Showing archive for: “Criminal & Civil Justice Reform”
Committee Prepares to Grill Tech CEOS, but It Is the First Amendment That Could Get Torched
In what has become regularly scheduled programming on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be subject to yet another round of congressional grilling—this time, about the platforms’ content-moderation policies—during a March 25 joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The ... Committee Prepares to Grill Tech CEOS, but It Is the First Amendment That Could Get Torched
Congress Should Not Legalize a News Media Cartel
Amazingly enough, at a time when legislative proposals for new antitrust restrictions are rapidly multiplying—see the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), for example—Congress simultaneously is seriously considering granting antitrust immunity to a price-fixing cartel among members of the newsmedia. This would thereby authorize what the late Justice Antonin Scalia termed “the supreme ... Congress Should Not Legalize a News Media Cartel
Antitrust by Fiat
The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), recently introduced in the U.S. Senate, exhibits a remarkable willingness to cast aside decades of evidentiary standards that courts have developed to uphold the rule of law by precluding factually and economically ungrounded applications of antitrust law. Without those safeguards, antitrust enforcement is prone to be ... Antitrust by Fiat
Building the Digital Future: Can the EU Foster a Dynamic and Crime-Free Internet?
The European Commission has unveiled draft legislation (the Digital Services Act, or “DSA”) that would overhaul the rules governing the online lives of its citizens. The draft rules are something of a mixed bag. While online markets present important challenges for law enforcement, the DSA would significantly increase the cost of doing business in Europe ... Building the Digital Future: Can the EU Foster a Dynamic and Crime-Free Internet?
Google and Shifting Conceptions of What It Means to Improve a Product
Judges sometimes claim that they do not pick winners when they decide antitrust cases. Nothing could be further from the truth. Competitive conduct by its nature harms competitors, and so if antitrust were merely to prohibit harm to competitors, antitrust would then destroy what it is meant to promote. What antitrust prohibits, therefore, is not ... Google and Shifting Conceptions of What It Means to Improve a Product
Conflict of Interest in Prosecuting Police Officers: Examining the Incentives Facing District Attorneys
High-profile cases like those of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, have garnered attention from the media and the academy alike about decisions by grand juries not to charge police officers with homicide. While much of this focus centers on alleged racial bias on the part of police officers and ... Conflict of Interest in Prosecuting Police Officers: Examining the Incentives Facing District Attorneys
It’s All About What We Don’t Know
Nicolas Petit’s Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario provides an insightful and valuable antidote to this unease. While neither Panglossian nor comprehensive, Petit’s analysis persuasively argues that some of the concerns about the platforms are misguided or at least overstated. As Petit sees it, the platforms are not so much monopolies in ... It’s All About What We Don’t Know
Will Montesquieu Rescue Antitrust?
In an age of antitrust populism on both ends of the political spectrum, federal and state regulators face considerable pressure to deploy the antitrust laws against firms that have dominant market shares. Yet federal case law makes clear that merely winning the race for a market is an insufficient basis for antitrust liability. Rather, any ... Will Montesquieu Rescue Antitrust?
Happy 90th Birthday to Thomas Sowell, One of the Great Scholars of Law & Economics: A Sowell-Inspired Agenda for Racial Justice
One of the great scholars of law & economics turns 90 years old today. In his long and distinguished career, Thomas Sowell has written over 40 books and countless opinion columns. He has been a professor of economics and a long-time Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received a National Humanities Medal in 2002 ... Happy 90th Birthday to Thomas Sowell, One of the Great Scholars of Law & Economics: A Sowell-Inspired Agenda for Racial Justice
Setting Up a Fair System for Determining Police Misconduct: Towards A Law & Economics Analysis of Qualified Immunity
Yet another sad story was caught on camera this week showing a group of police officers killing an unarmed African-American man named George Floyd. While the officers were fired from the police department, there is still much uncertainty about what will happen next to hold those officers accountable as a legal matter. A well-functioning legal ... Setting Up a Fair System for Determining Police Misconduct: Towards A Law & Economics Analysis of Qualified Immunity
The Earn IT Act and the Institutional Limits of Congress
As the initial shock of the COVID quarantine wanes, the Techlash waxes again bringing with it a raft of renewed legislative proposals to take on Big Tech. Prominent among these is the EARN IT Act (the Act), a bipartisan proposal to create a new national commission responsible for proposing best practices designed to mitigate the ... The Earn IT Act and the Institutional Limits of Congress
Privacy in the Time of Covid-19
I type these words while subject to a stay-at-home order issued by West Virginia Governor James C. Justice II. “To preserve public health and safety, and to ensure the healthcare system in West Virginia is capable of serving all citizens in need,” I am permitted to leave my home only for a limited and precisely ... Privacy in the Time of Covid-19
