Pragmatism or What? The Future of US Foreign Policy

This article discusses the intellectual sources of the presidential candidates' foreign policies. In the case of Barack Obama, the article examines the formation of his worldview, his intellectual inspirations, his most significant foreign policy appointments and the diplomatic course he has pursued as president. Mitt Romney's foreign policy views are harder to identify with certainty, but his business and political career-as well as the identity and dispositions of his advisory team-all provide important clues as to the policies he will pursue if elected in November 2012. The article finds much common ground between the two candidates; both are results-driven pragmatists, attuned to nuance and complexity, who nonetheless believe-in agreement with Robert Kagan-that US geostrategic primacy will continue through the span of the twenty-first century. The gulf between the candidates on domestic policy is vast, but on foreign policy-Romney's bellicose statements through the Republican primaries served a purpose that has passed-there is little between the

The Politics of Intellectual Property

In May 2005, Keith Aoki invited me to participate on a panel on The Politics of Copyright Law at the 2006 Association of American Law Schools ( A.A.L.S. ) mid-year meeting workshop on Intellectual Property in Vancouver, British Columbia. The panel, renamed The Politics of Intellectual Property, and moderated by Keith, included talks by Justin Hughes, Mark Lemley, Jay Thomas, and me, and it was followed by three concurrent sessions on The Politics Concerning Moral Rights, The Politics of Global Intellectual Property, and The Politics of Patent Reform. I\u27m not sure what the organizing committee had in mind when it put together our panel. Judging from the speakers invited to participate, it seems likely that the organizers expected us to talk about how intellectual property ( IP ) law plays out in Washington. (Mark and Jay had been active in extant efforts to draft patent reform legislation, Justin has served as a policy expert in the patent office, and I\u27ve spent a large chunk of my life writing about the copyright legislative process.) Since nobody gave us explicit instructions, though, I took the opportunity to talk about something that had been on my mind. Although the A.A.L.S. had recently begun to make Annual Meeting talks available as podcasts, it did not record the 2006 mid-year meeting, and the text of the talk I gave has been sitting unread on my hard drive ever since. A few months ago, Justin Hughes wrote to ask me for a citation to the talk. When I told him it had never been published, he suggested that I agree to publish it her

Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement

In an effort to control flows of unauthorized information, the major copyright industries are pursuing a range of strategies designed to distribute copyright enforcement functions across a wide range of actors and to embed these functions within communications networks, protocols, and devices. Some of these strategies have received considerable academic and public scrutiny, but much less attention has been paid to the ways in which all of them overlap and intersect with one another. This article offers a framework for theorizing this process. The distributed extension of intellectual property enforcement into private spaces and throughout communications networks can be understood as a new, hybrid species of disciplinary regime that locates the justification for its pervasive reach in a permanent state of crisis. This hybrid regime derives its force neither primarily from centralized authority nor primarily from decentralized, internalized norms, but instead from a set of coordinated processes for authorizing flows of information. Although the success of this project is not yet assured, its odds of success are by no means remote as skeptics have suggested. Power to implement crisis management in the decentralized marketplace for digital content arises from a confluence of private and public interests and is amplified by the dynamics of technical standards processes. The emergent regime of pervasively distributed copyright enforcement has profound implications for the production of the networked information society

Constructing women's "different voice": Gendered mediation in the 2015 UK General Election

Since the 1990s, media commentators in the UK and elsewhere have praised women for introducing a “visibly different style of politics”, one symbol of which is the alleged preference of female politicians for a less adversarial and more co-operative style of political speech. Drawing on an analysis of the 2015 UK General Election campaign, we argue that this notion of women’s “different voice” has become increasingly central to the media’s construction of prominent female politicians as public figures, despite the evidence that it does not reflect any clear-cut pattern of differentiation between male and female political speakers of equivalent status and experience. Though it may seem to be an advance on previous negative representations of female politicians, we suggest that it reproduces—albeit in a “modernized” form—the long-established tendency of the media to evaluate women in relation to gendered norms and expectations, while men are judged as individuals

The Zombie First Amendment

Scholarly and popular critiques of contemporary free speech jurisprudence have noted an attitude of unquestioning deference to the political power of money. Rather than sheltering the ability to speak truth to power, they have lamented, the contemporary First Amendment shelters power’s ability to make and propagate its own truth. This Article relates developments in recent First Amendment jurisprudence to a larger struggle now underway to shape the distribution of information power in the era of informational capitalism. In particular, it argues that cases about political speech—cases that lie at the First Amendment’s traditional core—tell only a small part of the story. The contemporary First Amendment must be situated within a larger story about the realignment of information flows within circuits of power that serve emerging global interests, and to tell that story, one must look to disputes about the speech implications of private economic regulation. As a result of that struggle, free speech jurisprudence about information rights and harms is becoming what is best described as a zombie free speech jurisprudence: a body of doctrine robbed of its animating spirit of expressive equality and enslaved in the service of economic power. Within the emerging zombie free speech jurisprudence, speech, money, and information processing are equivalent, and speech advancing economic interests receives the strongest protection of all

Recommendations, Rhetoric, and Reporting: State and NGO Behavior in the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights

This dissertation takes a detailed look at the role of non-state stakeholders, overwhelmingly civil society non-governmental organizations (CSOs or NGOs), in human rights promotion within the process of the United Nations Human Rights Council\u27s Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights. Utilizing a mixed-method, text-heavy approach, I conduct analyses of both state behavior and NGO activity within the first cycle of the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights and examine the monitoring and follow-up practices between review rounds through paired cases in the second round of reviews. In these analyses, first I show that NGO activity, after controlling for the amount of state activity, human rights record, region, and issue area, is related to higher rates of states rejecting recommended changes and thus the exhibition of resistance to international pressure. Second, state rejection of recommendations increases with the level of demands in the recommendation, worsening human rights records, and when the recommendation covers specific international obligations or political rights such as basic freedoms and the rule of law. Moreover, recommendations covering women\u27s rights or the rights of the child are more likely to be accepted. Third, I establish that states express their resistance to international human rights norms in one of two fashions: with culturally-, religiously-, or nationally-particularistic claims or with appeals to state sovereignty. Finally, I highlight the centrality of NGOs in the monitoring process between cycles of the UPR process, tying NGO engagement and participation over the duration to reporting on compliance with recommended changes from the preceding cycle of review

Making Copyright Work for Creative Upstarts

Article published in the George Mason Law Review

Climate Change Scepticism

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Climate Change Scepticism is the first ecocritical study to examine the cultures and rhetoric of climate scepticism in the UK, Germany, the USA and France. Collaboratively written by leading scholars from Europe and North America, the book considers climate skeptical-texts as literature, teasing out differences and challenging stereotypes as a way of overcoming partisan political paralysis on the most important cultural debate of our time