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In the information society, the role of private sector entities in gathering information for and about users has long been a most critical issue. Therefore, intermediaries have become a main focus of privacy regulations, especially in jurisdictions with a strong tradition of privacy protection such as Europe. In a landmark case, the ECJ ruled that an internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal data which appear on web pages published by third parties. The recognition by the European Union of a so called “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) has ignited disgruntled reactions from civil society and legal scholars, especially in the United States. Meanwhile, proposals for the adoption of a similar right have appeared in several jurisdictions, including Brazil, Japan, Korea, and Russia. Supposedly, the right to be forgotten would endanger freedom of expression (FoE) and access to information. Apparently, factoids — defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact” — dominated the recent debate surrounding the right to be forgotten. This paper will discuss and debunk these factoids, review data protection legislation in Europe, and explore the legal and policy implications of the newly emerging right to be forgotten. Finally, the idea that extra-territorial application of the RTBF might unleash a kraken that can break down the Internet will be contextualized within the present political scenario. The extra-territorial application of the RTBF follows in the footsteps of a global move towards data protectionism against the de facto market dominance of US Internet conglomerates. Global blocking governed by a nationality principle — as suggested by CNiL and other EU institutions — would put to rest these protectionist concerns.

Despite the fact that policing is growing safer in the United States, thedanger associated with police work continues to structure departmentaltraining and police behavior. This article describes how police aresocialized into a cultural frame conceptualized as the "danger imperative"—the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety—and the unintended, deadly consequences of their perception through it. Using nearly 1000 hours of participant observation and 94 interviews across three urban police departments, the author demonstrates that officers are formally and informally socialized into this frame, and learn both policy-sanctioned and policy-deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. However, policy-deviant behavior such as not wearing a seatbelt when driving, though justified as necessary to allow officers to defend themselves from violence, places officers at grave risk of injury and death in high-speed car crashes.

In this paper, it was discussed about illicit drugs, legal controlled drugs, and illicit drugs that are not present in the current society, analyzing its properties, pharmacological and sociocultural characteristics. Besides that, it talked about the way the drug user walks, and the difficulty he pass through to fit into society. In addition, Law 11.343 / 2006, which deals with drugs, and special criminal procedure, with subsidiary application of The Code of Criminal Procedure. Within this same aspect, there is a brief historical passage about how we arrived in the current legal system, for the fight against drugs and trafficking.

The possibility of encoding regulation to make it processable automatically by computers has been gaining attention within the legal discipline. With it, an abundance of terms has emerged as much as an array of academic discussions providing different examples, raising different concerns, while, unfortunately, having different premises in mind. This makes contributions within the field of what we refer to as ‘automatically processable regulation’ difficult to compare with each other and research results hard to transfer among different research projects and groups. To overcome this problem, we propose a typology that enables researchers to locate their research project within the domain of automatically processable regulation, understand what issues might arise depending on where within the typology a project falls, and determine the relationship between projects. The typology revolves around three dimensions: the primary aim of the project, the potential for divergence of interests amongst stakeholders, and the degree of mediation by computers.

Triangulation of the various methodological approaches towards the rule of law is highly desirable since it allows the combination of benefits and elimination of problematic aspects in each. The present article triangulates the conceptualizations of three approaches relating to the rule of law, namely Bedner’s review of the rule of law theories, the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, and the review by Horák et al. of empirical measurement of legal consciousness, and identifies the most significant problem as a lack of communication between them. More precisely, the theoretical conceptualizations are not fully prepared for empirical measurement, and the empirical tools do not reflect the theoretical debate and its outcomes. Therefore, a new conceptualization of the rule of law is proposed to overcome these issues and consequently make the empirical measurement more valid. Triangulation of the various methodological approaches towards the rule of law is highly desirable since it allows the combination of benefits and elimination of problematic aspects in each. The present article triangulates the conceptualizations of three approaches relating to the rule of law, namely Bedner’s review of the rule of law theories, the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, and the review by Horák et al. of empirical measurement of legal consciousness, and identifies the most significant problem as a lack of communication between them. More precisely, the theoretical conceptualizations are not fully prepared for empirical measurement, and the empirical tools do not reflect the theoretical debate and its outcomes. Therefore, a new conceptualization of the rule of law is proposed to overcome these issues and consequently make the empirical measurement more valid.

In response to increasing concerns about jail and prison overcrowding, many officials and legislatures across the U.S. have undertaken different efforts aimed at reducing the prison population, such as reduced sentence lengths and early release of prisoners. Thus, there is currently a high degree of public interest regarding how these changes in policy might affect recidivism rates of released offenders. When considering the research on the relationship between incarceration and recidivism, many studies compare custodial with non-custodial sentences on recidivism, while fewer examine the impact of varying incarceration lengths on recidivism. This article provides a review of the research on the latter. While some findings suggest that longer sentences may provide additional deterrent benefit in the aggregate, this effect is not always consistent or strong. In addition, many of the studies had null effects, while none of the studies suggested a strong aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Overall, the literature on the impact of incarceration on recidivism is admittedly limited by important methodological considerations, resulting in inconsistency of findings across studies. In addition, it appears that deterrent effects of incarceration may vary slightly for different offenders. Ultimately, the effect of incarceration length on recidivism appears too heterogenous to be able to draw universal conclusions. We argue that a deepened understanding of the causal mechanisms at play is needed to reliably and accurately inform policy.

This contribution explores how the Council of Europe (CoE) – and the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg Court), in particular – have addressed the increasing number and complexity of applications involving sexual minority asylum claims (SMACs). The law and policy produced by the CoE and the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court immensely influence how domestic authorities address SMACs, so it is crucial to have a thorough understanding of this framework. Indeed, the CoE has acquired a progressively significant role in the field of asylum. Although it does not have an asylum policy as such, several of its bodies have taken a noteworthy role in this field, such as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). The Strasbourg Court, above all, along with the now extinct European Commission of Human Rights, developed a strong line of jurisprudence that applies the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to asylum claimants, despite the ECHR not possessing any norm explicitly related to asylum. More specifically, the Strasbourg Court was the first judicial instance at a European level to decide on cases relating to SMACs. It has so far dealt with at least 23 separate cases of asylum on grounds of sexual orientation. Many of these cases led to contentious and inadequate decisions, such as the 2014 judgment in M.E. v. Sweden, which gave legitimacy to the idea that applicants can be sent back to their countries of origin and asked to be ‘discreet’ about their sexuality. This approach reflects a worrying detachment from the realities of sexual minorities in many countries around the world and from their experiences when claiming international protection in Europe. This contribution thus critiques the CoE policy and Court’s jurisprudence in this field, whilst advancing policy and legal recommendations that can adequately address the socio-cultural and sexual diversity of asylum claimants from a queer intersectional perspective.

How do people in a precarious profession leverage technology to grow their business and improve their quality of life? Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and make up a sizeable workforce: the United Nations estimates that at least 42 million sex workers are conducting business across the globe. Yet, little research has examined how well technology fulfills sex workers’ business needs in the face of unique social, political, legal, and safety constraints. We present interviews with 29 sex workers in Germany and Switzerland where such work is legal, offering a first HCI perspective on this population’s use of technology. While our participants demonstrate savvy navigation of online spaces, sex workers encounter frustrating barriers due to an American-dominated internet that enforces puritan values globally. Our findings raise concerns about digital discrimination against sex workers and suggest concrete directions for the design of more inclusive technology.

Distributed Ledger Technology can be an effective tool for resource distribution. As individuals and organisations explore innovations which allow to redefine the rules of access, possession and sharing these developments also become important for the future of self-determination. Demonstrated through credit scoring and ‘social credit systems’, the identity of an individual is intertwined with resource access, possession and transferability. A key pre-requisite for participation is formal legal status, which translates to citizenship. However, many proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology focus predominantly on technological features and capabilities, which might enable the implementation of concepts such as decentralised governance, ‘self-sovereign identity’ management, and trust-less transactions based on ‘zero-knowledge proof’. Nevertheless, such narrow consideration overlooks existing legal and political realities. Considering the lessons learned from citizenship, it becomes questionable whether Blockchain as player in the area of identity management will ultimately increase human dignity, or further manifest traditional patterns of discrimination and inequality.

This essay written for the general public uses my ethnographic research on customary African marriage and same-sex marriage in South Africa to argue that marital status is best understood not as a static category but as the ongoing production of layered social processes.

This report discusses the data gathered through two surveys carried out in the context of the SOGICA project. SOGICA – Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum: A European human rights challenge – is a four-year (2016-2020) research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) that explores the social and legal experiences of people across Europe claiming international protection on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI).

In this testimony, basic logic and definitive evidence are presented for faith and action, the fundamental claim in James 1-2 and additional biblical letters, as a necessary requirement for eternal life through Christ.

International audience; We examine patterns of reported crime in Santa Monica, California before and after the passage of Proposition 47, a 2014 initiative that reclassified some non-violent felonies as misdemeanors. We also investigate impacts of the opening of four new light rail stations in 2016 and of increased community-based policing starting in late 2018. Our statistical analyses of reclassified crimes-larceny, fraud, possession of narcotics, forgery, receiving/possessing stolen property-and non-reclassified ones are based on publicly available reported crime data from 2006 to 2019. These analyses examine reported crime at various levels: city-wide, within eight neighborhoods, and within a 450-meter radius of the new transit stations. Monthly reported reclassified crimes increased city-wide by approximately 15% after enactment of Proposition 47, with a significant drop observed in late 2018. Downtown exhibited the largest overall surge. Reported non-reclassified crimes fell overall by approximately 9%. Areas surrounding two new train stations, including Downtown, saw significant increases in reported crime after train service began. While reported reclassified crimes increased after passage of Proposition 47, non-reclassified crimes, for the most part, decreased or stayed constant, suggesting that Proposition 47 may have impacted reported crime in Santa Monica. Reported crimes decreased in late 2018 concurrent with the adoption of new community-based policing measures. Follow-up studies needed to confirm long-term trends may be challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic that drastically changed societal conditions. While our research detects changes in reported crime, it does not provide causative explanations. Our work, along with other considerations relevant to public utility, respect for human rights, and existence of socioeconomic disparities, may be useful to law enforcement and policymakers to assess the overall effect of Proposition 47.

As part of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission would like to introduce vertical regulations, replacing — or better conflicting with — the well-established eCommerce Directive horizontal intermediary liability regime. An upcoming revision of the Audio-visual Media Services Directive would ask platforms to put in place measures to protect minors from harmful content and to protect everyone from incitement to hatred. Meanwhile — under the assumption of closing a ‘value gap’ between rightholders and online platforms allegedly exploiting protected content — the Draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market would implement filtering obligations for intermediaries. Finally, the EU Digital Single Market Strategy has also endorsed voluntary measures as a privileged tool to curb illicit and infringing activities online. Each of these actions will erode the eCommerce intermediary liability arrangement by bringing in — in a way or another — proactive monitoring obligations and causing a systemic shift from a negligence-based to a strict liability regime for hosting providers. This systemic shift would apparently occur against public consensus and absent any justification based on empirical evidence. Nonetheless, it will bring about dire consequences by pushing privatization of enforcement online through algorithmic intelligence, based on murky, privately-enforced standards, rather than transparent legal obligations. This reform might cause a policy earthquake that will shake and crack EU law’s systemic consistency, due process and fundamental rights online.

Since Euromaidan and the beginning of annexation of Crimea and hostilities in the East of Ukraine post-truth was not much in focus of Ukrainian scholars. The events mentioned above have pulled the trigger of interest to the term in international scholarly world. Ukraine was not an exception in this situation. Having suffered through the consequences of post-truth practical application, Ukrainians have much to say on the matter of post-truth description and on the matter of dealing with it. My specific interest concerned the area of law, and this article focuses on the role post-truth plays in legal fields. I go over the basic ideas of post-truth, analyze its origin and influence, as well as provide examples of its legal application in Ukrainian environment. ZVIERIEV, Ievgen. Legal Interpretation in Post-truth Society: Ukrainian Case. Kyiv-Mohyla Law and Politics Journal, n. 4, p. 81–98, 2018. ISSN 2414-9942. Available at: . doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.18523/kmlpj153253.2018-4.81-98.

This article examines the persistent authority of lobola, the customary practice for forming marriages in many South African communities. South African marriage rates have sharply fallen, and many blame this on economic challenges completing lobola. Using in-depth, qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country's highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola's authority survives because lay actors have innovated new approaches for pursuing emerging desires for marriage via lobola. I argue that dyadic narratives of marriage increasingly circulate alongside “traditional” extended-family narratives, especially among the young women who strongly support lobola while yearning for gender-egalitarian marriages. My argument synthesizes actor-oriented analyses of legal pluralism with Ewick and Silbey's theorization of lay actors’ role in producing legality to illuminate how lay actors contribute not only to the form and content of different legal systems, but also to the reach of their authority.

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law’s role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analyzing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. Accordingly, while my argument broadly distinguishes the more repressive regimes of colonialism and apartheid from the more expansive post-apartheid legal regime, it also partially undoes that periodisation by highlighting limits and evasions of repressive law and obstacles impeding access to post-apartheid law’s expansive promises.

While conjugal-recognition policies are often a subject of political debate, scholars rarely attempt to explain the causal roots of such policies. When they do, their methods typically focus on discrete policies in isolation—same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, etc.—with comparatively little investigation of potential connections among policies. This article begins to develop a more holistic approach focused on identifying and explaining what I call conjugal-recognition regimes. Adapting the concept from the existing literature on welfare regimes, I argue that conjugal-recognition regimes exist when an identifiable pattern or principle organizes an institution’s conjugal-recognition policies. Such regimes shape social relations at multiple levels, both between the individuals in conjugal relationships and among the multiple institutions (state, religious, and so on) that confer official conjugal recognition. I argue that these organizing patterns or principles emerge out of historically specific, institutionally situated, and discursively constructed political debates on specific conjugal issues and, to the extent a regime in fact exists, go on to shape subsequent conjugal-policy controversies. I demonstrate these ideas through an extended analysis of post-apartheid South African marriage law, which has recently incorporated numerous previously excluded conjugal formations but has also assigned each new form to its own statutory and administrative structure or, as I call it, “silo.” I argue that these silos entrench a principle of “gendered multiculturalism” that officially defines cultures in terms of their supposedly characteristic gender relations. This principle increasingly tends to embed religious and cultural elites’ understandings of their respective traditions into the state’s marriage laws.

Ability-to-pay determinations are essential when governments use money-based alternative sanctions, like fines, to enforce laws. One longstanding difficulty in the U.S. has been the extreme lack of guidance on how courts are to determine a litigant’s ability to pay. The result has been a seat-of-the-pants approach that is inefficient and inaccurate, and, as a consequence, very socially costly. Fortunately, online platform technology presents a promising avenue for reform. In particular, platform technology offers the potential to increase litigant access, reduce costs, and ensure consistent and fair treatment—all of which should lead to more accurate sanctions. We use interviews, surveys, and case-level data to evaluate and discuss the experiences of six courts that recently adopted an online ability-to-pay assessment tool that streamlines and standardizes ability-to-pay determinations. Our findings suggest that the online tool improves accuracy and therefore the effectiveness of fines as punishments, and so it may make the use of fines as sanctions more socially attractive.

This contribution explores the adequacy of EU action with regard to Roma minorities. The expulsion of large numbers of Roma individuals, accompanied by other discriminatory practices and forms of hostility, exclusion and violence against the Roma across Europe, has brought the attention of the media and policy makers to Roma issues to a greater extent than ever before during the last decade. The range of problems still afflicting the lives of many Roma nowadays is extremely wide, well researched and profusely documented. This contribution leaves aside issues related to free movement and EU citizenship, thus moving the debate beyond the narrow framework of the ‘migrant Roma’. The contribution considers the wide range of relevant EU competences in this field, and assesses how comprehensive and appropriate the EU’s approach to Roma issues is. The analysis combines legal instruments, policy papers, and case law, draws from legal and non-legal literature, and integrates considerations of social, economic and cultural nature. In the process, this contribution considers themes that cut across several strands of the EU’s Roma policy, including fundamental rights, intercultural sensitivity, the limits of the ‘integration model’, and issues of enforcement, monitoring and funding. The logical narrative developed puts together the key jigsaw pieces that currently contribute to a EU Roma policy, and clearly identifies the limitations of the current state of affairs. Finally, this contribution interrogates the trends underlying the development of the EU Roma policy and puts forward a range of recommendations.

Campaign-finance reformers fear that rich donors’ money can be used disproportionately to influence the content of campaign advertising and thus, perhaps, the results of elections. In European football, UEFA has attempted to ban “financial doping,” rich owners’ use of money earned in sectors other than football to pay large sums for the best football players. Campaign-finance reform efforts and “financial fair play” rules in sport may seem like bespoke solutions to different problems. In fact, they are the same solution to the same problem. Both are attempts to ensure that power accumulated in one market is not brought into another market so as to distort and damage its proper functioning. Market segregation, which seeks to bar explicit or implicit trans-market “currency” exchanges, disconnects the markets’ decisionmaking rationales. By understanding the segregation regulatory tool and its characteristic difficulties, including the appearance of black-market currency exchanges and the entrenchment of incumbents, it is possible to see in more general terms the challenges in many other legal settings, including moral rights and so-called “repugnant transactions.”

This conclusion offers some concluding remarks on the overall theme of gender and queer perspectives on Brexit, drawing from key insights in the contributions to this volume and advancing some future lines of research which hopefully will continue to advance the debate in this area.

This Introduction explores why Brexit matters for women and queer individuals. It offers background and context, including the nature of the referendum debate on social and traditional media, whose voices were heard, role of activists, voting breakdown, etc. This Introduction also offers a roadmap through the subsequent contributions.

Published on Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter, 2019, 21 (1): 22–32. In 2014, the Chinese government proposed to build a social credit system (SCS) to better collect and evaluate citizens’ creditworthiness and grant rewards and punishments based on one’s social credit. Since then, various SCS pilots have been enacted. While current media and scholars often perceive SCS as a single and unified system, this paper argues that there are in fact multiple SCSs in China. I identify four main types of SCS and articulate the relationships among them. Each SCS has different assumptions, operationalizations, and implementations. China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, and the macroeconomic management agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, are the two most important actors in the design and implementation of the multiple SCSs. Yet their distinctive views about what “credit” is and what an SCS should be produced great tensions on the SCS landscape. I also historicize current SCSs and show that many elements and assumptions of SCSs can be traced back to a broader political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Finally, I propose an alternative theoretical framework to understand Chinese SCSs as a symbolic system with performative power that is more than a simple repressive and direct political project.

Use-based welfare achieves redistribution by reallocating rights to use and benefit from idle resources, rather than through tax and transfer. How and why has this form of welfare provision emerged as an urban institution, and what affects whether it endures? This article compares projects to grant poor and unemployed Chicagoans access to land for gardens and small farms between 1895 and 1935, explaining how this form of social support came about through experiments with rules, norms, and forms of property. While social policy is typically understood as emerging through the realization of rights to public support, use-based welfare turns instead on efforts to create a legal privilege for the needy to use idle resources. During the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, this form of relief was pitched as both an alternative and a complement to welfare based on tax and transfer. Yet efforts to establish it as a permanent institution repeatedly failed, due to implementation challenges, opposition from people committed to treating land and food as commodities, and the nonemergence of a social movement to defend land access. Recognizing the historical dynamics of use-based welfare offers a new perspective on the contemporary resurgence of urban farming as a strategy for addressing unemployment and poverty.

Slowly, but surely, awareness is increasing about the possible impact of Brexit on individuals who identify, or are identified as, members of minorities based on their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). After explorations of this theme by Wintemute and by us, Cooper, Cooper et al., and the Trade Union Congress all alerted people to the potentially detrimental effect that Brexit may have on SOGI minorities.It is critical to note that these SOGI minorities are far from monolithic, and any potential impact of Brexit for them will be different at a sub-group and even at an individual level. Broad-brush, abstract policy analyses on this theme – as on any other theme – fail to capture the essentially individual nature of the relationship between SOGI minorities and Brexit, as one of the most divisive and hotly contested topics in British society for many decades.In this short piece, we wish to delve into that individuality, bringing to the fore just some of the voices within the ‘SOGI minorities’ umbrella and listening to their concerns, fears and hopes in relation to Brexit – both specifically related to their identity and more generally about life after Brexit.

Urban agriculture has been theorized by social scientists, and even some urban growers, as a means of reclaiming the commons. But what does “reclaiming the commons” entail? A longue-durée genealogy reveals distinct socio-legal imaginations of the commons and visions of how it might be reclaimed. Social thinkers and reformers have split over how to address the key problem of private property identified by John Locke: landless people who can’t find paid employment. One vision, proposed by Thomas Jefferson, would reclaim the commons by activating space – reuniting the unemployed with unused land. Another, proposed by Thomas Paine, takes such a reunion as impracticable; it would reclaim the commons by taxing property and transferring the proceeds. The genealogical analysis helps understand contemporary urban agriculture as consistent with a Jeffersonian “land fix” mode of reclaiming the commons, and by contrast to state-led “tax fix” strategies for addressing unemployment and poverty.

Studies of legal cynicism have documented the reluctance of residents in low-income minority neighborhoods to call on criminal law and the police. But are people in such places equally cynical about other forms of law? This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood have found promise in the opportunities that property law provides for addressing community problems. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the creation of neighborhood institutions for Chicago’s first urban agriculture district. These institutions have been informed by memories of slavery and sharecropping, and of the role played by food production and economic cooperation in struggles for African American self-determination. To keep ownership, use, and benefits of urban farmland local, organizers in Englewood founded a community land trust. They view this new neighborhood institution as a way to cultivate a sense of community ownership and control, and thereby chip away at the alienation that blocks residents from addressing local problems. Prior studies have linked collective efficacy and residents’ individual sense of ownership; the experience in Englewood points to how collective efficacy could also be fostered by institutions that demonstrate collective, African-American ownership of community resources. The article concludes by discussing why organizers and residents in race-class subjugated communities may find promise in, but also limits to, the sense of sovereignty and legal agency afforded by property.

Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America’s cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities’ legal landscapes.This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.

Drawing on ethnographic observations and informal conversations with judges in Dallas Immigration Court, as well as archival documents, this article describes two approaches through which judges in this setting justify their decisions during removal proceedings. The “scripted approach,” used to effect the routine removal of noncitizens in most of the completed cases observed, entails judges’ recitation of well-rehearsed narratives regarding the limited legal rights and remedies available to noncitizens. The “extemporaneous approach” involves judges moving beyond their scripts and deliberating in greater depth about noncitizens’ cases. In doing so, judges’ personal attitudes, biases, and motivations are often revealed as they articulate their desire to circumvent the removal process for noncitizens they view as “deserving” of relief—but for whom only temporary relief from removal is often available given judges’ interpretations of immigration law. Although judges recognize that this temporary relief may allow some noncitizens to remain in the United States indefinitely, incomplete protection from removal can leave noncitizens in a precarious legal status and jeopardize these individuals' future opportunities for legalization. These findings support a conceptualization of immigration judges as street-level bureaucrats, or frontline workers who interpret the law—sometimes unevenly—in order to enforce government policy while interfacing with the individuals subject to said policy, and amplify the social control capacity of the federal immigration regime.

On 24 June 2016, many people had the feeling that they had gone to bed the night before in the United Kingdom and had woken up in Little Britain – a country prone to isolationism and protectionism, risking hurting its economic and social development for the sake of imperial nostalgia and moral panic about ‘loss of sovereignty’ and ‘mass migration’. That feeling inevitably affected many individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer and other (LGBTIQ+). Although the possible impact of Brexit seems to have been scrutinised from most angles, there has been limited analysis of how it may affect LGBTIQ+ individuals.There is certainly more than one ‘gay in the village’, so it is worth assessing Brexit in relation to the situation of LGBTIQ+ individuals. This is particularly timely in the light of the recent UK Supreme Court decision in Walker v Innospec Limited, where the Court relied on European Union (EU) law to hold a provision of the Equality Act 2010 unlawful for violating pension rights of same-sex couples.

European Union law has curtailed the traditional discretion Member States have in ordering non-nationals to leave their territory. Although Directive 2004/28 (the Citizenship Directive) has enhanced the system of protection afforded to offending European Union citizens, it still contains a number of cracks that lead to policy incoherence and gaps in rights protection. This is evident in the first rulings on Article 28(3) of Directive 2004/38 concerning the deportation of offending EU citizens. These issues also threaten to transform European Union citizenship from a fundamental status into a thin overlay that, under pressure from national executive power, loses its effect and significance. To be sure, EU citizenship has demonstrated that community belonging does not have to be based on organic-national qualities, cultural commonalities, or individuals' conformity to national values, but the continued deportation of long-term resident Union citizens makes nationality the ultimate determinant of belonging. The subsequent discussion suggests possible remedies and makes recommendations for institutional reform.

Hungary has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons for quite a while. From legislation targeting ‘foreign-operating universities’ to border walls to keep refugees from entering Hungarian territory, the populist right-wing government of Viktor Orban has been sparking outrage in many sectors of Hungarian society, and the European institutions. The most recent reason for alarm again relates to migration and refugees, an area of widespread criticism of Hungarian authorities. Building on extremely hostile policies towards refugees that have been admonished by both the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Hungarian authorities now intend to resort to highly dubious means to assess the applications of individuals claiming asylum on grounds related to their sexual orientation. It was already public knowledge that this category of claimants was subjected to poor treatment by the Hungarian authorities, but recent events suggest that the authorities have reached a new low.

Domestic violence is an epidemic that is occurring at alarming rates throughout the state of Florida and across the nation. Much of that abuse occurs behind closed doors inside the home where there are no witnesses. Because Florida law does not allow a person to record communications without the consent of everyone else involved, victims are forced to rely on uncorroborated verbal accusations when they report their abuse. Unfortunately, it is difficult to prosecute these cases because they turn into credibility contests where the abuser often has an unfair advantage and has learned how to manipulate the system. If the abuse was serious enough, the victim can rely on visible physical injuries to support her allegations. That is also problematic because it forces victims to use their bodies as evidence when far more effective substitutes are available.This Note demonstrates that, although we claim domestic violence is no longer a private matter, we are effectively keeping it hidden behind closed doors by refusing to let victims record their abuse and then making it exceedingly difficult to prove their allegations without corroboration. The abuser’s right to privacy has become a priority over the victim’s safety. This Note argues that domestic violence victims need the ability to record the abuse they suffer inside the homes they share with their abusers. Finally, this Note proposes a statutory amendment to Florida’s all-party consent law that would achieve this goal.

Launched in 2014, vTaiwan is an open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together in online and offline spaces, to deliberate and reach rough consensus on national issues, and to craft national digital legislation. This paper documents vTaiwan's background, open consultation process framework, and the collaborative open source engagement tools used in vTaiwan. The UberX case study highlights vTaiwan's open format and crowdsourcing characteristics as well as vTaiwan's culture-a recursive public that shapes an interactive environment that is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through an evolving rough consensus. Aiming to go beyond its limitations and challenges, vTaiwan iterates on creating a feasible model of decentralized consultation for society.

Commentary on judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union on case F v Bevándorlási és Állampolgársági Hivatal, relating to credibility assessment and means of evidence in asylum cases involving sexual orientation.

Since the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has slowly developed an increasingly sophisticated body of asylum law and policy, known as the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This framework – both in the shape of legislative instruments and case law – has inevitably also affected those asylum seekers who claim asylum on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI). This has been vividly demonstrated by particular norms in EU asylum instruments and judgments of the Court of Justice of EU (CJEU). The current CEAS can be said to have several shortcomings in relation to SOGI claims, including in relation to: country of origin information; the notion of ‘safe country of origin’; the burden of proof and the principle of benefit of the doubt; the concept of a ‘particular social group’; and the definition of persecution. A new set of proposals for reform of the CEAS was put forward in 2016 by the European Commission, and these also affect SOGI asylum claims in precise and acute ways. This policy brief scrutinises these proposals of reform, and assesses the extent to which these proposals and different institutional positions address, ignore or aggravate the issues that currently affect asylum seekers who identify as LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex). The policy brief makes fifteen recommendations for European policymakers in regards to the reform of the CEAS, in order to ensure that the needs of LGBTI asylum seekers and refugees are effectively addressed and their rights are respected. Academics from the University of Sussex working on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum (SOGICA) project, funded by the European Research Council, are calling for policymakers to implement these recommendations in order to render the CEAS fairer for SOGI asylum seekers.

In its nearly two decades of existence, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “notice and takedown” process has become both a source of controversy and a primary means of addressing online copyright disputes. Yet there is little empirical research into the use of notice and takedown or its effectiveness. Because it depends on the private communications and actions of copyright holders, online service providers, and targets, notice and takedown operates largely within a difficult-to-study “black box.” This article contributes to the literature with an empirical look at two sets of takedown notices. It digests findings from two quantitative studies of takedown notices in the Lumen database, reported fully in the three-study report, Notice and Takedown in Everyday Practice (available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755628), and peer-reviewed here. The first study, of notices sent to Google Web Search, shows a heavy reliance by large rightsholders on automated infringement detection and notification, and tends to support their assertions that they focus their enforcement resources on large-scale infringement. At the same time, 31% of these notices raised questions related to their accuracy and statutory compliance. The second study provides a snapshot of takedown as used by one set of smaller notice senders — individuals and small businesses sending to Google Image Search. In this study, notices were more likely to target social media sites, blogs, and personal websites, and 70% of the notices raised questions. While both studies revealed surprisingly high percentages of notices of questionable validity, the questions raised tended to differ. The automated notices in the first study predominantly exhibited issues identifying the works in question, while the notices sent by smaller rightsholders in the second study predominantly exhibited issues with the underlying claim. Accordingly, while notice sending appears to need improvement, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach. Both “worlds” of notice sending need to be accommodated. We therefore suggest a set of voluntary best practices, educational efforts, and modest legal reforms directed to the different issues we observed.

For millennia, Western and Eastern culture shared a common creative paradigm. From Confucian China, across the Hindu Kush with the Indian Mahābhārata, the Bible, the Koran and the Homeric epics, to Platonic mimēsis and Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” our culture was created under a fully open regime of access to pre-existing expressions and re-use. Creativity used to be propelled by the power of imitation. However, modern policies have largely forgotten the cumulative and collaborative nature of creativity. Actually, the last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of intellectual property rights in sharp contrast with the open and participatory social norms governing creativity in the networked environment. Against this background, this paper discusses the reaction to traditional copyright policy and the emergence of a social movement re-imagining copyright according to a common tradition focusing on re-use, collaboration, access and cumulative creativity. This reaction builds upon copyright’s growing irrelevance in the public mind, especially among younger generations in the digital environment, because of the emergence of new economics of digital content distribution in the Internet. Along the way, the rise of the users, and the demise of traditional gatekeepers, forced a process of reconsideration of copyright’s rationale and welfare incentives. Scholarly and market alternatives to traditional copyright have been plenty, attempting to reconcile pre-modern, modern and post-modern creative paradigms. Building upon this body of research, proposals and practice, this Article will finally try to chart a roadmap for reform that reconnects Eastern and Western creative experience in light of a common past, looking for a shared future.

Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act established both "safe harbors" from liability for online service providers and the well-known "notice and takedown" process for removing online infringements of copyrighted material. In the ensuing two decades, the notice and takedown process has become a primary tool for raising and resolving copyright disputes in the United States.But despite its influence, there is little empirical research describing § 512's operation or its effectiveness. This article digests findings from a qualitative study, reported fully in the three-study report, Notice and Takedown in Everyday Practice (available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2755628) and peer-reviewed here, that helps fill this gap. Through detailed surveys and interviews with nearly three dozen respondents, we provide the first detailed account of how § 512 is implemented and experienced by online service providers and large rightsholders. All respondents agreed that the § 512 safe harbors and the ability to take down infringing material remain fundamental. But the online copyright enforcement ecosystem is also highly diverse, and all participants face challenges. The findings suggest that the notice and takedown system is important, under strain, and that there is no "one size fits all" approach to improving it. Based on the findings, we suggest a variety of best practices and limited legal reforms.

In imposing a strict liability regime for alleged copyright infringement occurring on YouTube, Justice Salomão of the Brazilian Superior Tribunal de Justiça stated that “if Google created an ‘untameable monster,’ it should be the only one charged with any disastrous consequences generated by the lack of control of the users of its websites.” In order to tame the monster, the Brazilian Superior Court had to impose monitoring obligations on YouTube. This was not an isolated case. Proactive monitoring and filtering found their way in the legal system as a privileged enforcement strategy through legislation, judicial decisions and private ordering. In multiple jurisdictions, recent case law has imposed proactive monitor obligations on intermediaries. These cases uphold proactive monitoring across the entire spectrum of intermediary liability subject matters: intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and hate/dangerous speech. In this context, however, notable exceptions—such as the landmark Belen case in Argentina—highlight also a fragmented international response. Legislative proposals have been following suit. As part of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission, would like to introduce filtering obligations for intermediaries to close a “value gap” between rightholders and online platforms allegedly exploiting protected content. In addition, proactive monitoring and filtering obligations would also feature in an update of the European audio-visual media legislation. Meanwhile, online platforms have already set up miscellaneous filtering schemes on a voluntary basis.In this paper, I suggest that we are witnessing the death of “no monitoring obligations,” a well-marked trend in intermediary liability policy. Current Internet policy—especially in Europe—is silently drifting away from a fundamental safeguard for freedom of expression online. In this respect, this paper would like to contextualize this trend within the emergence of a broader move towards private enforcement online. The EU Digital Single Market Strategy apparently endorsed voluntary measures as a privileged tool to curb illicit and infringing activities online. As I argued elsewhere, the intermediary liability discourse is shifting towards an intermediary responsibility discourse. This process might be pushing an amorphous notion of responsibility that incentivizes intermediaries’ self-intervention. In addition, filtering and monitoring will be dealt almost exclusively by intermediaries through automatic infringement assessment systems. Due process and fundamental guarantees get mauled by algorithmic enforcement, limiting enjoyment of exceptions and limitations, use of public domain works, and silencing speech according to the mainstream ethical discourse. The upcoming reform—and the border move that it portends—might finally slay “no monitoring obligations” and fundamental rights online, together with the untameable monster.

This article discusses the resistance to the Digital Revolution and the emergence of a social movement “resisting the resistance.” Mass empowerment has political implications that may provoke reactionary counteractions. Ultimately—as I have discussed elsewhere—resistance to the Digital Revolution can be seen as a response to Baudrillard’s call to a return to prodigality beyond the structural scarcity of the capitalistic market economy. In Baudrillard’s terms, by increasingly commodifying knowledge and expanding copyright protection, we are taming limitless power with artificial scarcity to keep in place a dialectic of penury and unlimited need. In this paper, I will focus on certain global movements that do resist copyright expansion, such as creative commons, the open access movement, the Pirate Party, the A2K movement and cultural environmentalism. A nuanced discussion of these campaigns must account for the irrelevance of copyright in the public mind, the emergence of new economics of digital content distribution in the Internet, the idea of the death of copyright, and the demise of traditional gatekeepers. Scholarly and market alternatives to traditional copyright merit consideration here, as well. I will conclude my review of this movement “resisting the resistance” to the Digital Revolution by sketching out a roadmap for copyright reform that builds upon its vision.

In this work, I discuss the tension between gift and market economy throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at the intersection between gift and market economy. From the time of Pindar and Simonides — and until the Romanticism will commence a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts — market exchange models run parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. Again, at the time of the British and French “battle of the booksellers,” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. The return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. Today, after a long unchallenged dominance of the market, gift economy is regaining momentum in the digital society. The anthropological and sociological studies of gift exchange, such as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, served to explain the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. Later, communities of social trust — such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and fan-fiction communities — spread virally online through gift exchange models. In peer and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. User-based creativity thrives on the idea of “playful enjoyment,” rather than economic incentives. Anthropologists placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange; in a continuum from the clan to capitalist system of organization. I suggest that this continuum should now extend to the “crowd society,” which features new modes of social interaction in digital online communities. The networked, open, and mass-collaborative character of the crowd society enhances the proliferativeness of the gift exchange model that lies in what anthropologists and social scientists described as a debt-economy. The exploration of the creative mechanics of online communities put under scrutiny the validity of utilitarian theories of copyright and traditional market economy models. From Émile Durkheim and Mauss to Alain Caillé, anti-utilitarian thought designed a new political economy that defines humans as a “cooperative species,” rather than Homo economicus. In this context, I look into commons theory, through the lens of Elinor Ostrom’s work, and its application to modern commons-based peer production with special emphasis on Yochai Benkler and Jerome Reichman’s work. In conclusion, I evoke Jean Baudrillard’s essential question: “Will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality?” I consider whether the digital revolution that promoted the emergence of the networked information economy is that “revolution of the social organization and of social relations” that might bring about, according to Jean Baudrillard, “real affluence” through a return to “collective prodigality,” rather than our “productivistic societies, which [...] are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy.” I argue that a possibility for the reinstatement of Baudrillard’s “collective prodigality” might have materialized in the “crowd society” thanks to technological advancement and the emergence of a consumer gift system or “user patronage,” promoting an unrestrained, diffused, and networked discourse between creators and the public through digital crowd-funding. ispartof: Michigan State Law Review issue:5 pages:1983-2046 status: published

For most of human history, the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies that regulate creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and reuse. From the Platonic mimesis to Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” the largest part of our culture has been produced under a paradigm in which imitation—even plagiarism—and social authorship formed constitutive elements of the creative moment. Pre-modern creativity spread from a continuous line of re-use and juxtaposition of pre-existing expressive content, transitioning from orality to textuality and then melding the two traditions. The cumulative and collaborative character of the oral formulaic tradition dominated the development of epic literature. The literary pillars of Western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were fully forged in the furnace of that tradition. Later, under the aegis of Macrobius’ art of rewriting and the Latin principles of imitatio, medieval epics grew out of similar dynamics of sharing and recombination of formulas and traditional patterns. Continuations, free re-use, and the re-modeling of iconic figures and characters, such as King Arthur and Roland, made chansons de geste and romance literature powerful vehicles in propelling cross-country circulation of culture.The parallelism between past and present highlights the incapacity of the present copyright system to recreate the cumulative and collaborative creative process that proved so fruitful in the past. In particular, the constant development and recursive use of iconic characters, which served as an engine for creativity in epic literature, is but a fading memory. This is because our policies for creativity are engineered in a fashion that stymies the re-use of information and knowledge, rather than facilitating it. Under the current regime, intellectual works are supposedly created as perfect, self-sustaining artifacts from the moment of their creation. Any modifications, derivations, and cumulative additions must secure preventive approval and must be paid off, as if they were nuisances to society.Rereading the history of aesthetics is particularly inspiring at the dawn of the networked age. The dynamics of sharing of pre-modern creativity parallel the features of digital networked creativity. As in the oral-formulaic tradition, digital creativity reconnects its exponential generative capacity to the ubiquity of participatory contributions. Additionally, the formula—the single unit to be used and reused, worked and re-worked—is the building block of the remix culture as well as the oral formulaic tradition. Today, in an era of networked mass collaboration, ubiquitous online fan communities, user-based creativity, digital memes, and remix culture, the enclosure of knowledge brought about by an ever-expanding copyright paradigm is felt with renewed intensity. Therefore, I suggest that the communal, cumulative, social and collaborative nature of creativity and authorship should be rediscovered and should drive our policies. In order to plead my case, I have asked for the support of the most unexpected witnesses.

The 2009 Bolivian Constitution significantly changed the structure of the state and paved the way for the creation of regional, local, and even indigenous autonomies. These autonomies are charged with the management of archaeological sites and museums within their territory. This article answers the question of who currently owns the Bolivian past, it stems from concerns raised at the 2011 renewal hearing of the Memorandum of Understanding preventing the import of illicit Bolivian antiquities into the United States. By combining an analysis of recent legal changes related to the creation of the autonomies and a short discussion of a notable case study of local management of a Bolivian archaeological site, this article offers a basic summary of the legal framework in which Bolivian archaeology and heritage management functions and some preliminary recommendations for governments and professionals wishing to work with Bolivian authorities at the state and local level.

To better understand the heterogeneity of the international online intermediary liability regime—with the collaboration of an amazing team of contributors across five continents—I have developed and launched the World Intermediary Liability Map (WILMap), a detailed English-language resource hosted at Stanford CIS and comprised of case law, statutes, and proposed laws related to intermediary liability worldwide. Since its launch in July 2014, the WILMap has been steadily and rapidly growing. Today, the WILMap covers almost one hundred jurisdictions in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania. After introducing the WILMap—and the surrounding landscape of recent projects related to intermediary liability—this article aims at discussing advancement in intermediary liability theory and describing emerging regulatory trends.

Since the enactment of the first safe harbours and liability exemptions for online intermediaries, market conditions have radically changed. Originally, intermediary liability exemptions were introduced to promote an emerging Internet market. Do safe harbours for online intermediaries still serve innovation? Should they be limited or expanded? These critical questions—often tainted by protectionist concerns—define the present intermediary liability conundrum. In this context, this paper would like to explain the recent developments in intermediary liability theory and policy within a broader move towards private ordering online. Public enforcement lacking technical knowledge and resources to address an unprecedented challenge in terms of global human semiotic behaviour would coactively outsource enforcement online to private parties. Online intermediaries’ governance would move away from a well-established utilitarian approach and toward a moral approach by rejecting negligence-based intermediary liability arrangements. Miscellaneous policy tools—such as monitoring and filtering obligations, blocking orders, graduated response, payment blockades and follow-the-money strategies, private DNS content regulation, online search manipulation, or administrative enforcement—might reflect this change in perspective. In particular, governments—and interested third-parties such as intellectual property rightholders—try to coerce online intermediaries into implementing these policy strategies through voluntary measures and self-regulation, in addition to validly enacted obligations. This process might be pushing an amorphous notion of responsibility that incentivizes intermediaries’ self-intervention to police allegedly infringing activities in the Internet. In this sense, the intermediary liability discourse is shifting towards an intermediary responsibility discourse. Further, enforcement would be looking once again for an ‘answer to the machine in the machine’. By enlisting online intermediaries as watchdogs, governments would de facto delegate online enforcement to algorithmic tools. Due process and fundamental guarantees get mauled by technological enforcement, curbing fair uses of content online and silencing speech according to the mainstream ethical discourse.

This paper proposes a preliminary taxonomy of crowd-civic systems developed in a number of areas and geographical contexts. The taxonomy is based on different theoretical models of democracy and their underlying visions of citizenship. While this classification is neither exhaustive nor categorical, it may contribute to discovering connections between theoretical models of democracy and state-of-the-art digital platforms and tools. Framing crowd-civic systems within different models and visions of democracy and citizenship can also shed new light to concepts such as participation or deliberation, as well as to the role of civic technologies in reshaping them.

The idea of the Library of Alexandria has powerfully expanded over the centuries, embodying the dream of universal wisdom and knowledge centralized in one single place. Digitization projects, such as the Google books project, are reviving the hope that this dream may come true. Moreover, the ubiquity of the networked environment promises to open access to this über-library to everybody with an internet connection. Today the entire collection of human knowledge may be only one click away. Whether the dream of the Library of Alexandria may be achieved by the Google books project is highly debated. Recently, a court decision concluded that perhaps that dream is not within Google’s reach at the moment. In this paper I will review the Google books project as both an opportunity to discuss the orphan works problem and to examine the copyright strictures impinging on digitization projects. In looking at the Google books litigation, I will investigate the sustainability of Google’s fair use defense before delving into the description of the Google books settlement. I will then discuss the recent opinion from the Court of the Southern District of New York rejecting the settlement in its present form. I will argue that the Google books settlement is an additional move towards propertization and privatization of culture, though admittedly furthering public interest as well. This time, privatization involves memory institutions. In warning against this privatization, I will argue that we need a global effort towards the creation of a World Digital Public Library.

This article discusses the proposed introduction in EU law of an obligation for hosting providers to conclude licencing agreements with copyright holders and ensure their functioning by taking effective technological measures — such as content id technologies — to prevent copyright infringement on online platforms. This proposal is included in Article 13 — and accompanying Recitals — of the European Commission’s Draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market of September 14, 2016, which forms an important part of the ongoing EU copyright reform. This article highlights the shortcoming of this proposed reform, which might fall short in terms of clarity, consistency with the EU acquis, appropriacy and proportionality. In doing so, the article discusses recent CJEU case law — such as GSMedia, Ziggo and Filmspeler — struggling with the notion of communication to the public in the digital environment. It highlights systemic inconsistencies between the traditional knowledge-and-take-down negligence-based intermediary liability system and the introduction of filtering and monitoring obligations. The article examines the appropriacy of filtering — and monitoring — measures within a fundamental rights perspective by considering proportionality between property rights’ enforcement and competing fundamental rights — such as freedom of expression, freedom of business and privacy. The critical review of the proposed reform serves as an opportunity to briefly advance an alternative proposal seeking a more pragmatical engagement with technological change through an arrangement enforcing a liability rule or an apportionment of profits and producing value for creators out of platform economy’s virality, while limiting negative externalities on users’ rights.