Reconceptualizing Privacy: An Examination Of The Developing Regulatory Regime For Facial Recognition Technology

ABSTRACT The National Telecommunications and Information Administration have convened a series of meetings to create a voluntary code of conduct for the commercial use of facial recognition technology. This research asks and answers three questions related to the creation of the voluntary code of conduct: 1) How is the regulatory regime of FRT emerging in the U.S.? 2) What are the roles of the various stakeholders in shaping the commercial regulation of FRT? 3) How does FRT challenge our current conceptions of privacy? Data has been gathered to answer these questions using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed via mediated discourse analysis. Findings of the research include: the highly sensitive nature of the biometric data that facial recognition technology collects, the data’s ability to be linked across multiple databases, the surreptitious way the data can be collected, the potential chilling effect the technology can have on the First Amendment, and the various threats the technology poses to privacy. Keywords: Privacy, Facial Recognition Technology, Multistakeholder, and Biometric Dat

The Shrinking Back: The Law of Biography

The Article argues that quotations of copyrighted material used as fact should be protected. The Article explores the relation between the legal law of biography and the literary theory of biography, focusing specifically on the use of unpublished materials in written biographies. The Article surveys the assumptions underlying copyright, fair use, and privacy doctrines. The Article critiques fair use solutions suggested by legal commentary and congressional action and sketches a different analysis, not involving fair use. The fact use proposal would shift the burden from proving fair use to proving that the quotations were not used as facts

NAVIGATING THE POLITICAL DIVIDE: LESSONS FROM LINCOLN

This edition is comprised of Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law’s symposium “Navigating the Political Divide: Lesson from Lincoln,” held April 20, 2012 in Knoxville, TN. Authors and speakers within this volume include: M. Akram Faizer, Charles M. Hubbard, Mark Halperin, Helen E. Lee, Michael Steele, Siegfried Wiessner, Nicholas S. Davenport, and Tracy P. Knight

Because It is Wrong : An Essay on the Immorality and Illegality of the Online Service Contracts of Google and Facebook

This essay argues that the behavioral-advertising business model under which an internet platform, such as Google or Facebook, provides free services in exchange for the user’s personal data is immoral and illegal. It is immoral because it relies on addiction, surveillance, and manipulation of the user to deplete the user’s autonomy. The contract between the company and the user is immoral. It can also be plausibly argued that the contract is illegal under California law because it is contrary to good morals, is unconscionable, and is against public policy. As society becomes more aware of these moral and legal defects, courts in the future should be more willing to find these contracts illegal and thus void. In such case, the user’s consent to the contract would be nullified and the company would have no legal right to gather and monetize the personal data of the user. The companies should then be forced to convert to a subscription model with a fiduciary duty to users to restrict the gathering and monetizing of personal data. This essay employs perspectives not only from morality and law, but also from philosophy, history, political theory, and neuroscience. Part One covers morality, Part Two legality

No Amendment? No Problem: Judges, Informal Amendment, and the Evolution of Constitutional Meaning in the Federal Democracies of Australia, Canada, India, and the United States

This article considers the way in which judges play a significant role in developing the meaning of a constitution through the exercise of interpretive choices that have the effect of “informally amending” the text. We demonstrate this by examining four written federal democratic constitutions: those of the United States, the first written federal democratic constitution; India, the federal constitution of the largest democracy on earth; and the constitutions of Canada and Australia, both federal and democratic, but emerging from the English unwritten tradition. We divide our consideration of these constitutions into two ideal types, identified by Bruce Ackerman: the “revolutionary” constitutions of the United States and India, and the “adaptive establishmentarian” constitutions of Canada and Australia. In this way, we show that judicial informal amendment changes constitutional meaning in both revolutionary and adaptive settings. We conclude that whatever the origins of a federal democratic constitution, be it revolutionary or adaptive establishmentarian, and whatever the background of the judges and the text with which they work, in the absence of formal amendment, judges use an image of the constitution to give and to change the meaning of a written text over time. This allows a constitution to adapt to changing social, economic, and political conditions where formal amendment, for whatever reason, proves difficult. But, in some cases, it might also leave a federal democracy with a constitution which the Framers did not intend. Whatever the outcome, though, the judges play a central role in the evolution of constitutional meaning over time, for good or for ill