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Anne Klinefelter on The Right to Be Forgotten in the Age of Internet Surveillance Capitalism
No full textThis is a topic we’ve wanted to discuss since early 2019, but teaching stints in Helsinki, and a global pandemic pushed it back almost three years. But we did not forget about the topic of The Right to Be Forgotten! However, in that time, even the phrasing of the topic has changed to The Right to Erasure. Our guest, Anne Klinefelter, Director of the Law Library and Henry P. Brandis Distinguished Professor of Law, catches us all up on the current issues surrounding data privacy and the Internet both here in the US, as well as in the EU.
Klinefelter’s view of privacy is that while we haven’t done a great deal of work to protect individual’s privacy in an economic model based on surveillance capitalism, we have done some things. Her vision of the future is that the Internet still has the capability of being the Utopia we once hoped it would be, but it will probably get far worse before it gets better. And those who benefited from the weak data privacy regulations may end up being the very people who come in and change it for the better. We also talked with Molly Huie from Bloomberg Law about the 2022 DEI Framework survey which is now open for law firms. Molly lists out a number of new data points included in the framework, including neurodiversity, origination credit, and partnership tracking topics in law firm diversity efforts.
Transcript available at: https://www.geeklawblog.com/2022/03/the-geek-in-review-ep-152-anne-klinefelter-on-the-right-to-be-forgotten-in-the-age-of-internet-surveillance-capitalism.htm
Pricing Plastics Pollution: Lessons from Three Decades of Climate Policy
Get PDFPlastic is now the most widely used human-made substance on the planet, and plastics pollution impacts marine and coastal ecosystems, local economies, and human health. Local and national governments are increasingly responding by banning plastic bags and other specific plastic products, taxing the use of certain plastics, and improving waste management and recycling. These are important steps, but alone they will not result in a meaningful reduction in cumulative plastics pollution or encourage development of sufficient alternatives to plastic. Additional policy measures are necessary.
This Article argues that climate change and plastic pollution share numerous similarities, and these similarities allow policymakers to benefit from the three decades of climate policy experimentation when choosing plastics pollution policy instruments. Both are collective action problems with local, national, and global impacts. Unilateral policies will do little to address total accumulation of the pollutant. There are countless sources of plastics pollution and the plastics have different uses and characteristics. Technological breakthroughs are necessary to recycle and reuse large amounts of plastics or reduce carbon pollution. There are influential, established interests in value chains that produce and use plastics or fuels that emit greenhouse gases.
The Article focuses on one key policy instrument in climate policies—pollution pricing—and identifies lessons from carbon pricing that can inform the design of plastics pollution policies. The Article begins by summarizing the global impacts of plastics pollution and the current international, national, and subnational plastics pollution policies. It then argues that broader market-based approaches can help address the global challenge of plastics pollution, identifies policy design choices for market-based pollution policies, elaborates on the similarities between plastics pollution and climate change, and then describes lessons from climate policy that can inform the design of plastics policies. The Article concludes by describing the applicability of these lessons from climate change to the emerging policy response to plastic pollution
Not Child’s Play: A Constitutional Game of Pass the Story in \u3ci\u3eDobbs\u3c/i\u3e, \u3ci\u3eShurtleff\u3c/i\u3e, and \u3ci\u3eKennedy\u3c/i\u3e
Get PDFThis Article suggests that in the effort to find fixed standards for rights, working with vague, indeterminate, silent text, the Supreme Court engages in a constitutional game of pass the story. No one outcome concludes the story; it merely adds another chapter, to which the next set of judges will add their own installment. The quest for standards never ends. The Court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Shurtleff v. City of Boston, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District are merely the latest installments in stories that began with the founding. And as with any such story, what happens next cannot be predicted at the outset. This ongoing quest, though, comes with a cost: certainty. Adding to a story might be a good literary device to keep a listener or reader interested, but it is of little use in a system that at least pays lip service to stare decisis and the rule of law
A 60-Year March Requires Some Stretching: The Statutory Expansion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
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Implicit Legislative Bias: The Case of the Mortgage Interest Deduction
Get PDFThe home mortgage interest deduction is over 100 years old. The deduction has been subject to increasing and, at times, withering criticism from commentators. Scholars have argued that the mortgage interest deduction may be a particularly ineffective and regressive way to subsidize homeownership. Other scholars have made the important point that the mortgage interest deduction has a disparate racial impact: homeowners are disproportionately white, so the deduction disproportionately benefits white people at the expense of people of color. Yet, the mortgage interest deduction has retained remarkable and costly staying power despite all the critiques.
How has the mortgage interest deduction persisted over a century, despite extensive critique? We argue that an underappreciated part of the story of the mortgage interest deduction is how its very creation arose out of implicit racial bias and other cognitive biases. First, scholars and policymakers ignored the racialized history of homeownership in the United States and relied on racist tropes in studying the potential economic benefits of the deduction. After such associations occurred, policymakers misattributed to homeownership benefits that were really, at least in part, benefits that flowed from whiteness. Perceiving positive benefits from homeownership, legislators viewed it as a good worth subsidizing through the tax system. Cognitive biases such as confirmation bias then made it unlikely that, once in place, the mortgage interest deduction would be substantially changed.
his understanding of the mortgage interest deduction should upset any future attempts to characterize the deduction as a neutral, albeit flawed, way to subsidize desirable values. More generally, this case study illustrates a phenomenon that merits more attention in the legal literature: how implicit racial bias and other cognitive biases in the legislative process make flawed legislation, like the mortgage interest deduction, more likely to be made and more difficult to upend. We conclude by offering suggestions for minimizing bias in future legislation and for reforming existing legal policy that already reflects such bias