Resources

Keynote Speakers:

Mignon Clyburn, Former Commissioner at FCC

Ro Khanna, Congressman at the U.S. House (CA’s 17th District)

 

Panel 1 – Law Enforcement, Policing, Surveillance

Speakers:

Bennett Capers, Professor of Law at Fordham Law 

Bennett Capers is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Center on Race, Law, and Justice at Fordham University. The focus of his research is the intersection of race, gender, technology, and criminal justice. He is published in numerous prestigious law journals including our own California Law Review and is publishing his own book on prosecutors, The Prosecutor’s Turn. He has also received numerous awards for his writing and publication, including winning Teacher of the Year three times and receiving the 2009 Lawrence A. Stessin Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication.

Elizabeth Joh, Professor of Law at University of California, Davis 

Elizabeth E. Joh is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. She has written extensively on policing, technology, and surveillance in multiple journals including the California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review. She also co-hosts a podcast, “What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law” with Roman Mars (99% Invisible). In 2017, she received the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Jerome Greco, Director of the Digital Forensic Unit at Legal Aid Society of NY

Jerome Greco is the Director of the Digital Forensics Unit, a unit of the New York Legal Aid Society that helps defenders advocate for clients who are up against invasive government surveillance. Jermone has experience with cases involving cell phone tracking, GPS, social media, and hard drive analysis, and has challenged the NYPD’s use of facial recognition.

Kami Chavis, Professor of Law Wake Forest Law 

Resources:

Teresa Scassa, Law Enforcement in the Age of Big Data and Surveillance Intermediaries: Transparency Challenges, 14 SCRIPTed 239 (2017).

Big data analytics raises privacy and social justice concerns when used to mine public social media pages. This paper examines the use of these tools by law enforcement and recommends ethical frameworks for their use.

Mary Anne Franks, Democratic Surveillance, 30 HARV. J. L. & TECH. 425 (2017).

Concerns about individual privacy have increased since more advanced surveillance technologies have developed. However, marginalized groups including black, poor, and/ or female Amerians already face regular invasions of privacy with little intervention. This article argues for enhanced privacy regulation that prevents invasions for even the most vulnerable among us. 

 

Panel 2 – Criminal Justice System: Evidence, Expert Testimony, Incarceration

Speakers: 

Maurice Dyson, Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School 

Maurice Dyson is a Professor of Law at Suffolk University teaching Criminal Law; Evidence; Education, Equity and the Law; and Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Law. He has published extensively on topics including education, civil rights, criminal justice reform, game theory, constitutional law, sociology, and critical race theory. Maurice works with a number of minority and immigration outreach organizations and is a registered counsel at the U.S Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Homeland Security United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Brandon Garrett, Professor of Law at Duke Law 

Hanni Fakhoury, Assistant Federal Public Defender at Office of the Federal Public Defender 

Rashida Richardson, NYU AI Now Institute 

Resources:

Andrew D. Leipold, Is Mass Incarceration Inevitable, 56 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 1579 (2019).

America has an overwhelming number of its citizens behind bars, but combating mass incarceration is an enormous challenge. This article explores the complicated history which has created the mass incarceration problem and explores the difficult questions and uphill battles necessary to help decrease it. 

Brandon L. Garrett, Evidence-Informed Criminal Justice, 86 GEO. Wash. L. REV. 1490 (2018).

The U.S. criminal justice actors are beginning to embrace evidence-based models over discretionary ones for improving the system at all levels. This needs to be done carefully, with researchers from a variety of disciplines and governmental oversight, in order to promote positive outcomes. This article explores areas for impactful research and argues for enhanced data collection. 

 

Panel 3 – Algorithm Bias in Advertising, Social Media, and Employment

Speakers:

Safiya Umoja, Noble Assistant Professor at UCLA Law

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). Dr. Noble is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture, and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies and is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, including Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. Safiya is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is regularly quoted for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, and The New York Times, to name a few. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018.

Resources:

Miranda Bogen, All the Ways Hiring Algorithms Can Introduce Bias, Harvard Business Review, 2019

Do hiring algorithms prevent bias, or amplify it? This fundamental question has emerged as a point of tension between the technology’s proponents and its skeptics, but arriving at the answer is more complicated than it appears. 

Joseph Blass, Algorithmic Advertising Discrimination, Law Review Journal, 2019

The ability of social media companies to precisely target advertisements to individual users based on those users’ characteristics is changing how job opportunities are advertised. Companies like Facebook use machine learning to place their ads, and machine learning systems present risks of discrimination, which current legal doctrines are not designed to deal with. This Note will explain why it is difficult to ensure such systems do not learn discriminatory functions and why it is hard to discern what they have learned as long as they appear to be performing well on their assigned task.

 

Panel 4 – TBD

 

Panel 5 – TBD

 

Panel 6 – Online Speech, Online Harassment, and Section 230

Speakers:

Gautam Hans, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law  atVanderbilt Law 

Gautam Hans joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in summer 2018 to launch a legal clinic focused on First Amendment issues and protections funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, Prior to returning to academia, Professor Hans served as policy counsel and director at the Center for Democracy and Technology in San Francisco, where he worked on a range of technology law and policy issues including speech, privacy and surveillance. He joined CDT, based in Washington, D.C., in 2012 as the Ron Plesser Fellow, focusing on privacy issues, after earning both his J.D., cum laude, and his master’s in information at the University of Michigan.

Anupam Chander, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law 

Professor Chander is an expert on the global regulation of new technologies. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he clerked for Chief Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He practiced law in New York and Hong Kong with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He has been a visiting law professor at Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, and Tsinghua. He previously served as the Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. A member of the American Law Institute, he has also served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, where he co-founded the International Law and Technology Interest Group. The author of The Electronic Silk Road (Yale University Press), he serves as a judge of the Stanford Junior International Faculty Forum. A recipient of Google Research Awards and an Andrew Mellon grant on the topic of surveillance, he has served on ICTSD/World Economic Forum expert groups on the digital economy. He serves as an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Policy, a faculty advisor to Georgetown’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, and as a faculty affiliate of Yale’s Information Society Project.

Resources:

Kari Paul, Online harassment increases to 35% for American minority groups, the Guardian, 2020

Some 35% of Americans have experienced harassment online this year due to racial, religious, or sexual identity – an increase of 3% from 2018, according to a study released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League. Religion-based harassment in particular increased to 22% in 2020, up from 11% in 2018.

Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience, 2020

This report is based on a nationally representative survey of Americans conducted from December 17, 2018 to December 27, 2018, and sheds light on these issues. 

Panel 7 – TBD

 

Panel 8 – Privacy as a Civil Right

Speakers:

Alvaro Bedoya, Founding Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology; Visiting Professor of Law Georgetown Law 

Professor Alvaro Bedoya is the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where he is also a Visiting Professor of Law and Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic. Prof. Bedoya is an expert on government surveillance and commercial data collection, with a focus on their impact on immigrants and people of color. In 2016, he co-authored The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, the Center’s year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in the police face recognition database. He has testified before Congress and state legislatures, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Slate. Prof. Bedoya served as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, where he negotiated legislation and conducted oversight on mobile location privacy, biometrics, and NSA transparency. In 2009, he co-founded the Esperanza Education Fund, a college scholarship for immigrant students that is blind to applicants’ legal status. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Free Press and previously served on the board of the Hispanic Bar Association of Washington, D.C.

Travis LeBlanc, Partner at Cooley LLP and Board Member at Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board 

Travis is a member of Cooley’s litigation department leadership team and vice-chair of the firm’s cyber/data/privacy practice. He is a leading authority on cybersecurity, data privacy, telecommunications, and the regulation of emerging and disruptive technologies. Drawing on his broad experience in federal and state government, he helps clients manage litigation and regulatory risk, as well as strategically respond to data breaches, cyberattacks, nation-state attacks, dissemination of stolen data, misinformation campaigns, and government enforcement efforts, including those by state attorneys general. In addition to overseeing crisis management, internal investigations, and national security matters, Travis advises and counsels clients on complex commercial, antitrust and intellectual property litigation. The respect and skills Travis has earned during his career have translated into appointments and recommendations across the political spectrum, including his selection by the US Department of Commerce and the European Commission as an arbitrator for the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework in 2017 and his unanimous US Senate confirmation to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in 2019.

Pedro Pavon, Director and Senior Corporate Counsel at Salesforce  

Pedro Pavón advises technology companies on SaaS licensing, data privacy and data security, data licensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and general data protection and information privacy risk. Before entering private practice, Pedro served as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the United States at the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney-Advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy, and Attorney Advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice. Pedro’s expertise is in global data protection law in the context of product development and sales, mergers and acquisitions, and development and deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.

Tiffany Li, Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at Boston University School of Law

Tiffany C. Li is a technology attorney and legal scholar. She is an expert on privacy, artificial intelligence, and technology platform governance. Li’s writing has appeared in popular publications including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, NBC News, and Slate. She is regularly featured as an expert commentator in national and global news outlets across television, radio, podcasts, and print, and digital publications. Li has been honored as a transatlantic digital debates fellow (Global Public Policy Institute/ New America Foundation), a fellow of information privacy (International Association of Privacy Professionals), an internet law and policy foundry fellow (Internet Education Foundation), and an intellectual property law fellow (American Bar Association). Li is also an affiliate fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and has held past affiliations with Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and UC Berkeley’s Center for Technology, Society, and Policy. Li is a licensed attorney and holds CIPP/US, CIPP/E, CIPT, and CIPM certifications from the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Her professional legal experience includes roles at the Wikimedia Foundation and General Assembly. She has a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a global law scholar, and a BA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Resources:

Privacy Rights Are Civil Rights. We Need to Protect Them, Free Press, 2019

We communicate, participate in social and economic life, and engage in our democracy online.

Alvaro M. Bedoya, Privacy as Civil Right, New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2020

 

Panel 9 – Net Neutrality, Communications Policy, and its Impact on Minority Populations

Speakers:

Catherine Sandoval, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law

Professor Sandoval is well known in the world of academia for her research on telecommunications, antitrust, energy, and contract issues. She is a tenured member of the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty which she joined in 2004. She has had extensive experience as a leader in numerous government organizations, as well as in the private sector. In January 2011 Governor Brown appointed Professor Sandoval to serve as a Commissioner at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) which regulates energy, water, telecommunications, and rail services in California. The California State Senate unanimously confirmed her to serve in that post. During her term as a CPUC Commission, she was appointed by the Federal Communications Commission to the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services. She served as Co-Vice Chair of the Telecommunications Committee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Prior to joining the academy, Governor Davis appointed her to serve as Undersecretary and previously as Staff Director of California’s Business Transportation and Housing Agency from 2001 to 2003. In that post, she oversaw a wide variety of legal and policy matters affecting California’s infrastructure and economy and advised the Secretary on energy, communications, and housing policy. She has written numerous articles on Communications Law, Antitrust Law, Energy Law, and Contracts issues. In 2010 she won the SCU Public Interest and Social Justice Achievement Award in recognition of her legal scholarship. Professor Sandoval was the Director of the Santa Clara Law Oxford University Summer Law Program in 2018. She twice served as the Director for Santa Clara Law’s Summer Program on Human Rights Law in San Jose Costa Rica.

Olivier Sylvain, Professor Law at Fordham University School of Law

Olivier is a Professor of Law at Fordham University. His research is in communications law and policy. His most recent popular writing, scholarship, and public speaking engagements are on liability under the Communications Decency Act and the social impacts of artificial intelligence. A few months ago, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded him a grant to support this work. He is a principal investigator, along with a team of telecommunications network engineers and social scientists, in an interdisciplinary National Science Foundation grant project that is prototyping a community-administered computing network in West Harlem. Olivier teaches Legislation & Regulation, Administrative Law, Information Law, U.S. Data Protection Law & Privacy, and information law related courses. At Fordham, he also is the Director of the McGannon Center for Communications Research, the Academic Director of the Center for Law and Information Policy, and a research affiliate at the Center on Race, Law, and Justice. Before entering academia, Olivier was a Karpatkin Fellow in the National Legal Office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block, LLC, in Washington, D.C. He is the Board President of the New York affiliate of the ACLU and sits on the Academic Advisory Board for the Open Markets Institute and the Advisory Committee for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, he taught a class on modern American literature for local incarcerated men.

Ari Q. Fitzgerald, Partner at Hogan Lovells

Ari Fitzgerald leads the firm’s Communications, Internet, and Media practice. He provides strategic, legal, and policy advice on a wide range of communications and spectrum policy issues to some of the world’s largest and most dynamic communications network operators and equipment manufacturers, as well as industry trade associations and investors. Ari enjoys helping automobile manufacturers and suppliers, medical device manufacturers, and other technology companies bring new and innovative communications-related products and services to the market. Ari had a distinguished career in government before joining the firm as a partner in 2001. He was a legal adviser to former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, as well as Deputy Chief of the FCC’s International Bureau. He also worked as a legal adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he advised the White House, executive branch agencies, and the U.S. attorney general on constitutional and federal statutory interpretation matters.

Ernesto Falcon, Senior Legislative Counsel at Electronic Frontier Foundation 

Ernesto Falcon is Senior Legislative Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation with a primary focus on intellectual property, open Internet issues, broadband access, and competition policy. He represents EFF’s advocacy, on behalf of its members and all consumers, for a free and open Internet before state legislatures and Congress. Ernesto’s work includes pushing the state of California to pass the strongest net neutrality law in the country in response to federal repeal efforts, as well as leading EFF’s research and advocacy to promote universally available, affordable, and competitive fiber broadband networks. Prior to joining EFF, Ernesto worked as a legislative staffer for two members of Congress (2004-2010). He then became Vice President of Government Affairs at Public Knowledge (PK), where he was successful in leading the organization’s efforts to defeat AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile in 2014. The following year, PK and EFF scored a major victory for consumers by rallying the Internet community to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). After eight years in Washington DC, he returned to his home state of California to attend law school at McGeorge School of Law and continue his work for digital rights advocacy. After becoming an attorney, Ernesto rejoined the fight for consumers and Internet freedom at EFF.

Resources:

Tech Blog on Net Neutrality by Eric Escobar / (QDT News)

Basics of Net Neutrality 

Standford Computer Science Articles

Cases on Net Neutrality 

Capobianco, John (2016) “Effects of Net Neutrality,” Political Analysis: Vol. 18 , Article 5.

Effects of Net Neutrality 

Panel 10 – IP & Race

Speakers:

Sonia Katyal, Professor of Law and Distinguished Haas Chair at Berkeley Law

Sonia Katyal is the Co-Director for the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Her focus areas are the intersection of technology, intellectual property, and civil rights including antidiscrimination, privacy, and freedom of speech. She has numerous publications, such as Technoheritage, in the California Law Review and The Gender Panopticon in the UCLA Law Review (forthcoming). She has received awards for her work including an honorable mention in the American Association of Law Schools Scholarly Papers Competition, a Yale Cybercrime Award, and twice received a Dukeminier Award from the Williams Project at UCLA for her writing on gender and sexuality.

Srividhya Ragavan, Professor of Law and Director of India Programs at Texas A&M University School of Law 

Srividhya Ragavan is a Professor of Law and Director of India Programs at Texas A&M University. Her research is on the interplay between international trade law and intellectual property issues with a developmental perspective, with a focus on issues that affect developing nations from embracing the trade regime. She has written numerous books and articles on the subject, including Diversity in Intellectual Property: Identities, Interests, and Intersections and Patent and Trade Disparities in Developing Countries.

Wayne Stacy, Regional Director of the USPTO’s Silicon Valley Regional Office (USPTO) 

As the Regional Director of the USPTO’s Silicon Valley Regional Office, Wayne Stacy carries out the strategic direction of the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO and is responsible for leading the USPTO’s West Coast regional office. With a computer-engineering background, he has over twenty years of experience litigating high-stakes technology cases, including patent, trade secret, software-based copyright, and technology-licensing disputes. He has been an adjunct professor at four universities, teaching patent law, patent litigation, copyright law, and PTAB practice.

Resources:

Richard Awopetu, In Defense of Culture: Protecting Traditional Cultural Expressions in Intellectual Property, 69 EMORY L.J. 745 (2020).

From the words “Aloha” to “Hakuna Matata,” many elements of traditional cultural expression have been readily trademarked by nonindiginous peoples. This comment explores how harmful this practice is to cultures around the world and suggests methods to combat the practice. 

Mark Conrad, Matal v. Tam, A Victory for the Slants, a Touchdown for the Redskins, but an Ambiguous Journey for the First Amendment and Trademark Law, 36 CARDOZO Arts & ENT. L.J. 83 (2018).

Matal v. Tam ended in a victory for the Asian-American rock band The Slants because it empowered them to re-appropriate racial slang on their own terms. However, the case simulatenously ended marginalized groups’ ability to sue over trademarks that they find offensive. This article seeks to shed light on the conflicts between protecting free speech under the first amendment and protecting vulnerable groups from commercialization.