天美传媒

IM978
Law, Society and Technology: Power, Policy and Practice

20/30 CATS - (10/15 ECTS)

Term 2

Module Description

This course is designed to examine the role that law plays in regulating technology in a global, contested, and unequal world. Technology is influencing the lives we lead, shaping work, education, leisure and resetting conventions and values that underpin our societal fabric. These changes also affect the arrangements and design of regulation to ensure that they can keep pace and remain effective with the emergence of new technology. Technology affects different people, and contexts differently, and fundamental to the design of this course is to show how technology shapes power, between countries, people, and institutions. Taking a global approach acknowledges that there is a plurality of legal perspectives, concerns and objectives that need to be addressed across different jurisdictions, and domains of law. This course will examine intersecting concerns that emerge around technological developments. It will discuss regulations around artificial intelligence, data, platforms as well as offer approaches that study human rights, gender and discrimination from interdisciplinary lenses. The course is not restricted to a particular area of law, nor the study of a specific regulation, it encourages students to build a legal understanding of socio-technical issues

Module Convenor

Dr. Siddharth De SouzaLink opens in a new window

Assessment

The assessment will consist of an individual presentation, a reflection essay and a review essay.

Indicative Syllabus

Part 1: Framing

Week 1: Technology, Power and the role for law in global settings

In this week, we will situate the course and highlight the role that law at a global level play in ensuring justice in a fragmented, unequal and techno-colonial world. The focus of this session is to highlight what the law is, how it works, and what role it can play.

Week 2: Interrelations between Technology and Regulation

In this week, we will discuss the interconnections between technology and regulation. Some of the questions we will discuss include: How do we regulate? Who can regulate? Is technology a form of regulation? Can the law keep up with technology?

Part 2: Objects of Regulations

Week 3: Data Regulation and Governance

In this week, we will discuss data as a regulatory object, through an examination of regulation that looks at data protection, data governance, and data access. This session is designed to introduce students to various considerations that go into defining and regulating data, including a focus on personal and non-personal data.

Week 4: Law and the Platform

In this week, we will discuss the emergence of platforms as a regulatory object, studying the role of markets, and the relevance of competition law to be able to challenge the dominance of platform companies. This lecture will also discuss content moderation policies adopted by platforms, and the efficacy of such policies considering platform power.

Week 5: AI Regulation

In this week, we will build on discussions in the previous two weeks to examine how AI is regulated in different global contexts through recourse to general purpose regulation in the EU, as well as domain specific regulation such as in the UK. International approaches from UNESCO around AI Ethics will also be introduced.

Week 6: Reading Week

Part 3: Lens of Analysis

Week 7: Human Rights and Technology with a focus on health

In this week, we will discuss what a human rights approach to technology includes, examining what human rights are, how they apply in digital settings, and what is needed to ensure their effective implementation. This session will particularly discuss the application of a human rights approach to technology in the domain of health.

Week 8: Gender, Work and Technology

In this week, we will look at how work is changing on account of technology from a gendered lens. Through this session, we will examine the precarity of labour across platform work, data work, and study the role that courts are playing to challenge the global place-based injustices advanced by big tech companies such on matters related with liability of platforms on workplace related harms.

Week 9: Discrimination, Surveillance and Technology

In this week, we will draw from critical race theory and critical caste studies to study how anti-discrimination perspectives are critical to challenge the development of technology in light of the increasing pervasiveness of algorithmic surveillance.

Part 4: Critical reflection

Week 10: Mock Trial In this week, we will reflect on the course examining the different threads and narratives from the lectures through a mock trial. Students will be presented with an issue brief from which they will have to study and prepare legal and ethical arguments.

Illustrative Bibliography

Bennett Moses, Lyria, How to Think About Law, Regulation and Technology: Problems with 'Technology' as a Regulatory Target (2013). (2013) 5(1) Law, Innovation and Technology 1-20, UNSW Law Research Paper No. 2014-30, Available at SSRN:

Benjamin Ruha, Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination. (2016) Engaging Science, Technology, and Society Vol.2, pp.145-156 Cohen, Julie E., Law for the Platform Economy (June 22, 2017). Available at SSRN:

Edwards Lilian, Michael Veale, Slave to the Algorithm? Why a 'right to an explanation' is probably not the remedy you are looking for, Law Archive (Nov.18, 2017), osf.io/preprints/lawarchive/97upg_v1

Gangadharan, S. P., & Niklas, J. (2019). Decentering Technology in Discourse on Discrimination. Information, Communication & Society, 22(7), 882–899.

Kosta, Eleni, Surveilling Masses and Unveiling Human Rights - Uneasy Choices for the Strasbourg Court (December 15, 2017). Available at SSRN:

Khan, Lina Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, 126 Yale L. J. 710 (2017). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2808 Lessig, Lawrence. 鈥淭he Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach.鈥� Harvard Law Review 113, no. 2 (1999): 501–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/1342331.

Purtova, N. (2018). The law of everything. Broad concept of personal data and future of EU data protection law. Law, Innovation and Technology, 10(1), 40–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/17579961.2018.1452176

Reidenberg, Joel Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules through Technology, 76 Tex. L. Rev. 553 (1997-1998)

Suzor, N. (2018). Digital Constitutionalism: Using the Rule of Law to Evaluate the Legitimacy of Governance by Platforms. Social media + Society, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118787812 (Original work published 2018)

Zalnieriute, Monika and Bennett Moses, Lyria and Williams, George, The Rule of Law 'By Design'? (2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3805479

 

Learning Outcomes

• Explain how and why the law matters in studying technology through a socio-technical point of view.
• Distinguish between different forms and models of technology regulation that are being proposed globally.
• Critically assess the political economy of regulation, and its implications on people and the planet.
• Study the ways in which policy design, and legal and regulatory practice have responded to technology facilitated change.
• Demonstrate awareness of how regulation and technology mutually shape each other.
• Articulate the value of interdisciplinary approaches to law for addressing complex socio-technical and political challenges.
• Present, analyse and write on a legal issue that may have emerged in the course.