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Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War
No full textA picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts, such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity. Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses of an event, sparing them the need to decide whether to trust someone else’s account of it. And thanks to smartphones, which make it easy to capture audio and video content, and social media platforms, which allow that content to be shared and consumed, people today can rely on their own eyes and ears to an unprecedented degree
Automation and jobs: when technology boosts employment
Get PDFWill new technologies cause industries to shed jobs, requiring novel policies to address mass unemployment? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? The elasticity of demand. Using data over two centuries for US textile, steel and auto industries, this paper shows that automation initially spurred job growth because demand was highly elastic. But demand later became satiated, leading to job losses. A simple model explains why this pattern might be common, suggesting that today\u27s technologies may cause some industries to decline and others to grow. Automation might not cause mass unemployment, but it may well require workers to make disruptive transitions to new industries, requiring new skills and occupations
Trial Films on Trial
No full textA collection of wide-ranging critical essays that examine how the judicial system is represented on screen Historically, the emergence of the trial film genre coincided with the development of motion pictures. In fact, one of the very first feature-length films, Falsely Accused!, released in 1908, was a courtroom drama. Since then, this niche genre has produced such critically acclaimed films as Twelve Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Anatomy of a Murder. The popularity and success of these films can be attributed to the fundamental similarities of filmic narratives and trial proceedings. Both seek to construct a “reality” through storytelling and representation and in so doing persuade the audience or jury to believe what they see. Trial Films on Trial: Law, Justice, and Popular Culture is the first book to focus exclusively on the special significance of trial films for both film and legal studies. The contributors to this volume offer a contemporary approach to the trial film genre. Despite the fact that the medium of film is one of the most pervasive means by which many citizens receive come to know the justice system, these trial films are rarely analyzed and critiqued. The chapters cover a variety of topics, such as how and why film audiences adopt the role of the jury, the narrative and visual conventions employed by directors, and the ways mid-to-late-twentieth-century trial films offered insights into the events of that period.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1131/thumbnail.jp
The Past as Present, Unlearned Lessons and the (Non-) Utility of International Law
Get PDFThe contemporary moment provides an acute illustration of the dangers of historical amnesia—as if the Trump Administration’s policies of exclusion, extremist nationalism, and presidential imperialism were singular to ‘now,’ and entirely reversible in the next election. This Article argues to the contrary; that we have been down this road before, and the current crisis in immigration and refugee policies is the inevitable development of trends of racism, including anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, that have only become normalized by the populist resurgence of Trumpism. If this premise is correct—that we are experiencing a culmination of a historical trajectory—what lessons from past legal-activist mobilization around implementing international law can be applied to the present? Focusing on a few select efforts over time that used international law—human rights treaties and other instruments— and international legal interpretation to litigating refugee and asylum claims in the United States, this Article posits that the U.S. constitutional framework is inadequate to address the serious undermining of immigration and refugee rights. Although prior efforts at incorporating human rights norms have thus far been insufficient, more robust and strategic application of international human rights norms is urgently needed to seriously challenge the migration crisis of our time.
As support for this premise, it is useful to examine three prior periods of significance for the rights of refugees and immigrants: the refugee influx from Central America during the civil wars in the 1980s, the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim refugee and immigrant measures during the 1990s, and the post-9/11 Guantanamo litigation. What were some of the key challenges that lawyers and advocates made to the worst of the policies in those periods, and how useful were international law arguments to those strategies?
I draw on these examples from the past to illustrate that we have been down this road before. This is not the only time that racism and xenophobia have been normalized at the very top of government and mainstreamed by Congress and the media. Concurrently, however, there has been a massive response by civil society. Thousands of people spontaneously showed up at airports to protest the ‘Muslim’ ban, and lawyers volunteered all over the country to file habeas petitions to allow non-citizens to enter in defiance of the ban.1 So far, the courts have mostly struck down the various versions of the Muslim ban, though that litigation is now pending at the Supreme Court.2 However, prior efforts to push back against similar extreme measures against immigrants and refugees starkly illustrate the limits of constitutional protections, and that international legal rights are needed more urgently than ever to fill the lacunae in domestic legal protections. In this short introductory Article to the Symposium Issue, I offer no more than an overview of the issues raised during previous moments of legal crisis rather than an in-depth analysis of the merits of the arguments in the cases
Unity and Diversity in International Law
Get PDFThe primordial Greek sea-god Proteus could alter his shape at will, notwithstanding that his divine substance remained the same. Reinventing himself by adapting to new circumstances, Proteus still stayed unchanged in essence.
Unlike the sea-god’s protean nature, the substance of international law may well undergo alterations when examined through the telescope of legal culture, or with predispositions of divergent educational backgrounds. For the thoughtful reader, scholarly speculation on such variations will be triggered by reading Is International Law International?. In that book, Professor Anthea Roberts explores a variety of elements in the teaching and practice of international law, viewed through the lenses of scholars and judges from different parts of the world
Law and Economics Versus Economic Analysis of Law
Get PDFI agree with Calabresi\u27s general distinction between Economic Analysis of Law and Law and Economics. However, these broad categories may obscure important differences between types of law and economics scholarship. I would distinguish positive economic analysis from normative economic analysis, and positivist legal analysis from nonpositivist analysis. The four categories generated by these distinctions provide a more fine-grained map of the styles of reasoning in law and economics, and has implications for the future of law and economics
When Protest is the Disaster: Constitutional Implications of State and Local Emergency Power
Get PDFThe President’s use of emergency authority has recently ignited concern among civil rights groups over national executive emergency power. However, state and local emergency authority can also be dangerous and deserves similar attention. This article demonstrates that, just as we watch over the national executive, we must be wary of and check on state and local executives — and their emergency management law enforcement actors — when they react in crisis mode. This paper exposes and critiques state executives’ use of emergency power and emergency management mechanisms to suppress grassroots political activity and suggests avenues to counter that abuse. I choose to focus on the executive’s response to protest because this public activity is, at its core, an exercise of a constitutional right. The emergency management one-size-fits-all approach, however, does not differentiate between political activism, a flood, a terrorist attack or a loose shooter. Public safety concerns overshadow any consideration of protestors’ individual rights. My goal is to interject liberty considerations into the executive’s calculus when it responds to political activism. I use the case studies of the 2016 North Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the 2014 Ferguson protests, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests to demonstrate that state level emergency management laws and structures provide no realistic limit on the executive’s power, and the result is suppression of activists’ First and Fourth Amendment rights. Under current conditions, neither lawmakers nor courts realistically restrain the executive’s emergency management action. I suggest a better check on executive crisis and emergency actions undertaken in response to mass protest. When the protest is the disaster, more robust judicial review of executive emergency declarations and the establishment of a council to guide state and local executives’ emergency/crisis response are crucial
There\u27s a Legal Crisis on Our Southern Border -- And it was Caused by Our Government
No full textDuring the State of the Union, President Trump described the “lawless state of our southern border” where traffickers, smugglers and criminals reign. And he again vowed to erect a wall to protect “the well-being of all Americans.
Development Status and Decision-Making in Investment Treaty Arbitration
No full textIn this paper, I reproduce, replicate and extend two representative empirical studies that examine biases against developing states in investment treaty arbitration and arrive at contradictory conclusions. I find no evidence of biases against developing states using the same datasets and estimation strategies as the original studies. I find similar results when using alternative estimation strategies in the replication. However, when I change to a larger and more up-to-date dataset in the extension, I start to find consistent negative correlations between respondent states’ development status and their likelihood of losing. The results remain robust after I take into account confounding factors that could be correlated with unobserved case strength, and use the Heckman probit selection model to correct for potential selection bias caused by settlement. The patterns indicate that there may exist biases against developing states in investment treaty arbitratio
Women\u27s Rights, Human Rights and the Criminal Law or, Feminist Debates and Responses to [De]Criminalization and Sexual and Reproductive Health
Get PDFMy comments today seek to highlight how social and economic rights advocates, particularly those concerned with the right to health, engage with ongoing debates about the role of criminal law in human rights. In particular, I emphasize how many “right to health” campaigns fight for the decriminalization of laws that result in the arrest of marginalized communities or health workers. This trend within right to health advocacy complicates what has been called the anti-impunity turn in human rights. In other words, although many scholars have correctly highlighted the rise of a carceral agenda in human rights, there is also ongoing, and perhaps growing, emphasis on decriminalization in the context of social and economic rights. This presentation gives a brief overview of the fight for decriminalization in the context of the right to health, highlights the challenges faced by advocates of in those campaigns, and reflects on some cautionary tales emerging from these fights for decriminalization