[No abstract available]

Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination. © 2023, The Author(s).

In 2008, the Swedish legislature removed any references to race and racial difference,formalizing a post-racial discourse. This has resulted in both the near impossibility ofproving discrimination based on racialized difference, and a formal denial of racial dis-crimination as a social and structural problem. This article attempts to circumscribethese difficulties by suggesting an approach for tracing structural racism in Swedishpolicing. We argue that a claim of structural racism in policing cannot be studied bycounting self-proclaimed racist officers or through individual experiences, for race is astructure in and of itself. Instead, we claim that structural racism can methodologicallybe studied through a combined reading of relevant (a) laws, (b) practices, and (c) tech-nologies of policing, since these habitually produce racialized outcomes even in theabsence of direct references to race or ethnicity. Reflecting this tripartite approach tothe study of structural racism, we analyze data gathered from these three specificsites. We argue that developments in criminal policies and policing practices reproduceand reinforce structural racism as part of the wider penal structure, leading to a repro-duction of the targets of punitive policies and police control in the intersection of class,place, race, and ethnicity. © The Author(s) 2024

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before!© 2023, The Author(s).

This book is about how distinctions are drawn between civilians and combatants in modern warfare and how the legal principle of distinction depends on the technical means through which combatants make themselves visibly distinguishable from civilians.

The author demonstrates that technologies of visualisation have always been part of the operation of the principle of distinction, arguing that the military uniform sustained the legal categories of civilian and combatant and actively set the boundaries of permissible and prohibited targeting, and so legal and illegal killing. Drawing upon insights from the theory of legal materiality, visual studies, critical fashion studies, and a dozen of military manuals he shows that far from being passive objects of regulation, these technologies help to draw the boundaries of the legitimate target.

With its attention to the co-productive relationship between law, technologies of visualisation and legitimation of violence, this book will be relevant to a large community of researchers in international law, international relations, critical military studies, contemporary counterinsurgency operations and the sociology of law. © 2024 Amin Parsa.

The relation of law and art is conventionally understood through a disciplinary divide that presents art as an instrument of legal practice and scholarship or, alternatively, presents law as potential context for artistic engagement. Moving beyond disciplinary definitions, in this article we explore how art and law, as modes of ordering and action in the world, often overlap in their respective desires to engage existing material orders. Whereas law’s claim of producing order appears self-evident, we try to highlight, through a concept of legislative arts, the often-overlooked similar function of artistic practices. At the heart of what we refer to as legislative arts are practices that aim to challenge law’s claim of authority in ordering social life through tactical combinations of elements of art and law. In examining a set of examples that include the Tamms Year Ten campaign to close a super-max prison in the United States, the work of Forensic Architecture and practices of passport forgery, we aim to highlight the possibility of manifesting social orders beyond an exclusive reliance upon state laws. Pointing to the potentials of such legislative arts practices, this article suggests that the material ordering quality of artistic and legal practices can, and perhaps should, be weaponized for challenging and remaking the world of unjust state laws. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.