Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly expected to disrupt the ordinary functioning of society. From how we fight wars or govern society, to how we work and play, and from how we create to how we teach and learn, there is almost no field of human activity which is believed to be entirely immune from the impact of this emerging technology. This poses a multifaceted problem when it comes to designing and understanding regulatory responses to AI. This article aims to: (i) (...) defend the need for a novel conceptual model for understanding the systemic legal disruption caused by new technologies such as AI; (ii) to situate this model in relation to preceding debates about the interaction of regulation with new technologies (particularly the ‘cyberlaw’ and ‘robolaw’ debates); and (iii) to set out a detailed model for understanding the legal disruption precipitated by AI, examining both pathways stemming from new affordances that can give rise to a regulatory ‘disruptive moment’, as well as the Legal Development, Displacement or Destruction that can ensue. The article proposes that this model of legal disruption can be broadly generalisable to understanding the legal effects and challenges of other emerging technologies. (shrink)

Vice crimes, crimes prohibited in part because they are viewed as morally corrupting, engage legal theorists because they reveal importantly contrasting views between liberals and virtue-centered theorists on the very limits of legitimate state action. Yet advocates and opponents alike focus on the role law can play in suppressing personal vice; the role of law is seen as suppressing licentiousness, sloth, greed etc. The most powerful advocates of the position that the law must nurture good character often draw on (...) Aristotelian theories of virtue to ground the connection between law and virtue. While Aristotle believed that law and character were linked, it is ironic to note that he did not argue for the position evidenced in our vice laws that law was likely to succeed in instilling virtue. Indeed, Aristotle thought the project of using law to instill private virtue was nearly certain to fail. Aristotle’s deep concern was not for the way law protected private virtue within each person but the way law had to protect civic virtue between citizens. This article argues that even from its foundations, the project of vice crimes as moral instruction is misconceived. The use of law for overly instrumental or narrow reasons opens law and legal institutions to abuse and factionalism. Lawyers, judges and others specially connected to law must first and foremost aim at addressing “legal vices,” vices internal to the institutions of law. Particularly, increasing factionalism and instrumentalism which disconnects law from the pursuit of the common good threatens our civic bonds. Most importantly, where civic bonds are disrupted, citizens have no reason to remain law abiding. The striking lesson, captured both in ancient philosophy and modern history, is that when legal vices grow unchecked and factions use the law to pursue narrow interests, ultimately law abidingness is corrupted and interest groups harm themselves as much as others. (shrink)

This Article is a contribution to the torture debate. It argues that the abusive interrogation tactics used by the United States in what was then called the “global war on terrorism” are, unequivocally, torture under U.S. law. To some readers, this might sound like déjà vu all over again. Hasn’t this issue been picked over for nearly fifteen years? It has, but we think the legal analysis we offer has been mostly overlooked. We argue that the basic character of (...) the CIA’s interrogation of so-called “high-value detainees” has been misunderstood: both lawyers and commentators have placed far too much emphasis on the dozen or so “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) short-listed in government “torture memos,” and far too little emphasis on other forms of physical violence, psychological stressors, environmental manipulations, and abusive conditions of confinement that are crucial to the question of whether the detainees were tortured. Furthermore, we dispute one of the standard narratives about the origins of the program: that it was the brainchild of civilian contractor psychologists because— in the CIA’s words—“[n]on-standard interrogation methodologies were not an area of expertise of CIA officers or of the US Government generally.” This narrative ignores the CIA’s role in devising these methods, in spite of the decades of prior CIA research and doctrine about forcing interrogation subjects into a state of extreme psychological debilitation, and about how to do so—by making them physically weak, intensely fearful and anxious, and helplessly dependent. By neglecting this history and focusing on the contractors and the EITs they devised, this narrative contributes to the misunderstanding that the torture debate is about EITs and nothing else. In effect, a “torture debate” about EITs and the torture memos neglects the purloined letter in front of our eyes: the abusive conditions the CIA inflicted on prisoners even when they were not subject to EITs, including abuses that the torture memos never bothered to discuss. Unpacking what this debate is really about turns out to be crucial to understanding that such interrogation methods are torture under existing U.S. law. The U.S. Torture Act includes a clause in its definition of mental torture that was intended to ban exactly the kind of interrogation methods the CIA had researched, out of concern that our Cold War adversaries were using them: mind-altering procedures “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” That is precisely the “non-standard interrogation methodology” the CIA employed after 9/11. (shrink)

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, (...) libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data. (shrink)

The dominant male discourse as expressed in the law of sexuality constructs the male subject. In each area — rape, incest and prostitution, it creates and extends the power which underpins the sexuality of the male subject to facilitate the non-consensual taking of women in rape and incest and the buying of them on the subject's own terms in prostitution.Further, the law constructs the female as Other not as freely consenting subject but as Other for the male subject in the (...) space of unreason, for the logic of desire.In these constructions, lie the paradox of the law of sexuality. It exists purportedly to defend and protect the “victims” of rape, incest and prostitution but even in so far as it does so, it reasserts, through its constructions, the power of the speaking male subject through and the exclusion of the woman as Other from, the dominant male discourse as it is expressed in and enshrined by that law. (shrink)

In this chapter we will argue that the capacities necessary to moral and legal agency can be understood as executive functions in the brain. Executive functions underwrite both the cognitive and volitional capacities that give agents a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing: to recognize their acts as immoral and/or illegal, and to act or refrain from acting based upon this recognition. When a person’s mental illness is serious enough to cause severe disruption of executive functions, she is very (...) likely to lack substantial capacities necessary to be law-abiding. Our analysis supports the Model Penal Code test for legal insanity over the traditional M’Naghten test, because the Model Penal Code test allows either severely diminished cognitive or volitional capacities to warrant an excuse to criminal culpability. We will provide a nuanced account of the ways in which mental illness can erode executive function, as well as an explanation as to why severe diminishment of executive functions caused by mental illness, but not some other causes, is exculpatory. (shrink)

This article uses a fictionalised encounter as the basis for an autoethnographic exploration of the intersections between the South African social value of ubuntu and the notion of spatial justice. Ubuntu describes the interconnectedness of human lives. It asserts that a person is only a person through other people, a recognition that calls for deep respect, empathy and kindness. Ubuntu is expressed in selfless generosity and sharing. The spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities has resulted in a concern (...) with the relationship between space and justice. It recognises that space is not simply an empty container in which people live and act, but is something that is constructed by social relations – and simultaneously constitutive of them. While this recognition gives rise to spatial perspectives on justice, what constitutes spatial, justice, as distinct from other notions of justice, and how such justice is to be achieved are contested. Building on the work of legal scholar, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, on spatial justice, I argue that the notion of ubuntu is able to shape our understanding of spatial justice, and when practised, it is able to disrupt space and challenge dominant spatial configurations. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus amongst law firms and in-house legal departments that next generation "Legal Tech" - particularly in the form of Blockchain-based technologies and Smart Contracts - will have a profound impact on the future operations of all legal service providers. Legal Tech startups are already revolutionizing the legal industry by increasing the speed and efficiency of traditional legal services or replacing them altogether with new technologies. This on-going process of disruption (...) within the legal profession offers significant opportunities for all business. However, it also poses a number of challenges for practitioners, trade associations, technology vendors, and regulators who often struggle to keep up with the technologies, resulting in a widening regulatory "gap." Many uncertainties remain regarding the scope, direction, and effects of these new technologies and their integration with existing practices and legacy systems. Adding to the challenges is the growing need for easy-to-use contracting solutions, on the one hand, and for protecting the users of such solutions, on the other. To respond to the challenges and to provide better legal communications, systems, and services Legal Tech scholars and practitioners have found allies in the emerging field of Legal Design. This collection brings together leading scholars and practitioners working on these issues from diverse jurisdictions. The aim is to introduce Blockchain and Smart Contract technologies, and to examine their on-going impact on the legal profession, business and regulators. (shrink)

This article argues that to disrupt legal education in a radical sense, students need to become acquainted with the art of worldmaking and the view that law is a “way of worldmaking”. First, I show that law is a cultural semiotic practice that requires decoding and, for that reason, demands a creative intervention by those that want to know, understand, and do things with law. Altogether this amounts to recognizing the different modes in which law creates, and is part (...) of, worlds. Second, I propose that due to different features of their aesthetic form, comics are a particularly effective medium to place students before the myriad ways in which law and lawyers make and reproduce worlds. Third, I illustrate the argument by exploring how the Saga comic series, through its formal multimodality and narrative and cultural complexity, can make good on that challenge. (shrink)

To study Judicial determinants of the ordered obstetrical and fertility interventions. Nature, corresponding laws, decisions upon the 37 expounded holdings at the Probate, Trial, District, Appellate, and Supreme Courts are studied in 92 published materials identified through the ACOG, RCOG, SOCG portals, and Legal Scholarship Repository. Hearings are held in the US (83.8 %), Canada (10.8 %) and U.K (5.4 %). Of all the hearings reviewed, 27 % concern mentally impaired, 37.8 %-maternal incompetence, and 21.6 % cases are of (...) criminal nature. The Judicial determinants vary from country to country. In Canada, the ordered medical interventions are effected by the child protection legislation, whereas in the US, by court orders. In majority of cases, orders are obtained by dismissing the patriae petitions for involuntary sterilizations of mentally impaired sui juris adults (57 %); coerced obstetrical interventions (33.3 %), fetal custody (50 %); enforcement of surrogacy contracts (62.5 %) in favor of the Common Humanity Benefit clause; and recognizing the rights to inherit in posthumously conceived children (80 %) pursuant to the Social Security Act, Law of obviousness, Law of inherent anticipation, and Intestacy statute. Current study prioritizes two questions: (1) whether it is justified to override the wishes of a competent patient purportedly in her best interests; and (2) whether the patient’s autonomy and competence is an absolute concept. With the law unsettled as to a woman’s right to assent a treatment and contradict her fetus, parties concerned with fetal rights should consider exercising of screening tools on maternal judgmental fitness jointly developed by medical and legal practitioners. Further, given the advances in gamete conservations, states consider enacting legislation in order to safeguard the orderly administration of estates disrupted by claims from posthumously conceived children. A balance must be struck between the child’s right to inherit, the state’s interest, as well as the interests of prior born children. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or (...) accelerates the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

Over the past 30 years, the Australian state of Victoria has made numerous reforms to a set of jury directions purporting to address concerns that rape trials do not adequately respond to the reality of sexual offending in the community. Building on work identifying the predominant narratives mobilised in rape trials, in this article we consider whether the way in which a jury consumes information during a trial explains why the jury directions, positioned and utilised as they are, appear to (...) have been inadequate to the task of enabling juries to re-imagine evidence through alternative narrative frameworks. (shrink)

Western European liberal democracies have recently enacted laws that prohibit the diffusion of fake news on social media. Yet, many consider that such laws are incompatible with freedom of expression. In this paper, I argue that democratic governments have strong pro tanto reasons to prohibit fake news, and that doing so is compatible with free speech. First, I show that fake news disrupts a mutually beneficial form of epistemic dependence in which members of the public are engaged with journalists. Second, (...) I contend that laws against fake news enhance rather than thwart personal autonomy. If these suggestions are plausible, then the same considerations about truth and autonomy that underpin the value of free speech give us reasons to prohibit fake news. (shrink)

The article responds to an overlooked objection put by Allen Buchanan to John Rawls’s theory of justice: that implementing the Difference Principle over time may require gross and frequent disruptions of people’s framing and execution of long-term plans. Having strengthened Buchanan’s objection to resolve significant weaknesses in his main counterexample, I argue that the best response to this objection draws on the concept of the rule of law, specifically, the legal doctrine of legitimate expectations, which can be found in (...) English, French, and European Union administrative law. I also explore the suitability of incorporating this doctrine into Justice as Fairness given its absence in United States constitutional and administrative law. Finally, I turn to consider the question of what the government owes to agents in whom legitimate expectations are induced and then frustrated. Here I introduce the Precept of Administrative Liability. (shrink)

The recognition of animal sentience in law has created high expectations but has not yet lived up to them. In some jurisdictions, the recognition of animal sentience has formed the basis of new legal obligations imposed on humans to protect animal interests. So far, however, its potential has been limited because legal officials have interpreted sentience narrowly, as mainly referring to pain. This article proposes identifying other animal characteristics to better serve animal interests, namely sociability and agency. These (...) animal characteristics could, like sentience, be legally recognized by legislatures and receive normative force from the courts. This article argues that the legal recognition of sociability and agency could address animal exploitation and killing. Animal sociability and agency are already implicitly recognized by the law of most Western states, making it easier for them to be explicitly recognized in the future. Although these characteristics are already found in the law, they have the potential to be more disruptive than sentience because they have never served as the basis for the legal protection of animals. In other words, their potential as protective tools remains underexplored and underexploited. Moreover, sociability and agency more intuitively suggest normative implications because of their demanding nature. Acknowledging that a being is social and agential implies recognizing her need for social relationships and ensuring that her choices are fulfilled. This research article provides antispeciesist scholars and activists with a critical overview of new concepts around which some may wish to rally, particularly since the legal recognition of sentience has shown limits in multiple jurisdictions. This article explores the potential of legally recognizing sociability and agency by taking examples from the lives of dogs, cows, cats, horses, northern gannets, and dolphins. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Sonny Nordmarken Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Beginning in the 1960s, scholars began to theorize gender (...) as a contextually specific process rather than a universal category reflecting an essential pre-discursive sex. Two interrelated traditions developed: a discursive approach, which theorized gender as performative, and an interactionist approach, which investigated the interactional achievement of gender. For Judith Butler, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”1 Gender is therefore performative : it is a series of effects produced through the repetition and citation of stylized acts, which are named via and thus produced through discourse ; discourse also produces the defining limits of subjects.2 Candace West and Don Zimmerman theorized gender as a “routine, methodical, 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 2. Butler, Gender Trouble; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sonny Nordmarken 37 and recurring accomplishment” produced in social interaction.3 They observed how, in the relational process of “doing gender,” social actors display gender, presenting an appearance to others, who attribute gender by interpreting this appearance. In this article, I investigate how actors interactionally challenge and construct discursive structures in order to contribute to scholarship that analyzes the role language plays in such interactions.4 Following Sandy Stone, who suggests that transsexuals are not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre, “a set of embodied texts,” who, through their interpretation, might potentially disrupt dichotomous sexuality and gender categories, I examine the spaces in which the discursive and the interactional merge to investigate how gender minorities, as simultaneous subjects, texts, social actors, and cultural workers, queer hegemonic gender practices.5 I argue that members of trans linguistic communities and gender nonconforming individuals queer the normative gender process in two ways: by productively linguistically communicating third-person gender pronouns and by disruptively inhibiting gender’s hegemonic attribution. Lal Zimman has made parallel observations, explaining linguistic gender self-determination practices as a new cultural phenomenon, focusing on terminology for types of gendered persons, grammatical gender forms (i.e., pronouns), and lexical items that relate to embodied sex.6 My analysis builds on Zimman’s observations using sociological, performance 3. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 126. 4. For example, see Mimi Schippers, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 85–102. 5. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 296. The term “gender minorities ” encompasses individuals identifying with gender identity terms other than those they were assigned and individuals with gender nonconforming appearance. 6. See Lal Zimman, “Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language,” Journal of Language and Discrimination 1, no. 1 (2017): 84–105; Lal Zimman, “Trans People’s Linguistic Self-Determination and the Dialogic Nature of Identity,” in Representing Trans: Linguistic, Legal, and Everyday Perspectives, ed. Evan Hazenberg and Miriam Meyerhoff (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2017). 38 Sonny Nordmarken studies and performativity frameworks to theorize these practices. By approximating new gender pronoun-attribution norms that bring a trans queer paradigm to life in interactions and by disregarding their perceptions of each other’s bodies, actors accomplish gender pronouns linguistically, override hegemonic gender attribution norms, and reorganize gender accountability. These practices institutionalize a new interpretive frame and accountability structure through which social actors create and recognize a variety of gender expressions, identities, and pronouns, reworking performativity to produce gender minorities as subjects. I argue that this gendering-queering is a form of disidentificatory gender accomplishment. In addition, I... (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of (...) the gig economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how blockchain law, by emancipating itself from three essential dimensions of law—language, territory, and the body—implies a profound disruption of (...) how we perceive law and its legitimacy. Starting with an overview of the technological details of blockchain, the paper then addresses its ideological context and traces the underlying ideas, values and functions and their relation with—and impact on—the general perception of law and legal issues. By critically assessing the claim that blockchain will liberate the subject from any heteronymic constraints, this paper analyses to what extent this technology has social and legal implications that reach far beyond its virtual, purely blockchain-related scope of applications—and why this technology should matter to us all. (shrink)

Business theory suggests that knowledge intensive professionslike law would devote major attention to knowledge management (KM) activities. Afterall, since a firm's combined knowledge is a key differentiating asset, one wouldexpect the exploitation of that asset to be a high priority. Yet new lawyers are oftensurprised at how little of such activities take place within firms. One might also expect tofind rich connections between academic research in knowledge management and law firmsusing that research. The rarity of such connections stands in sharp (...) contrast to thebreadth and depth of use of substantive legal research and analysis. These disappointmentsare not unrelated: a firm that allocates little time to systems for leveraging its intellectualcontent is unlikely to invest in staying up to date with externalresearch relating to such systems.The authors believe that significant progress nonetheless may bemade both in applying KM methodologies to law firm work and better connecting theacademic and practice sectors. To those ends, this article explores three theses: (1)Legal technologists can and should lead by example in utilizing KM tools and methods; (2) Theeconomics of legal practice still pose substantial challenges to even those knowledge technologies considered by some as truly ``disruptive''; and (3) Focussing onareas that could yield a tremendous economic harvest may help forge richer connections betweenthe work being done in academic and practice spheres. (shrink)

BackgroundDuring a commercial surrogacy arrangement, the event of embryo transfer can be seen as the formal starting point of the arrangement. However, it is common for surrogates to undergo a failed attempt at pregnancy conception or missed conception after an embryo transfer. This paper attempts to argue that such failed attempts can be understood as a loss. It aims to reconstruct the experiences of loss and grief of the surrogates and the intended parents as a consequence of their collective failure (...) to conceive a surrogate pregnancy.MethodsDrawing on a qualitative study conducted over a period of eight months between 2014 and 2015 at two fertility clinics in Delhi and two in Kolkata, India, this paper examines the experiences of the surrogates and the intended parents when faced with missed conceptions or failed conceptions during a surrogacy arrangement.ResultsWe argue that while the surrogate grieves the non-arrival of a ‘good news’ as an uncertain loss, the intended parents experience yet another, failure in addition to the losses they might have incurred during their previous fertility treatments. The body of the surrogate becomes a site of ‘a lost opportunity’. The surrogate embodies a loss in her quest to achieve social mobility and the intended parents experience a disembodied pregnancy loss. This very emotional experience stands in stark contrast to the conceptualisation of such failed attempts as non-events within the discourse of the surrogacy industry. The experience of loss of the intended parents is recognised but their grief is given no space. We argue that such ambiguity around the nature of losses resulting out of a missed or failed conception during surrogacy is an outcome of lack of interpersonal relationship between the surrogate and the intended parents.ConclusionsSince commercial surrogacy is a relational process, the only way in which the experiences of losses and failures of the actors at the preconception stage can be better addressed is through developing close sharing and understanding between each other through an ethics of care. Therefore, to nurture caring relationships, surrogacy needs to be understood as a moral commitment by –the surrogates and intended parents. To enable such a commitment, there is a need to reconsider the pre-defined and legally regulated professional duty of the doctors, agents and agencies. It cannot be a one-sided commitment, but has to have elements of mutuality. (shrink)

Free speech has been a historically volatile issue in higher education. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of progressive censorship on campus. This wave of censorship has been characterized by the explosive growth of such policies as "trigger warnings" for course materials; "safe spaces" where students are protected from speech they consider harmful or distressing; "micro-aggression" policies that often strongly discourage the use of words that might offend sensitive individuals; new "bias-reporting" programs that consist of different degrees (...) of campus surveillance; the "dis-invitation" of a growing list of speakers, including many in the mainstream of American politics and values; and the prominent "shouting down" or disruption of speakers deemed inconsistent with progressive ideology. Not to be outdone, external forces on the right are now engaging in social media bullying of speakers and teachers whose views upset them. The essays in this collection, written by prominent philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and legal scholars, examine the issues at the forefront of the crisis of free speech in higher education. The contributors address the broader historical, cultural, legal, and normative contexts of the current crisis, and take care to analyze the role of "due process" in protecting academic freedom and individuals accused of misconduct. Additionally, the volume is unique in that it advances practical remedies to campus censorship, as the editors and many of the contributors have participated in movements to remedy limitations on free speech and open inquiry. The Value and Limits of Academic Speech will educate academic professionals and informed citizens about the phenomenon of progressive censorship and its implications for higher education and the republic. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on legal issues raised by the audiovisual broadcasting of performing arts, which has significantly increased due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. First, we contextualize this practice and briefly present the emergence and evolution of the practice of “filmed theater”, as well as any other form of performances (e.g., concert, ballet, opera) originally conceived for the stage but subsequently diffused through other channels. Secondly, we address the current legal issues that have arisen because of the increase of (...) such practice due to the containment measures taken by government. Two axes are of particular attention: the matter of copyrights and related rights, on the one hand, and the question of public financing, on the other. Concerning intellectual property, audiovisual broadcasting leads to several legal consequences and issues: effectiveness of related rights, emergence of new modes of exploitation and new authors, recognition of the recording as an original work, etc. This new practice is, moreover, likely to disrupt the categories established by public funding legal mechanisms, which are often poorly adapted to hybrid artistic objects. The objective of this part is therefore to analyze the new legal issues raised by the audiovisual distribution of performances. Finally, we go beyond exclusively legal issues to examine the very specificities of performing arts and, more specifically, the possible loss that would result from a fixation of a production on a reproducible medium, making its diffusion possible beyond the stage. (shrink)

Sociologists have identified many factors that mitigate the progressive effects of the legal mobilization to end sexual violence. Within this body of research, however, there is little interrogation about the social construction of sexual harm. I use the case of child sexual abuse to investigate how prosecutors make sense of sexual harm. Data are qualitative interviews with 43 prosecutors. Findings reveal that prosecutors use a framework of sexual identity to construct sexual injury on the child’s body. The perceived harm (...) centers on the anticipated loss of the child’s heterosexual potential. Girl victims are thought to grow into sexual promiscuity, and boy victims are thought to grow into sex offenders. Prosecutorial constructions of child sexual abuse cases are future-oriented, which increases their urgency, and these constructions also imagine the child as a person in formation, rather than a fully actualized person with intrinsic rights. In revealing how the state of sexual victimization is not only deeply gendered but also heteronormative, this research has theoretical implications for childhood studies, queer studies, and anti-violence advocacy. (shrink)

Food charity in the United States has grown into a critical appendage of agro-food supply chains. In 2016, 4.5 billion pounds of food waste was diverted through a network of 200 regional food banks, a fivefold increase in just 20 years. Recent global trade disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic have further reinforced this trend. Economic geographers studying charitable food networks argue that its infrastructure and moral substructure serve to revalue food waste and surplus labor in the capitalist food system. The (...) political–legal framework undergirding this revaluation process however is still poorly understood. Drawing on a 6-year institutional ethnography of the food banking economy in West Virginia, this paper takes a supply-side approach to examine the material and moral values driving the expansion of food waste recovery as hunger relief. Empirically, it focuses on the laws, contracts and fiscal incentives regulating charitable food procurement at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Feeding America. The assemblage of government agencies, private businesses and non-profit organizations enrolled into this gift economy at different scales I argue, serves to enclose food waste into a public–private governance structure that regulates food surpluses and ensures these will not disrupt the scarcity logics driving profitability along primary food circuits. (shrink)

Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors consider how these novel sociotechnical imaginaries may emerge, having regard to law’s contribution to, as well as its possible transformation by, the process of 3D (...) bioprinting. The authors draw on Gilbert Simondon and corporeal, material feminists to account for these disruptions as ‘ontogenetic,’ in the sense that technology can produce new ontologies or beings. The authors focus namely on ontogenesis, individuation and the pre-individual forces that comprise, and yet remain inexhausted by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors argue legal phenomena are pre-individual forces that ‘in-form’ ontogenesis. These pre-individual forces are indistinguishable from those implicated in the individuation of the body’s physical form; thereby, the individuation of the bodily material through 3D bioprinting may be expressive and generative of sociolegal phenomena, at least as those relate to the body. The authors conclude that 3D bioprinting shores up conventional, liberal conceptions in law of the human body as individual, bounded and primarily contractual. Three-dimensional bioprinting may introduce ontological difference to the extent it promises and realises a new temporality of the human as a species- and legal-subject, although such a development would only seem to expand, rather than attenuate, a biopolitical regime. (shrink)

Despite its obvious advantages, the disruptive development of neurotechnology can pose risks to fundamental freedoms. In the context of such concerns, proposals have emerged in recent years either to design human rights de novo or to update the existing ones. These new rights in the age of neurotechnology are now widely referred to as “neurorights.” In parallel, there is a considerable amount of ongoing academic work related to updating the right to freedom of thought in order to include the protection (...) of “freedom of thinking” (i.e., freedom of thought itself) and not only its social manifestations. Neurorights such as cognitive liberty, free will, mental freedom, and mental self-determination come into play here. Importantly, freedom of thought has often been considered a prerequisite for all the other fundamental freedoms and rights. In any case, just as other rights require additional legal instruments to guarantee their compliance, substantial neurorights will probably require specific complementary developments in procedural law. In relation to this, there is a long tradition of habeas corpus as an emergency remedy to enforce the rights of a citizen against illegal or arbitrary detention. More recently, the habeas data writ has been proposed and admitted in certain countries to guarantee a person’s ownership of their personal data. In this article, we propose to expand this procedural apparatus by incorporating a third habeas, which we call habeas cogitationem: a writ aimed primarily at enforcing the right to freedom of thinking (and, subsidiarily, the rest of neurorights) against direct, harmful interferences in a person’s thought process by both public and private perpetrators. (shrink)

The one of goals that religious provisions aim to achieve is the preservation of the generation. For this reason, Islam recommends marriage and prohibits all illegitimate relationships outside of marriage. He also ordered the parties to respect each other's rights and fulfill their responsibilities in order to maintain the marriage union. He requested that all attitudes and behaviors that would disrupt the marriage union be avoided. How ever, from time to time, a word said or a behavior exhibited by one (...) or both spouses shakes the marriage union and even leads to its end. Situations that can be described as severe disagreements that occur between spouses and make the continuation of the marital union almost impossible are expressed with the concept of “shiqàq” in fiqh. Failure of the parties to observe marriage law in domestic relations is one of the main reasons that lead to “shiqàq”. Although the reasons for the “shiqàq” that leads the spouses to discord are not explained in the relevant verse, it is recommended that in case of “shiqàq”, the institution of arbitration should be applied and the arbitrators should first reconcile the relationship between the spouses and prevent the breakdown of the marital union. On the other hand, it is controversial among the sects whether arbitrators have the authority to terminate a marriage union that they do not find beneficial to continue. While the fuqaha, who argue that arbitrators are in the position of attorneys, say that referees cannot separate the spouses without the consent of the spouses, those who say that arbitrators are in the power of judges are of the opinion that arbitrators have the authority to separate husband and wife regardless of the consent of the spouses. In addition, in case of “shiqàq”, the man can directly divorce his wife, and the woman can request the judicial authorities to separate from her husband. In this study, which deals with the issue of “shiqàq” in the context of family law, first of all, the meaning of “shiqàq”, the issues that cause this situation and the legal consequences attached to this concept will be revealed. (shrink)

The neuroethics field emerged in the early 2000s in an effort to face important philosophical dilemmas and anticipate disruptive social changes linked to the use of neurotechnology (Safire, 2002). From very early on, this field grew out of two core issues, namely inquiries into the ethics of neuroscience –concerning the moral use of knowledge and technology– and inquiries into the neuroscience of ethics –on how new brain function evidence can change human self-understanding (Roskies 2002). Similarly, neurolaw is now on a (...) parallel path with two main pillars as Chandler (2018) suggested, (1) “self-reflexive inquiry” (the neuroscience of law) and (2) “inquiry into the development and use of brain science and technologies” (the law of neuroscience). In this paper, I suggest that these two lines of research are still excessively disconnected from one another and, to support this claim, I analyze the three potential point-of-no-return risks that Aldous Huxley associated with technological challenges, namely centralization of power, bureaucratic alienation, and scientific idealism. In addition, I show how Huxley shifted analysis of technological problems from a focus on the rights of potential victims to the duties of potential aggressors. Finally, I argue that Aldous Huxley’s view on how to build a bridge that brings pillars 1) and 2) closer together also helps prevent the technological point-of-no-return. According to Huxley, the key is found in paying particular attention to understanding contemplative activity, reinforcing its role in the study of reality, and, eventually, returning the romantic gaze updated to academia. (shrink)

In this paper the authors present the psychological consequences of social isolation on domestic violence during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the legal framework in the RNM on addressing the phenomenon of domestic violence. In this age of globalization and drive for material conformity, family life is quite difficult to cope with. This “war” for material comfort during the pandemic, has strained and stressed many families as a result of the created circumstances. Public safety measures, including physical distance (...) and social isolation, which have also been implemented in the RNM have contributed in making family problems even more pronounced. Social distance and staying at home are very effective in reducing the transmission of Covid-19 virus, but these safeguards disrupt the routines of spouses and families. Domestic violence affects a large number of families, and it is estimated that in times of social isolation, all forms of violence have been inflicted against family members regardless of their gender and age. The most common forms of domestic violence during Covid-19 pandemic in our country are psychological, physical and economic violence. Some countries affected by Covid-19 have seen increases in levels of domestic violence, including violence against children, violence against partners, and violence against the elderly. This paper presents the results of research conducted which highlight the fact that during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in levels of domestic violence in the Republic of North Macedonia in the first six months of 2020. The authors give their recommendations on the need for action by state institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to adapt methods and circumstances towards the protection of victims of domestic violence. (shrink)

In Germany the question whether to uphold or repeal the judicial prohibition on Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis is being debated from quite different standpoints. This paper differentiates the major arguments according to their reasons as a) moral, b) evaluative , and c) legal. The arguments for and against PGD can be divided by content into three groups: arguments relating to the status of the embryo, focusing on individual actions in the implementation of PGD, and relating to the foreseeable or probable (...) consequences of PGD.In Germany, from a legal perspective, the status of the embryo does not permit the intervention of PGD; from a purely moral perspective, a prohibition on PGD does not appear defensible. It remains an open question, however, whether the moral argument permitting PGD should be restricted for evaluative reasons. The paper discusses the species-ethical reasons, for which Jürgen Habermas sees worrisome consequences in the wake of PGD to the extent that we comprehend it as the forerunner of a ‘positive eugenics’. It would so disrupt the natural preconditions of our universal morality. The question of whether to prohibit or allow PGD is not merely a question of simple moral and/or legal arguments, but demands a choice between evaluative, moral and species-ethical arguments, and the question remains open. (shrink)

The design of collaborative robotics, such as driver-assisted operations, engineer a potential automation of decision-making predicated on unobtrusive data gathering of human users. This form of ‘somatic surveillance’ increasingly relies on behavioural biometrics and sensory algorithms to verify the physiology of bodies in cabin interiors. Such processes secure cyber-physical space, but also register user capabilities for control that yield data as insured risk. In this technical re-formation of human–machine interactions for control and communication ‘a dissonance of attribution’ :7684, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805770115) (...) is created between perceptions of phenomena, materials and decision-making. This reconfigures relations not only between humans and machines, objects and subjects, but possibly disrupts attributive functions in the social system of Law. What it requires is shifting a legal accountability for action from a sovereignty of the human to a new materialist account based on a ‘cognitive assemblage’ between physiological data, computation and algorithmic sensing. This paper investigates the function of law as a guidance system to acknowledge this account of sensory and algorithmic computation as autonomous ‘sensing agents’ that may be accountable in situations of risk. This assemblage of robotic computation and sensory determination requires a clearer legal differentiation across the current static terminologies of person, property, liability and rights that maintain strict separations of object from subject. To neglect this, we argue, law will solely impute attributions of error to humans despite evidence of operation via mutual control. (shrink)

The presented paper focuses on the analysis of strategic documents at the level of the European Union concerning the regulation of artificial intelligence as one of the so-called disruptive technologies. In the first part of the article, we outline the basic terminology. Subsequently, we focus on the summarizing and systemizing of the key documents adopted at the EU level in terms of artificial intelligence regulation. The focus of the paper is devoted to issues of personal data protection and cyber security (...) included in these strategic documents. The final part contains recommendations for future research and evaluation of its key features. (shrink)