Daily Archives: June 10, 2008

What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines

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This blogging is fun.  One aspect I enjoy is reading the search terms that people used to find our content.  Some recent search terms were: international legal research, atms for books, “advanced legal research” ideas, bloomberg.law.reports, espresso book machine, greenversations, detroit mercy law school, bloomberg law citator, “bloomberg law citator,” and google books.  But I cannot tell who out there used these search phrases.  But Google knows, and that raises concerns, as this working paper indicates.

“What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines“

OMER TENE, College of Management – School of Law, Israel

Search engines are the most important phenomenon on the Internet today and Google is the gold standard of search. Google evokes ambivalent feelings. It is adored for its ingenuity, simple, modest-looking interface and superb services offered at no (evident) cost. Yet increasingly, it is feared by privacy advocates who view it as a private sector big brother posing perhaps the biggest privacy problem of all times. Google is an informational gatekeeper harboring previously unimaginable riches of personal data. Billions of search queries stream across Google’s servers each month, the aggregate thoughtstream of humankind, online. Google compiles individual search logs, containing information about users’ fears and expectations, interests and passions, and ripe with information that is financial, medical, sexual, political, in short – personal in nature. How did Google evolve from being a benevolent giant seeking to do no evil into a privacy menace reviled by human rights advocates worldwide? Are the fears of Google’s omniscient presence justified or overstated? What personal data should Google be allowed to retain and for how long? What rules should govern access to Google’s database? What are the legal protections currently in place and are they sufficient to quell the emerging privacy crisis? These are the main issues addressed in this article.

 

Source: LSN Information Privacy Law Vol. 1 No. 2,  06/10/2008

Bloomberg Law Digest

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As part of its continuing Bloomberg Law (BLAW) ramp-up — which we have been blogging about at times here (see our May 16, May 29 and June 5 posts), Bloomberg is developing its Bloomberg Law Digest (BBLD) research tool, which features indexed, integrated primary and secondary legal sources in an expanding number of practice areas. At present, Bloomberg offers: antitrust & trade, banking & finance, bankruptcy law, corporate law, data & information law, energy law, insurance law, intellectual property, labor & employment, mergers & acquisitions, privacy law, and securities law.

“Jet Ski research” – Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

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Our alumnus Matt Asay has a post on The Open Road about a must-read cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr.

From The Atlantic article:

. . .

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
 . . .
 . . . a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
. . .

 The article has worried and inspired Matt thusly:

Which is why I’m returning to my books. I read a fair amount–the classics, mostly–but generally only when I’m traveling. As Carr points out, I, too, have difficulty reading when my computer beckons with instant gratification. I read each night to my kids before they go to bed, but Carr’s article has me thinking that I need to return to doing the same.

Over the weekend, the Asays determined that we’re going to have “reading time” each night for an hour before bed. Everyone (except my 5- and 3-year-old) will read for an hour. My kids were already doing this. The change is for me and for my wife. I need to exercise my brain to think again, and not merely process.

After you’ve finished the article, you might want to add Carr’s recent book to your summer reading list:

 

Author: Carr, Nicholas G., 1959-
Title: The big switch : rewiring the world, from Edison to Google / Nicholas Carr.
      Portion of title: Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google
               Edition: 1st ed.
               Imprint: New York : W. W. Norton & Co., c2008.
  Physical Description: vii, 278 p. ; 25 cm.
                 Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-260) and
                        index.
Contents: Burden’s wheel — The inventor and his clerk — Digital millwork — Goodbye, Mr. Gates — The White City — World Wide Computer — From the many to the few — The great unbundling — Fighting the net — A spider’s web — iGod — Flame and filament.
          Subject (LC): Computers and civilization.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Technological innovations.
          Subject (LC): Internet.
                  ISBN: 9780393062281 (hardcover) : $25.95
                  ISBN: 0393062287 (hardcover) : $25.95

More on ELS: Judicial Transparency in an Age of Prediction

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“Judicial Transparency in an Age of Prediction“

U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 216

ADAM SAMAHA, University of Chicago – Law School


The Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) movement is making strides toward understanding judicial behavior, and ELS models could become the foundation for more accurate prediction of judicial decisions. This essay raises two questions associated with this development. First, what would an age of predictable judicial behavior look like? Second, would satisfying the informational needs of ELS prediction models also exhaust the demands for “judicial transparency”? My conclusions are that a state of predictable judicial behavior, if somehow stable, would leave almost no litigation to observe; and that a prediction-oriented information policy would nearly meet the demands of today’s transparency advocates. One shortfall involves the intrinsic/consumption value of adjudication for intellectuals and others. A prediction-oriented policy would not meet that demand and could even thwart its satisfaction which presents an unappreciated normative choice for information policy.

 

Source: LSN: University of Chicago Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory, Vol. 10 No. 6,  06/10/2008

Coding Complexity: Bringing Law to the Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court

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“Coding Complexity: Bringing Law to the Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court“

2nd Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Paper
Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 60, 2009

CAROLYN SHAPIRO, Illinois Institute of Technology – Chicago-Kent College of Law

In recent years, the legal academy has experienced a surge of interest in quantitative empirical analysis. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm has not always been accompanied by careful analysis of what the tools and resources of quantitative analysis can tell us about law and legal doctrine. As this Article demonstrates, the findings of some studies therefore unwittingly reflect the limitations of those tools and resources rather than providing insight into the workings of courts.

Specifically, this Article provides a long-overdue critical analysis of the most influential source of data about the Supreme Court, the Original Supreme Court Database, created by political scientist Harold J. Spaeth. The Database, which codes every opinion issued by the Supreme Court since 1953, contains coding for legal provisions considered by the court and for what Spaeth calls issue and issue area. Although numerous scholars – within both political science and law – rely on them, these codes do not report reliable information about the role that law and legal doctrine plays in the Supreme Court’s cases. The Database does not reliably report the legal provisions or doctrines relied upon or at issue; it does not attempt to report legal issues at all, instead describing the “public policy context” of the case; and by design, it generally reports only one issue per case. These limitations have important, but poorly understood, implications for the many, many scholars who rely on the Database, and the Article describes a number of specific studies whose results are unreliable because of the way they use the Database.

This critique of the Database and the ways scholars use it can help scholars to be smarter and more accurate in their use of the Database. At the same time, the Article explores ways to incorporate law and legal doctrine into empirical legal scholarship. To further both goals, the Article presents the results of my Recoding Project of a random sample of recent Supreme Court cases. The findings of the Recoding Project confirm that significant information about law and doctrine is omitted from the databases. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the databases systematically underreport law and doctrine related to courts in particular and to the structure and operations of government in general – issues that may be very salient to the justices in at least some cases. By demonstrating what information is missing or misstated in the Database and by exploring ways to develop more comprehensive and law-focused coding protocols, this Article helps positive scholars – whether political scientists or legal academics – to consider how to take account of law. The Article concludes by discussing implications for future research.

Source:  LSN Law & Positive Political Theory Vol. 4 No. 9,  06/10/2008

Law’s Reality: Case Studies in Empirical Research on Law

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This “Special Research Issue” of the Journal of Law and Society (formerly the British Journal of Law and Society), “Law’s Reality: Case Studies in Empirical Research on Law,” edited by Martin Partington, provides 12 articles in which

. . . experienced researchers tell us how they went about their research, the principal challenges they faced, and how they endeavoured to overcome them, offer a practical introduction to work that is important, challenging, and enlightening.  They can also be used as case studies by those who are developing workshops or other forms of training in empirical research in law.

. . .

Much discussion about empirical research on law focuses on the United Kingdom.  In this collection a number of papers have an international dimension: Perry-Kessaris on the relationship between foreign investment decisions and local legal systems; Outhwaite and her colleagues on the effectiveness of international frameworks for dealing with biosecurity risks; and Vogel’s study of United States plea-bargaining.