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Privacy and Compliance Design Options in Offline Central Bank Digital Currencies
No full textMany central banks are researching and piloting digital versions of fiat money, specifically retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Core to many discussions revolving around these systems’ design is the ability to perform transactions even without network connectivity. While this approach is generally believed to provide additional degrees of freedom for user privacy, the lack of direct involvement of third parties in these offline transfers also interferes with key regulatory requirements that need to be accommodated in the financial space. This paper presents a compliance-by-design approach to evaluate technologies that can balance privacy with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CFT) measures. It classifies privacy design options and corresponding technical building blocks for offline CBDCs, along with their impact on AML/CFT measures, and outlines commonalities and differences between offline and online solutions. As such, it provides a conceptual framework for further techno-legal assessments and implementations
Platforms, Privacy, and Power: Examining Predictors of Online Intimate Information Disclosure and Expression
No full textWhen intimate privacy is violated, self- and relational development is impaired to the detriment of individuals and society. Despite these costs, there is a lack of systematic empirical and theoretical study of intimate privacy and efforts to protect it. This research helps fill this void through two complementary studies. Through a longitudinal experimental design, results from Study 1 highlight that partner trust and response-efficacy were not only positively predictive of online intimate disclosure, but also strengthened following knowledge of intimate privacy protections. In Study 2, we find individuals are more likely to engage in public-facing online sexual expression if the plat-form—as opposed to the government—is responsible for intimate privacy policy. This article underscores the value of empirical methods to the law and provides implications for policymakers and platform designers seeking to heighten intimate privacy protections
The Intertwining of Corporate, International Investment and Public International Law and Their Impacts on Sustainability
No full textThis chapter explores the interplay between corporate law, international investment law, and public international law, assessing their impact on sustainability. It examines how corporate legal structures enable multinational corporations to externalize costs. At the same time, international investment law, designed to safeguard foreign investors’ rights, amplifies corporate power through expansive protections and investment arbitration, frequently sidelining sustainability concerns. Meanwhile, public international law, despite its recognition of human and environmental rights, lacks enforcement mechanisms to counterbalance corporate influence. The chapter argues that meaningful reforms are necessary to address the business models embedded within corporate and investment law. Proposals include redefining corporate governance to prioritize broader stakeholder interests, restructuring investment treaties to impose investor responsibilities, and strengthening international legal frameworks for corporate accountability. Ultimately, it calls for a paradigm shift that challenges relentless economic growth to better align business practices with sustainability objectives
Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age
No full textIn Chilling Effects, Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects – or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights – have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty_books/1450/thumbnail.jp
The Effect of an ‘Appearance, Presentation and Demeanour’ Instruction on Credibility and Deception Judgments in Mock Refugee Status Decisions
Get PDFCan a written instruction convince refugee status decision-makers not to rely on a claimant’s ‘appearance, presentation, and demeanour’ in judging the claimant’s credibility? How else might such an instruction affect the decision-makers’ deception judgments? This study explored the effects of an APD instruction on the judgments of lay decision-makers making credibility judgments in a simulated refugee hearing (n=275). It sought, by means of an experiment, to quantify the instruction’s effects both on decision- making outcomes and on the written reasons that the decision-makers offered to justify their conclusions. The APD instruction in our study had no significant effect on whether participants judged the claimant to be credible or deceptive, how confidently they reached either kind of conclusion, or how thoroughly they justified their reasoning. Those who received the instruction, however, cited APD factors significantly less often in supporting their judgments. Under this study’s simplified experimental conditions, the APD instruction may have caused decision-makers, consciously or otherwise, to suppress the fact that APD factors had influenced their thinking, driving these factors underground. In real life, this kind of suppression would have serious consequences for the rule of law, as it would immunize flawed reasoning from appeal or review. This study’s findings, which have implications for credibility assessment in other legal settings, call into question the received wisdom that written instructions are an effective way to dissuade decision-makers from relying on unsound deception inferences
The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship by Axel Honneth, Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2024
Get PDFIN THE WORKING SOVEREIGN: Labour and Democratic Citizenship, Axel Honneth reflects on the importance of labour in democratic life. Honneth rescues a lost tradition, and I believe this work will be very relevant to labour law
An International Law of the Emotions
Get PDFTalk of the emotional or affective turn in international law is relatively recent though it tracks and echoes several other critical methods movements, including the turn to history, in the study of international law and, so too, a two-decade long wave of law and emotions research in several domestic legal systems. The affective turn in international law in several instances aims to critique a post-Cold War optimism that held out the promise that a rules and reason-based international order would work to abate war, and secure peace, prosperity and efficient capital flows. As outlined by the editors of this volume of the Cambridge History of International Law, ‘the period beyond or after the Cold War held out enormous hope precisely because it offered the possibility of change and great change at that’. With others similarly casting it as ‘a moment widely thought to be full of new ‘global’, if not cosmopolitan, possibilities’, involving ‘a high-minded desire and universalist objective to build a stable global legal order [that] was projected back to 1945, and then described as having been sacrificed by, and during, the Cold War’. Against this backdrop promise, the focus on emotions and affect in the study of international law stands to offer, via different manners and modes of analysis, critical appraisals of the convincing-or-not performances of this cosmopolitan liberal, legal formalism that rooted (and continues to root) the teaching and practice of international law as a ‘disembodied, disarticulated discipline’ in this so declared post-Cold War era.
The turn to the study of emotions in the history of international law stands to put pressure on the promise of this hopeful mode sketched above, often by illustrating the ways that legal theory offers formal rationalisations of hideously unequal status quo distributions of political and economic power. Indeed, one can map a burgeoning set of projects in the study of international law that foreground, examine, or use emotions (or affect) to better understand the history and politics of international law vis-à-vis this post-Cold War promise of good order.
This chapter takes up the broad challenge of thinking about emotions in the history of international law in the post-Cold War era by addressing the subject, sideways, through an essay by Bernard Williams. Drawing from Williams’s discussion of a tragedy by Sophocles, The Women of Trachis, this chapter speaks to the ways that philosophical conceptions of time set the backdrop for certain emotions appearing apt within a particular political era, and so too, how moralised philosophies of mind and action come to pervade historical thinking, including, as this chapter will argue, historical thinking about international law. Emotions can reveal deep political commitments, and they often serve to reinforce at the cultural level a material base or set of structured power relations. This leads to some emotions presenting as obscure, hard-to-place, or somehow out of bounds, where certain dominant frames and ways of seeing work to exclude them (consider here, for example, how some public acts of mourning have wrought political backlash, vilification, and persistent misconstrual). Attention paid to the work of emotions settled in the bedrocks of certain dominant theories about international law in the post-Cold War period, elucidate the ways in which they support an indomitable, impervious, and challenge-resistant form of liberal hopefulness (one apt to exclude history and horror), that is characteristic of the post-Cold War optimistic mode outlined above, and which later, when confronted with overwhelming political violence, transmutes for some actors into an incredible nostalgia for a past now construed as sufficiently orderly for that same liberal hopefulness to flourish
Radical Resistance in the Penumbra of the Law: Legal Mobilization for Migrant Farmworkers under Neo-colonial Racial Capitalism
Get PDFWorkers from the Global South with temporary immigration status provide a transitory, cheap, exploitable workforce that is responsive to economic vicissitudes and supremacist anti-migration discourse. They are created as an exceptional category of persons “essential” for their work but with no right to remain and claim citizenship-type entitlement to the Global North. The programs in agriculture are rooted in the legacies of indentureship, plantation, and other forms of racialized coerced labour. These programs continue to entrench a neocolonial racial capitalist global order where “unfree labour” is sanctified by contemporary liberal laws. Caught in the vice of a hegemonic, racial, state-governed project, migrant farmworkers are caught in what Best and Hartman call a “negative relation to law”—marked by “the necessity of legal remedy” but “the impossibility of redress.” Scholars within the Black radical tradition have configured fugitivity, or the practice of refusal, as a form of liberatory resistance that subverts the politics of recognition. The concept of fugitivity has been used in recent scholarship on illegalized crossings of securitized borders; but fugitive resistance is not meant to be seen in the registers of the established scripts of liberal resistance, such as legal claims. Using empirical evidence from migrant worker organizing in Canada, this paper suggests the possibility of radical legal mobilization that centres a praxis of refusal. This approach uses the law not for statist benevolence but as a counter-pedagogy for challenging neocolonial, racial capitalist sites and reframing the movement of marginalized, racialized persons. Such a legal mobilization enables and supports ‘fugitive’ actions of migrant workers––agentic choices by workers that reject, refuse, and escape the system that creates racialized unfreedoms. I show that radical legal mobilization can be conceptualized to involve three modalities of praxis (subversive legality, relationship-building, and radical knowledge production) that map to the three themes of performance, sociality, and futurity/imagination found in Fred Moten’s work
Rhetoric and Reality: The P&O Ferries Scandal and the Right to Strike
No full textThis article considers the freedom of association implications of the mass dismissals at P&O Ferries in 2022, in light of the Committee on Freedom of Association’s recent consideration of a complaint by affected trade unions. It identifies an important strategic shift in British trade unions’ engagement with legal enforcement. This involves an attenuation of the strong historical attachment to “voluntarism” in British industrial relations. It then considers some legal implications of the P&O Ferries scandal under the European Convention on Human Rights. It concludes by identifying a phenomenon of “state-managed deregulation” in the maritime sector, whereby company de-collectivization is facilitated by the active substitution of collective agreements by minimum wage laws