Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Global health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

How International Financial Law Works (and How it Doesn't)

Abstract: The "Great Recession" has given way to a dizzying array of international agreements aimed at strengthening the prudential oversight and supervision of market participants. How these international financial rules operate is, however, deeply misunderstood. Theorists of international law view international financial rules as merely coordinating mechanisms in light of their informal "soft law" quality. Yet these scholars ignore the often steep distributional implications of financial rules that may favor some countries over others and thus fail to explain why soft law would be employed where losers to agreements can strategically defect from their commitments. Meanwhile, political scientists, though aware of the distributional dynamics of financial rule-making, rarely, if ever, examine international law as a category distinct from international politics. Law is instead cast as an inert, dependent variable of power, as opposed to an independent factor that can inform the behavior of regulators and market participants.This Article presents an alternative theory for understanding the purpose, operation and limitations of international financial law. It posits that international financial regulation, though formally "soft," is a unique species of cross-border cooperation bolstered by reputational, market and institutional mechanisms that have been largely overlooked by theorists. As a result, it is more coercive than classical theories of international law predict. The Article notes, however, that these disciplinary mechanisms are hampered by a range of structural flaws that erode the "compliance pull" of global financial standards. In response to these shortcomings, the Article proposes a modest blueprint for regulatory reform that eschews more drastic (and impractical) calls for a global financial regulator and instead aims to leverage transparency in ways that more effectively force national authorities to internalize the costs of their regulatory decision-making.

Roles for Computing in Social Change

Abstract: A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work treats problematic features of the status quo as fixed, and fails to address deeper patterns of injustice and inequality. While acknowledging these critiques, we posit that computational research has valuable roles to play in addressing social problems — roles whose value can be recognized even from a perspective that aspires toward fundamental social change. In this paper, we articulate four such roles, through an analysis that considers the opportunities as well as the significant risks inherent in such work. Computing research can serve as a diagnostic, helping us to understand and measure social problems with precision and clarity. As a formalizer, computing shapes how social problems are explicitly defined — changing how those problems, and possible responses to them, are understood. Computing serves as rebuttal when it illuminates the boundaries of what is possible through technical means. And computing acts as synecdoche when it makes long-standing social problems newly salient in the public eye. We offer these paths forward as modalities that leverage the particular strengths of computational work in the service of social change, without overclaiming computing’s capacity to solve social problems on its own.

Law for the Platform Economy

Abstract: This article explores patterns of legal-institutional change in the emerging, platform-driven economy. Its starting premise is that the platform is not simply a new business model, a new social technology, or a new infrastructural formation (although it is also all of those things). Rather, it is the core organizational form of the emerging informational economy. Platforms do not enter or expand markets; they replace (and rematerialize) them. The article argues that legal institutions, including both entitlements and regulatory institutions, have systematically facilitated the platform economy’s emergence. It first describes the evolution of the platform as a mode of economic (re)organization and introduces the ways that platforms restructure both economic exchange and patterns of information flow more generally. It then explores some of the ways that actions and interventions by and on behalf of platform businesses are reshaping the landscape of legal entitlements and obligations. Finally, it describes challenges that platform-based intermediation of the information environment has posed for existing regulatory institutions and traces some of the emerging institutional responses.