Legal Commentary

Two Great Essays at Jotwell

By Michael Froomkin

I try not to use this blog to promote my other projects too often for fear of becoming a broken record.  But sometimes I cannot resist.

Over at Jotwell we’ve been publishing a whole lot of interesting reviews of recent scholarship relevant to the law, and I could be bragging about it every week.  But the two most recent essays have been particularly extraordinary, and I recommend them to everyone.

Sex/Power/Law is Robin West‘s review, for our Jurisprudence section, of Marc Spindelman, Essay, Sexuality?s Law,  20 Colum. J. Gender & L. (forthcoming 2011). It begins like this:

Marc Spindelman?s essay Sexuality?s Law, forthcoming in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of legal writing on the interrelations of law, culture and sexuality to appear in a law journal in well over a decade, perhaps much longer.

It ends with:

This is writing that matters, that serves truth, that responds to injury, and that restores one?s faith in the legal academy; this is what legal scholarship can be.

And the stuff in between is well worth your time.

Banana Republic.Com is Frank Pasquale‘s review, for our Cyberlaw section, of Jonathan Zittrain, Ubiquitous Human Computing, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, vol. 366 no. 1881 3813-3821 (28 October 2008):

Wasn?t the internet supposed to solve these problems? Wouldn?t a ?wealth of networks? guarantee opportunity for all, as prediction markets unearthed the ?wisdom of crowds??  It turns out that the net, while mitigating some forms of inequality in the US, is accelerating others.  Jonathan Zittrain?s essay ?Ubiquitous Human Computing? examines a future of ?minds for sale,? where an atomized mass of knowledge workers bid for bite-sized ?human intelligence tasks.?  Zittrain explores some positive aspects of the new digital dispensation, but the larger lesson is clear: without serious legal interventions, an expansive global workforce will be scrambling for these jobs by ?racing to the bottom? of privacy and wage standards.  This review explains Zittrain?s perspective, applauds his effort to shift the agenda of internet law, and argues that trends untouched on in Zittrain?s essay make his argument all the more urgent.

This review is a little longer than our usual fare, but it’s a rollicking read about a very important subject.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on January 14, 2011 (boomark / email).