Category Archives: Defamation and Privacy
I Bennett Capers, ‘We, The Watchers’
ABSTRACT A man’s home is his castle, the expression goes. It is a place where he can retreat from intrusion or prying eyes, including from the state, at least without a warrant or extenuating circumstances. At least this is what we tell ourselves. This Essay shows the falsity of this belief. A man’s home may […]
‘Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google’
Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews. The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other […]
Jaafar Noor, ‘The Fourth Fictitious Commodity: Data Brokers, the Consumer Category, and the Commodification of Personhood in American Privacy Law’
ABSTRACT This paper argues that American privacy law’s reliance on the legal category ‘consumer’ is not a regulatory gap but the operative legal mechanism by which lived experience is constituted as a fictitious commodity. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of fictitious commodities in The Great Transformation, the paper theorizes personhood as the fourth fictitious commodity […]
Carl Bogus, ‘Why New York Times v Sullivan Must Be Preserved’
ABSTRACT New York Times v Sullivan is under siege. Supreme Court justices and eminent members of the legal academy argue that its core holding – that public figures must prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence, and that courts must evaluate the evidence to determine whether it is sufficient to support that finding – […]
Neil Richards, ‘Privacy Is Not Theft’
ABSTRACT Something curious has happened to privacy recently. In our post-pandemic age of generative AI, tech companies and governments have stopped asking for our data or relying on fictions of implied consent. They have simply started taking it, arguing that data collection is inevitable, necessary, and virtuous. As masked federal agents prowl American streets sticking […]
Holli Sargeant, ‘From Estimation to Discrimination: Algorithmic Bias, Predictive Uncertainty, and Anti-Discrimination Law’
ABSTRACT Machine learning (ML) systems, increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making, inherently produce uncertain outputs that can lead to unlawful discrimination. This article provides the first legal analysis of how predictive uncertainty in ML systems interacts with UK anti-discrimination law under the Equality Act 2010. Employing a decision-theoretic framework, the article distinguishes between aleatoric uncertainty, stemming […]
Stewart and Clover Alcolea, ‘Game Meats Company of Australia v Farm Transparency International Ltd: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a (Remedial) Right’
ABSTRACT Game Meats Company of Australia v Farm Transparency International Ltd raises important questions about the proper limits of discretionary remedialism in Australia. The case arose after the defendant animal rights organisation published footage of the plaintiff’s commercial slaughterhouse obtained during several unlawful trespasses. The defendant admitted the trespasses and was ordered to pay the […]
Emmanuel Owosanni, ‘Regulating Trust in the Digital Economy: Towards Harmonized Private Law Principles on Algorithmic Decision-Making and Platform Accountability under UNIDROIT’
ABSTRACT Algorithm-based decision-making systems now govern a significant share of global commercial activity, ranging from automated lending decisions and insurance pricing to platform content moderation and smart contract execution; still, private international law has not kept pace with this transformation. Some existing legal and regulatory frameworks, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and […]
Katherine Day, ‘Censorship v the public interest: measuring the extent and impact of editorial mediation in trade book publishing’
ABSTRACT Implicit censorship describes a practice whereby editors and publishers subtly circumvent, constrain and/or excise text and titles that communicate material considered legally, politically, religiously or culturally problematic. Focussing on a legally challenged text, this paper provides a comparative analysis of the 2013 US and 2016 UK editions of Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood […]
Mark Hanna, ‘SLAPPs in Aotearoa New Zealand’
ABSTRACT This article examines strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on how civil procedure can be used to suppress public-interest expression. Drawing on 218 reported judgments between 2014 and 2024, supplemented by official records, interviews, and pre-action correspondence, it applies a four-phase socio-legal framework to identify cases that exhibit SLAPP-type […]