20092 research outputs found
Sort by
The New Breed: What our History with Animals Reveals About our Future with Robots by Kate Darling
Get PDFROBOTS WERE ONCE RELEGATED to roles that were “dirty, dull, or dangerous,”3 such as welding parts on car assembly lines, but today, they occupy more visible spaces in our workplaces, homes, and public areas. This visibility has provoked questions frequently seen in media inciting moral panic: Will robots cause job loss? Will robots become sentient? In The New Breed: What our History with Animals Reveals About our Future with Robots (“The New Breed”), Kate Darling explains that these fears are misplaced and that our tendency to anthropomorphize robots fosters false determinism. Darling imagines a different kind of agency, drawing on our historical relationships with animals, to shape future thinking about robotic technology. Reflecting on robots as a new breed or strain allows us to envision them as ontological interpolations rather than human-replacements
Federalism and Constitutional Hyper-Rigidity: A Comparative Analysis of the Federalist Amendment Mechanisms Within the Australian and United States Constitutions
Get PDFThe amendment mechanisms contained within the Australian and United States Constitutions, being Section 128 and Article V respectively, have many structural similarities. Both amendment mechanisms are purposed towards protecting federalism insofar as they require the achievement of more than just a simple constituent majority before a referendum proposal will succeed. In fact, the entrenchment of the Australian and United States ‘double’ and ‘super’ majority requirements respectively were specifically included as a protection for the federal distribution of power originally mandated within the Constitutions of each. Building upon that framework, if the Australian and American constitutional amendment mechanisms are purposed towards protecting federalism, what happens if neither can achieve their purpose and, thus, are ‘hyper-rigid’? The consequence of hyper-rigidity within an amendment mechanism itself often is that Courts will step in to make decisions about fundamental constitutional matters, such as those with respect to the division of federal power, which would otherwise be put to the people of a constituency. This article explores claims about amendment mechanism hyper-rigidity before addressing the issue of how the Australian and United States amendment mechanisms can be reformed to afford these Constitutions the degree of amendability necessary for the respective countries to act within an increasingly centralised world, without altering the nature and distribution of federal power allocated within each
Becoming Competitive on the Worldwide Stage: U.K. Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Class Actions
Get PDF
Understanding Chilling Effects
Get PDFWith digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects,” that is, the capacity for these activities to “chill” or deter people from exercising their rights and freedoms, have taken on greater urgency and importance. Yet, there remains a clear dearth in systematic theoretical and empirical work points. This has left significant gaps in understanding. This Article has attempted to fill that void, synthesizing theoretical and empirical insights from law, privacy, and a range of social science fields toward a more comprehensive and unified understanding.
I argue that conventional theories, based on fear of legal or privacy harm, are narrow, are empirically weak, cannot predict or explain chilling effects in a range of different contexts, and neglect the productive dimensions of chilling effects—how chilling effects shape behavior. Drawing extensively on social science literature, I argue that chilling effects are best understood as a form of social conformity. Chilling effects arise out of contexts of ambiguity and uncertainty—like the ambiguity of a vague law or surveillance—but have deeper psychological foundations as well. In moments of situational uncertainty, people conform to and comply with the relevant social norm in that context. Sometimes this means self-censorship, but most often it means more socially conforming speech or conduct. A theory of chilling effects as social conformity has important normative, theoretical, and empirical advantages, including greater explanatory and predictive power, clarifying what chilling effects theory is for and what it produces, as well as providing a basis to navigate competing and differing chilling effect claims. It also has implications, I argue, for constitutional standing as well as the First Amendment chilling effects doctrine
Law, Labour and Landscape in a Just Transition
Get PDFTaking conflicts over new solar energy projects on the agricultural landscape in the global North as its backdrop, the chapter demonstrates how work and labour (including that performed in the North by workers from the global South) are erased both by the opponents and the proponents of such projects. The erasure is consistent with prevailing ways of knowing the human-environment nexus, shaped by an underlying political economy derivative of how international law has constructed and maintained the foundational liberal mythology that separates labour from land. Grounded in our commitment to pursuing a ‘just transition’ to decarbonisation – that is to say, a transition that attends to the distributional effects and disproportionate impacts of decarbonisation on workers and communities – we strive to reconceptualise work and labour as embodied practices of working and living on the land. Everyday socio-spatial practices structured by law implicate ordinary people in the making of landscapes and continuing relations of settler capitalism, shaping how ‘we’ live together on the land, including who belongs and who gets to decide
Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law, 10th ed.
No full textPrinciples of Canadian Income Tax Law, 10th Edition elucidates Canadian income tax law in simple, concise, and non-technical language. The book encourages us to think deeply and critically about the important role of income tax in Canadian society. It emphasizes the principles of income tax law, the policies that influence and underlie the system, and its major features and context. The book upholds tax law as a rational system contributing to Canada’s socio-economic fabric. Income tax is the main instrument for financing and sharing among Canadians the cost of collective consumption of goods and services and expressing notions of social welfare, distributive justice, and political civility. --publisher\u27s descriptionhttps://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty_books/1427/thumbnail.jp
Book Review - Comparative Commercial Contracts: Law, Culture and Economic Development, Second Edition
No full textComparative Commercial Contracts: Law, Culture and Economic Development, Second Edition Boris Kozolchyk (St. Paul, Minnesota: West Academic Publishing, 2019) 1380 + liv pp. US$14
Panel C: Speech, Silence and Community | 25th Annual Constitutional Cases Conference
No full textThis panel will consider cases in which the Court split over the idea of “positive rights” in section 2b, considered the relationship between section 2b and section 15, confronted the requirement of open courts in a democracy and dealt with a case about a church community with implications for section 2a jurisprudence.
4:52 Rabiat Akande and Faisal Bhabha, Osgoode Hall Law School Insulating the Church: Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Canada v. Aga and the Suppression of Public Law in the Construction of Religious Communities
20:08 David Lepofsky, Visiting Professor Osgoode Hall Law School Viewing Ward v Quebec Human Rights Commission Through a Disability Lens
36:43 Bruce Ryder, Osgoode Hall Law School Political Expression, Electoral Fairness and the Charter
52:20 Amy Salyzyn and Sam Singer, University of Ottawa Law School Limits on the Open Court Principle in the 21st Century
Chair: Sonia N Lawrence, Osgoode Hall Law School
This event was recorded on Friday, April 1, 2022
Hosted by Osgoode Hall Law School
Sponsored by LexisNexis and Osgoode Professional Developmen