Thursday I’ll be discussing From Anonymity to Identification: Online Communication in a Time of Surveillance. My hosts are the Netzpolitik AG of the University of Heidelberg, which translates, I think, as the Network Working Group and is an interdisciplinary network of young researchers at the University of Heidelberg.
My thoughts on the topic of online anonymity are considerably grimmer than they were even two years ago.
Great lineup!
1pm Welcome
Vice-Dean Patrick Gudridge, Welcome
A. Michael Froomkin, A Little About Jotwell
1:15 – 2:00
Steven L. Winter, When Things Went Terribly, Terribly Wrong Part II
2:15- 3:00
Patrick Gudridge, Past Present (Revised Version)
3:15 – 4:30 Counterpoint
Jeanne Schroeder and David Carlson, Improving Oneself and Ones Clients; Not the World
Neil Buchanan, Legal Scholarship Makes the World a Better Place
4:45 – 5:30 Keynote Address
Margaret Jane Radin, Then and Now: Developing Your Scholarship, Developing Its Audience
5:30- 6:30
Reception, Faculty Lounge
7:00 ->
Conference Dinner
9:00-9:30
Breakfast
9:30 – 10:45 Counterpoint:
James Chen, Modeling Law Review Impact Factors as an Exponential Distribution
Patrick Woods, Stop Counting (Or At Least Count Better)
11- 11:45
Benjamin Keele, Improving Digital Publishing of Legal Scholarship
12-12:45
Mark Tushnet, The Federal Courts Junior Scholars Workshop (originally submitted as a contribution to Jotwell).
12:45-2:00
LUNCH
2:15- 3:00
Frank Pasquale, Symbiotic Law & Social Science: The Case for Political Economy in the Legal Academy, and Legal Scholarship in Political Economy
3:15 – 4:00
James Grimmelmann, Scholars, Teachers, and Servants
4:15-4:30
Envoi
Accepted papers from scholars unable to attend:
Angela Mae Kupenda, Personal Essay–On the Receiving End of Influence: Helping Craft the Scholarship of My Students and How Their Work Influences Me
We invite submissions for the fourth annual robotics law and policy conference—We Robot 2015—to be held in Seattle, Washington on April 10-11, 2015 at the University of Washington School of Law. We Robot has been hosted twice at the University of Miami School of Law and once at Stanford Law School. The conference web site is at http://werobot2015.org.
We Robot 2015 seeks contributions by academics, practitioners, and others in the form of scholarly papers or demonstrations of technology or other projects. We Robot fosters conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate. We particularly encourage contributions resulting from interdisciplinary collaborations, such as those between legal, ethical, or policy scholars and roboticists.
This conference will build on existing scholarship that explores how the increasing sophistication and autonomous decision-making capabilities of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, to the battlefield disrupts existing legal regimes or requires rethinking of various policy issues. We are particularly interested this year in “solutions,” i.e., projects with a normative or practical thesis aimed at helping to resolve issues around contemporary and anticipated robotic applications.
Scholarly Papers
Topics of interest for the scholarly paper portion of the conference include but are not limited to:
These are only some examples of relevant topics. We are very interested in papers on other topics driven by actual or probable robot deployments. The purpose of this conference is to help set a research agenda relating to the deployment of robots in society, to inform policy-makers of the issues, and to help design legal rules that will maximize opportunities and minimize risks arising from the increased deployment of robots in society.
Discussants
We also invite expressions of interest from potential discussants. Every paper accepted will be assigned a discussant whose job it will be to present and comment on the paper. These presentations will be very brief (no more than 10 minutes) and will consist mostly of making a few points critiquing the author’s paper to kick off the conversation. Authors will then respond briefly (no more than 5 minutes). The rest of the session will consist of a group discussion about the paper moderated by the discussant.
Demonstrations
Unlike the scholarly papers, proposals for demonstrations may be purely descriptive and designer/builders will be asked to present their work themselves. We’d like to hear about your latest innovations—and what’s on the drawing board for the next generations of robots as well, or about legal and policy issues you have encountered in the design or deploy process.
How to Submit Your Proposal
Please send a 1-3 page abstract outlining your proposed paper, and a c.v. of the author(s) to papers@werobot2015.org.
We anticipate paying reasonable round-trip domestic coach airfare and providing hotel accommodation for presenters and discussants.
Some time ago I agreed to give a talk on privacy issues 1pm this afternoon at UM’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
I’ve only just discovered, however, that the lecture series I’m a part of is the UM All-Stars. And they mean it: the wrap-up speaker on Oct. 13th is no less than UM’s Head Basketball Coach.
We’ve posted a program for Jotwell’s 5th anniversary conference on “Legal Scholarship We Like and Why It Matters” and also have opened up registration. The conference will be Nov 7 & 8, 2014 at the University of Miami School of Law.
If you are planning on coming, you can take advantage of the UM rate at local hotels. The main conference hotel is the Sonesta in Coconut Grove, but the UM discount also applies to the other hotels on the list.
In case you are rationing clicks, here’s the program:
1pm Welcome
Dean Patricia White, Welcome
A. Michael Froomkin, A Little About Jotwell
1:15 – 2:00
Raizel Liebler, Jessica de Perio Wittman and Kim Chanbonpin. Collaboration, Knowledge Production, and Legal Scholarship
2:15- 3:00
Patrick Gudridge, Past Present
3:15 – 4:30 Counterpoint
Jeanne Schroeder and David Carlson, Improving Oneself and Ones Clients; Not the World
Neil Buchanan, Legal Scholarship Makes the World a Better Place
4:45 – 5:30 Keynote Address
Margaret Jane Radin, Then and Now: Developing Your Scholarship, Developing Its Audience
5:30- 6:30
Reception, Student Lounge
7:00 ->
Conference Dinner
9:30 – 10:45 Counterpoint:
James Chen, Modeling Law Review Impact Factors as an Exponential Distribution
Patrick Woods, Stop Counting (Or At Least Count Better)
11- 11:45
Benjamin Keele, Taking Lessons from Science to Improve Digital Legal Scholarship
[via remote participation]
12-12:45
Steven L. Winter, When Things Went Terribly, Terribly Wrong Part II
12:45-1:45
LUNCH
1:45 – 2:30
David Millon, Legal Scholarship and the Delaware Judiciary
2:45- 3:30
Frank Pasquale, Reviving Political Economy: A Case Study in Legal Academics’ Dialogue with the Social Sciences
3:45 – 4:30
James Grimmelmann, Scholars, Teachers, and Servants
4:30-4:45
Envoi
Accepted papers from scholars unable to attend:
Angela Mae Kupenda, Personal Essay–On the Receiving End of Influence: Helping Craft the Scholarship of My Students and How Their Work Influences Me
All papers will be posted at Jotwell.com
Three of my colleagues are organizing what looks like a super conference to be held here in Miami on November 14-15 (just a week after the Jotwell conference about which more soon).
“An Uncomfortable Conversation: The Universal and the Particular — Vulnerability and Identities II” is organized as part of series of workshops on ‘Vulnerability and the Human Condition’. The full call for papers is online and responses are due by July 28. Here’s part of the CFP:
In recent years, key legal decisions in voting rights, gay marriage, and affirmative action have destabilized the identity-based anti-discrimination frameworks long used to pursue equality and social justice in the United States. The Supreme Court, for example, has been deregulating race, declaring in Schuette and in Shelby that the state’s involvement in the eradication of racial inequality and the protection of marginalized identities is now less imperative. Moreover, the Court seems reluctant to use the language of identity, instead framing gay and lesbian claims in the language of privacy, liberty and dignity. Yet, popular arguments for redistributive and reparative public policies remain steadily focused on traditional identity categories. For example, The Atlantic magazine has featured a series of essays on racial reparations to Blacks. Similarly, the #YesAllWomen twitter trend has drawn attention to normalized violence against women, even as the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen created virtual space for feminists of color to question what they perceive to be the dominance of white feminist voices in mainstream culture and gender politics. Amidst these complex legal, social and political changes comes a shift in academic discourse as well, with some critical theorists suggesting that “traditional” identity categories based on individual characteristics, such as race or sex, are inadequate to capture social problems that transcend such categories. Instead, they argue that focus should rest on paired social identities, such as employer/employee or parent/child – categories or statuses that are forged in social and institutional relationships and convey the allocation of legally sanctioned and shaped power and privilege.
These legal and social developments highlight the importance of building on the first Vulnerability and Identities Uncomfortable Conversation to further consider and assess specific identitarian frameworks (including both traditional and social identity formations) as well as more universal paradigms, such as human rights or vulnerability. This second conversation continues an investigation of the relationships between particularity and universality, with an emphasis on the ability of concepts like vulnerability and identity to deepen existing critiques of legal liberalism and advance our understanding of substantive justice. Central to this investigation is an evaluation of the impact of critical theory on understanding the state and its institutions, particularly their role in promoting human resilience through the provision of education, employment and training, healthcare, family structure, cultural recognition, and social welfare more broadly. In considering both the universal and identitarian approaches, we ask how they differently frame systemic disparities in access, opportunity and resources.
I wish I had time to do a paper for this based on my ongoing research on regulation of identification, but what with the Jotwell conference being a week earlier, realistically it’s not going to happen. I’m definitely going.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
