifest and class-bound way of being in the social world — into an explicit productive force without our conscious consent. By continually enticing us to produce more and enrich our self-concept, it presents a clear danger to our ability to maintain a coherent sense of ourselves — to sustain a feeling of ontological security, as Anthony Giddens puts it. Inundated with digital information from all sides — from friends, marketers, and the fruits of own unbounded curiosity — we can fritter away our time shuffling and reshuffling the little bits of novelty without performing a synthesis.

The data deluge and constantly shifting metrics of digital capitalism are hard enough to deal with. The types of civil rights concerns raised by The Offensive Internet shouldn’t be burdening anyone.

X-Posted: Madisonian.

Just before Christmas, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights recommended that the December 2010 conviction of Yukos-Oil-CEO-now-prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky be annulled.  That announcement (unfortunately, only available in Russian, but reported by the BBC, among others) coincides with massive street protests not seen in Russia since shortly before Christmas 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. 

The Council’s recommendation was based on a 427-page report on Khodorkovsky’s conviction that the Council gave to President Medvedev.  The report contained the analysis of nine scholars that the Council selected last spring from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.  I was [...]]]>

Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev met Tuesday with Mikhail Fedotov, Chairman of Medvedev's Human Rights Council. The Khodorkovsky report was the first topic that Mr. Fedotov raised.

Just before Christmas, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights recommended that the December 2010 conviction of Yukos-Oil-CEO-now-prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky be annulled.  That announcement (unfortunately, only available in Russian, but reported by the BBC, among others) coincides with massive street protests not seen in Russia since shortly before Christmas 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. 

The Council’s recommendation was based on a 427-page report on Khodorkovsky’s conviction that the Council gave to President Medvedev.  The report contained the analysis of nine scholars that the Council selected last spring from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.  I was the American contributor.  The report on the Council’s website is in Russian, but you can find an English-version of my portion of the document here. 

The Khodorkovsky case will be the focus of a “hot topics” panel on Friday morning, January 6, at 10:30 at the AALS Conference in Washington D.C.  How does the case relate to the recent protests in Russia?  What does it say about the rule of law in Russia and prospects for reform?  Come to the panel and find out!

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a piece by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don’t Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — “share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”

They write:

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information [...]]]>

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a piece by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don’t Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — “share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”

They write:

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

Read the full article, Don’t Break the Internet by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, at the Stanford Law Review Online.

Note: Corrected typo in first paragraph.

Happily, this is a rare occurrence, though one that’s well-represented in Torts casebooks.  Over at Point of Law, Ted Frank has blogged before about the dwindling number of accidents that involve elevators.  In his post, Ted cites to a 1926 New York Times newspaper article, which I subsequently dug up, that relates 87 deaths connected to elevators and elevator shafts in 1925—just in the city of New York!  Somewhat comfortingly, however, only 36 of these people were crushed by elevators.  Forty-seven fell into elevator shafts (which is still somewhat traumatic to me, especially after I watched this scene as an impressionable youth), three were killed when elevators fell, and one “fell through [...]]]> The other day, a woman was killed in a horrific elevator accident in New York City.  

Happily, this is a rare occurrence, though one that’s well-represented in Torts casebooks.  Over at Point of Law, Ted Frank has blogged before about the dwindling number of accidents that involve elevators.  In his post, Ted cites to a 1926 New York Times newspaper article, which I subsequently dug up, that relates 87 deaths connected to elevators and elevator shafts in 1925—just in the city of New York!  Somewhat comfortingly, however, only 36 of these people were crushed by elevators.  Forty-seven fell into elevator shafts (which is still somewhat traumatic to me, especially after I watched this scene as an impressionable youth), three were killed when elevators fell, and one “fell through a dumbwaiter” (eep).

I don’t know how many of these elevator-related accidents led to tort suits.  A quick online search, however, suggests that these cases were once pretty common.  These suits appear to have percolated in the 1870s and 1880s, and developed into a well-recognized type of case by the 1890s or the early 1900s, at the latest.

This development paralleled the construction of the first wave of high-rise structures in American cities (the first modern “skyscraper,” the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was built in 1884).   I don’t know if  there’s a causal connection between the proliferation of high-rises and the development of the elevator-suit case type (after all, any multistory building could claim an elevator, and lots of early cases involved apartment buildings and department stores that clearly were not skyscrapers), but it bears mentioning that Illinois, home of many early skyscrapers, produced a large number of appellate decisions involving elevators during this time period; perhaps appellate courts with discretionary jurisdiction in that state decided that these cases were worth hearing, if only because the construction of more high-rise buildings would mean more elevators, and a greater need for appellate precedent to guide the cases that would result from accidents involving these devices.

I’ll go into a little more detail about the disappearance of tort subspecies like the falling-elevator cases, after the jump.

These cases represent another example of a type of tort suit that was once fairly common and prominent, but is now relatively rare and shrouded in obscurity. I’m not talking about moribund torts like alienation of affections here; instead, I’m referring to subspecies of negligence, libel, or other still-recognized causes of action that were once important, but no longer produce many lawsuits because the factual predicates for their occurrence have dwindled or disappeared.  Other examples include lawsuits over exploding soda bottles and garbled telegrams. (Here, I should add that elevator cases are not totally defunct—just less important, perhaps, than they once were.  After all, I do teach Portee v. Jaffee.)

In this spirit, these days I am doing some research on the first batch of tort suits that involved automobiles. Many of these cases involved plaintiffs who were either the owner of, or injured by, a horse that took fright at an early automobile, causing the animal to rear or bolt.  In fact, these cases dominated the initial caselaw surrounding automobiles; in a November 1902 listing of known lawsuits involving automobile use, printed in the trade publication Horseless Age, a substantial majority of the cases identified involved frightened horses.

I suspect that one of the reasons why these cases predominated in the early caselaw was that similar frightened-horse cases had been quite common over the preceding decades. Frightened-horse suits brought against bicyclists and street rail operators, in particular, had produced a substantial volume of caselaw in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Through these cases, a set of rules coalesced that elaborated upon the reasonable-care standard, as it applied to this type of suit, in sufficient detail that prospective plaintiffs in frightened-horse cases that involved automobiles could both appreciate the existence of a potential cause of action and anticipate a fair probability of recovery if certain factual predicates existed.   Moreover, juries were conditioned to accept at least some frightened-horse cases as legitimate.

This sort of certainty was missing from most other types of potential lawsuits involving the automobile, in part because there were fewer analogous suits involving earlier technologies, in part because other theories of recovery in tort implicated significant technological differences between automobiles and earlier devices (complicating the process of reasoning by analogy), and in part because it was unclear how certain defenses (such as contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, and immunities from suit) would apply to these cases.

The bigger point may be this: There’s a lot of literature on how uncertainty vis-a-vis tort liability can chill innovation.  I am sympathetic to most of these arguments, but there’s another side to the debate, as well: uncertainty among prospective plaintiffs and their attorneys can sometimes chill the filing of tort suits, too.  Moreover, with innovations, it can take time for the necessary doctrine, expectations, and infrastructure to develop to fully assimilate prospective claims that implicate the invention into everyday legal practice.

In any event, I anticipate that I’ll be writing about this issue for an upcoming Santa Clara Law symposium on autonomous vehicles, if anyone wants to follow up on the point.