Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Location Tracking and Digital Data: Can Carpenter Build a Stable Privacy Doctrine?

In Carpenter v United States, the Supreme Court struggled to modernize twentieth-century search and seizure precedents for the “Cyber Age.” Twice previously this decade the Court had tweaked Fourth Amendment doctrine to keep pace with advancing technology, requiring a search warrant before the government can either peruse the contents of a cell phone seized incident to arrest or use a GPS tracker to follow a car’s long-term movements

Averting Robot Eyes

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms. We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology

Legal Age

How old are you? This deceptively simple question has a clear answer in the law, which is a number measuring the amount of time that has elapsed since birth. However, as scientists discover various biomarkers of human aging and individuals openly embrace more fluid identities, this chronological definition will soon have to compete with biological and subjective alternatives. Legal scholars have previously examined the role of age in the legal system, but they have done so assuming a chronological definition. This is the first Article to examine critically the antecedent question of how we should define legal age after one has reached adulthood. The stakes for this definition are high. Age is ubiquitous in the legal landscape, appearing in the Constitution, antidiscrimination statutes, criminal laws, and public benefits programs. This Article normatively assesses the chronological, biological, and subjective conceptions of age, examining how well they improve the accuracy of the legal system, impact administrative costs, promote autonomy interests, and further antisubordination goals. It then charts three potential paths forward for legal age: abolishing age as a meaningful legal category for adults, particularizing the definition of legal age based on context, and reforming the chronological status quo through the calibration of existing age-based law

Poverty and Social Exclusion Target. Europe 2020 Strategy Too Much Actor Diversity For Consensus?

The purpose of this thesis is to question the cause of the lack of consensus surrounding Europe 2020s poverty and social exclusion target – to lift 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion. The target was a major development for the European Union’s social dimension. Even so, it did not come easily, with divides over the existence and measurement of such a target. The Commission proposed the use of a sole at-risk-of-poverty indicator in their March 2010 draft, however by June the target included three indicators for poverty and social exclusion; at risk of poverty, jobless households, and material deprivation. Using strands of new institutionalism, this study acknowledges one commonly held premise and introduces a unique hypothesis to be tested. The first reestablishes the recurrent argument that a degree of diversity between the member states is the cause of the lack of consensus. The second concerns what is considered a gap in the current literature, analyzing the diversity between institutional levels focusing on the inclusion of the civil society. In short, this thesis concludes that there is a certain level of horizontal and vertical diversity causing the lack of consensus. However, this inference introduced the notion of a larger complexity issue surrounding poverty. Lastly, that further research is needed with a focus on the multidimensionality of poverty as a concept