Law & Policy最新文献

In times of crisis, emerging technology can pose major challenges for regulators. They must deal with great uncertainty and urgency related to both the crisis and the technology. To understand such situations, this article studies the revelatory case of privacy regulation of a contact-tracing application called Smittestopp, created in Norway during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on public and organizational documents and 48 interviews, the analysis shows that the Norwegian Data Protection Authority faced several options for regulatory intervention throughout the crisis, and adapted its approach based on intra-crisis experience, regulatees' responses, and different levels of uncertainty and urgency. Building on these findings, the study formulates propositions regarding the regulation of emerging technology during a crisis and regulatory agencies' use of rule-based, idea-based, and norm-based interventions. This study provides insight into how these three types of intervention relate to different aspects of a crisis situation. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of idea-based intervention as a key site of analysis in studying technology that emerges during a crisis.

In response to new regulations, universities have created multiple options for managing sexual misconduct complaints. These options are described as maximizing survivors' autonomy through feminist paradigms of choice. This study uses data from ethnographic observation and 76 interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and administrators to examine whether providing options gave survivors control over their complaints. The findings indicate that survivors found the complicated and vague sexual misconduct policies overwhelming and confusing. As a result, they became dependent on university actors in decision-making, giving the university more control over survivors' complaints as institutional actors guided survivors to options that required minimal university action.

Scholars have paid minimal attention to state statutory guidance that allows criminal justice agencies to disclose records that contain personal information about arrestees, defendants, and incarcerated people. We analyze US state policy for police, courts, prisons, and record repositories (N = 200). Most states restrict access to compiled criminal histories, but nearly all allow broad public access to agency records. Divergent policy guidance accounts for these differences, where transparency laws govern agency records while state criminal codes regulate records of arrest and prosecution, otherwise known as RAP sheets. These policy differences contribute to widespread disclosures of non-conviction records, raising questions about due process and inequality in the big data age.

The United States requires asylum applicants to bring their own interpreters to the Asylum Office. However, asylum officers have discretion to provide interpreters in extraordinary circumstances. When do asylum officers exercise this discretion? Is it exercised uniformly? How do interpreters affect interview dynamics? To explore these questions, I conducted 28 attorney interviews. Interviewees reported that asylum officers inconsistently exercised discretion and provided unaccompanied children with interpreters more often than adults. Interviewees noted that some bilingual officers conducted interviews in a language other than English, and some interpreters exacerbated communication challenges. Since the Asylum Office does not collect interpretation data, this study provides a glimpse into interpretation challenges.

Federal law mandates that employers accommodate lactating workers who wish to express breast milk at work. Lactation's physical demands set lactating employees apart from their coworkers, as lactation requires regular breaks and private rooms to express milk. Although longer breaks and convenient lactation accommodations make for more successful workplace milk expression, many lactating workers lack one or both. During their lactation breaks, some lactating workers wish to maintain workplace productivity, while others seek to relax and reconnect with their nurslings. Although the law mandates basic lactation accommodations, additional consideration must be given to location as well as to the preferences of lactating employees.

A major avenue through which Voting Rights Act (VRA) cases are adjudicated is three-judge district court panels. These panels mix district and circuit court judges and exist in federal law to force certain important legal questions to be decided in a multimember environment. Using an original dataset of VRA cases decided by three-judge district court panels, we find that these panels do not operate as intended. We find that the circuit court judges on these panels vote their own preferences consistently, unmoved by strategic or collegial considerations. District court judges, on the other hand, appear to defer to their circuit court brethren.

The cause lawyering and social movement organization literature explains that movement groups may not prioritize needs that are important to marginalized subgroups within their constituencies. This echoes common and salient critiques within the LGBTQ legal industry. Using a case study of legal organizations within the LGBTQ movement, this article attempts to identify the mechanisms used to determine community need. Contrary to expectations, legal organizations take deliberate and often systematic steps to understand community need and recognize it as central to priority setting. Information flow about needs between large impact groups and smaller state/local groups moves in both directions. However, there are features of these mechanisms that may explain the perceived gap between organizational agendas and community need. The identification of sites and tools for determining need found in this project might provide organizations with guideposts to help them improve practices and close that gap. Finally, the findings here add to our understanding of how lawyers seek to promote organizational accountability.

When supervising emerging technologies, regulators are more effective when they collaborate with business. Yet, innovative businesses are often small, inexperienced, and mistrustful. How can regulators motivate them to collaborate? This study examines this question by applying responsive regulation theory to a case study of the United Kingdom's regulatory sandbox for financial technology. This study illustrates how frontline regulatory interactions foster regulator–innovator collaboration, in ways that differ from how these interactions foster collaboration between regulators and the mature industries upon whose study responsive regulation is based. As one of the first academic studies to collect data from sandbox participants, this article offers unique insights into “what works” about the United Kingdom's much-imitated model.

Since Spring 2019, over 90 local communities in Poland adopted resolutions expressing their rejection of “LGBT ideology.” Based on a content analysis of these resolutions, I show how local lawmaking was used in this case to create and reinforce the social division between the heteronormative majority and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer people. In the “anti-LGBT resolutions,” majoritarian identities are territorialized by way of a construction of moralized social spaces designed to cast out the minority. Drawing on concepts proposed by Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, I demonstrate the efficiency of law in the performance of exclusion in three dimensions: institutional, symbolic, and proxemic.