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Intoxicated Scootering: Rethinking Electric Scooter Liability in Washington
Get PDFThe widespread acceptance of electric scooters has transformed the landscape of urban transportation. Yet, the emerging phenomenon of intoxicated scootering poses unanswered questions of liability and accountability. New research indicates that a third of traumatic electric scooter injuries are associated with intoxicated scootering. This statistic is particularly alarming given that there are over fifty million scooter trips per year in the United States.
In Washington State, the State Legislature has not enacted a state-wide policy against intoxicated scootering. Instead, the Legislature delegates the authority to regulate the operation of electric scooters to local governments. Due to the ambiguity of whether electric scooters qualify as “vehicles” for purposes of the DUI statute, intoxicated scooterers either face no liability or full DUI penalties depending on their local jurisdiction’s regulations. The State’s fragmented approach to intoxicated scootering either overcriminalizes or fails to deter intoxicated scootering. This Comment proposes a statutory carve-out for intoxicated scootering, facilitating deterrence by imposing civil penalties on offenders
The Role of Special Procedures in Sustaining Peace and Preventing Conflict through Human Rights
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The Privacy Act of 1974: The American Bill of Rights on Data and Its Unfinished Business
Get PDFIn the midst of the artificial intelligence (“AI”) revolution and the debates around it in 2023, this Article proposes to revisit the history of the Privacy Act of 1974, a federal statute that attempted to revolutionize the notion of privacy in response to automated data processing in the computer age. By recognizing that an individual should have the right to control data about herself, the 1974 Act went beyond the Warren-Brandeis framework of privacy based on tort law—the 1974 Act was essentially an American Bill of Rights on data.
The Article first tracks the conceptual development of this new idea of privacy by looking into congressional hearings and broad literature in the 1960s and early 1970s when the computer was introduced in federal government agencies. It describes the process from a theory of scholars and activists such as Alan Westin, to a consensus and policy position largely formed around the year 1971. Based on this central thesis, a “code of fair information practice” laid out five fundamental principles (openness, individual access, collection limitation, use and disclosure limitation, and information management) as the foundation for the 1974 Act. The Article then tracks privacy litigation subsequent to the 1974 Act. Here the Article demonstrates that in the decades after its enactment, the Act was substantially undercut in federal courts as the latter insisted on the old-fashioned tort law theory in interpreting the Act. Today, the Privacy Act of 1974 largely falls to oblivion—it is barely mentioned in the current debates on AI regulation.
The Article argues that the 1974 Act is an unfinished business not only because of its unfulfilled promises. While struggling at home, the ideas behind the 1974 Act were more successful abroad. This Article shows that the American congressional hearings and ideas behind the 1974 Act stimulated and facilitated first-generation data protection laws across the Atlantic during the 1970s. That central thesis has gained constitutional status in courts in Germany, India, South Korea and Taiwan, through the doctrine of informational self-determination. In the wake of the AI revolution, what we need is to learn from and strengthen the 1974 Act. What we need today is to finish what was left in 1974, and to develop a real American Bill of Rights on data
Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIGWG) to Elaborate an International Legally Binding Instrument to Regulate, in International Human Rights Law, the Activities of Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises (Discussant)
No full textToxic Narratives, Toxic Communities, and Enforcement of Environmental (In)justice
Get PDFThe United States has committed to enforce environmental justice in ways it never has before. A spate of new policies aims to increase resources for environmental agencies’ enforcement sections, improve training for environmental enforcement staff, and ensure community engagement in environmental enforcement decision-making. Yet there exists mounting evidence that enforcement of environmental laws happens less frequently and less vigorously in low-income and minoritized communities.
We need to understand why that is happening. Many commentators, opining from a distance, point to insufficient resources for environmental enforcement and legal and political constraints on environmental agencies. While not discounting these reasons, this Article offers a different explanation—one grounded in more than two years of ethnographic observations, interviews, and review of written policies, memoranda, and legislation. Drawing on that research, I interrogate the cultural underpinnings of environmental enforcement as revealed through narratives told by enforcement staff about enforcement purposes and practices. Those narratives construct an ideal of enforcement as an objective, value-neutral practice that often stands at odds with the decisions and actions that would further environmental justice.
Description and analysis of these narratives provide essential insight into how enforcement staff make everyday decisions and how the narratives that guide their decision-making contribute to inequitable enforcement practices. By integrating knowledge and theories from social science and the humanities, the Article expands traditional approaches to environmental enforcement, strengthens interdisciplinary bridges, and contributes to what many scholars have identified as an urgent need to generate more and better knowledge about the bureaucrats who power America’s institutions
An Empire of Anti-Democracy: The Imperial Legacies of American Territorial Labor
Get PDFA great deal of recent attention has been given to acknowledging the full historical scope of American empire and its legal foundations. A recurrent focus of this attention has been the impact of the Insular Cases—a set of early twentieth century doctrines that legitimate American territorial acquisitions while denying their full incorporation under the United States Constitution. Issues of political citizenship and property have thus predominated critical work on the Insular Cases.
This Article expands on this resurgent interest by focusing on another critical element of this acknowledgment: the history of territorial labor which has long been central to the political economy of American empire. Explicating the role and regulation of territorial labor enables a more complete picture of American empire and centers its evolving pursuit of new legal forms to project national power while avoiding democratic accountability.
Most concretely, the unprincipled doctrines of the Insular Cases have led to a paradigm of perpetually precarious bargaining in which territorial labor only enjoys the formal protection of labor and employment law subject to complete federal discretion and potential revocation. Mapping the diverse and contingent legal regimes this bargaining has produced unearths all too many tragedies past and present as the largely invisible labor of territorial people has been circulated throughout American empire while building its economic and military foundations.
Further complicating this formally inchoate set of rights are the practical realities territorial labor has historically been subject to under conditions of American empire: localized employer domination, tactics of racialized labor migration, and the overshadowing anti-democratic disciplinary rationales of U.S. national security. These realities are evident throughout the diverse range of contemporary territories as well as in their scarring effects within former American territories and military occupations. Moreover, imperial labor’s roaming logics of dehumanization are today increasingly displaced onto even more vulnerable foreign migrant workers within many territories themselves.
Acknowledging the role of territorial labor in American empire blurs the line between territorial and incorporated life and law. Most powerfully, it reveals how the conditions of territorial labor reflect back the enervated nature of American economic citizenship writ large. This reflection is just one of the many ways in which territorial history presents lessons increasingly applicable to broader swaths of American life under conditions of modern economic globalization. The Article ultimately integrates territorial history into renewed demands for a democratic political economy for all those living under American sovereignty
