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 & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Surveillance versus Privacy: Effects and Implications

Abstract: The ongoing transition from industrialism to informationalism has prompted repeated predictions of the death of privacy. Digital information networks and the granularity of the information they collect and transmit seem inconsistent with the preservation of older, analog conceptions of private information and private space. Digital information networks, however, are designed with particular purposes in mind. To decode and evaluate the rhetoric of doomed privacy, one must understand the purposes that current patterns of development are thought to serve. That inquiry requires consideration of the theory and practice of surveillance. This chapter takes up that project, exploring the nature of surveillance, its effects on self-development, and the societal implications of those effects.

Fissuring, Data-Driven Governance, and Platform Economy Labor Standards

Abstract: To better illuminate how platform economy firms such as Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Deliveroo are impacting workers' welfare, this paper disaggregates two aspects of industrial organization in low-wage labor markets today. It maps prominent low-wage firms onto a grid that seeks to capture (a) the statutory legal entitlements enjoyed by those firms’ workers, and (b) those firms’ technological and regulatory sophistication, as suggested by their market size and geographic scope. Such an approach illuminates different trajectories of change within particular industrial sectors. It also suggests that with appropriate legal reforms some workers, including drivers and domestic workers, may benefit in the long run from moving to a large, technologically sophisticated labor platform.

Recommendations and Comments on the Draft Vertical Merger Guidelines

Abstract: These recommendations and comments respond to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. We commend the agencies for updating the 1984 non-horizontal merger guidelines by recognizing the substantial advances in economic thinking about vertical mergers in the thirty-five years since those guidelines were issued. Our comments emphasize four issues: (i) the treatment of the elimination of double marginalization (“EDM”), particularly that the draft vertical merger guidelines appear inappropriately to make proof of cognizability part of the agencies burden and that they appear to inappropriately treat the merging firm’s failure to have eliminated double marginalization pre-merger as proof that the merger would lead to EDM and that the post-merger EDM would be merger-specific; (ii) the seemingly arbitrary and inappropriately permissive safe harbor; (iii) the inappropriate (though perhaps unintended) apparent requirement that harms be quantified; and (iv) the inappropriate (though perhaps unintended) apparent requirement that the agencies show that foreclosure would not have been profitable before the merger. We are concerned that these features of the draft Guidelines will lead to under-enforcement and false negatives (including under-deterrence).

What's in a Nudge?

Abstract: This Essay is an invited response to Prof. Sunstein’s “Do People Like Nudges?,” a thoughtful survey of public opinion on nudges and their rival policy options. I try to situate the survey in the larger context of Sunstein’s pathbreaking work, and then to reflect on the power and limits of both. I suggest that researchers have come to use the term “nudge” as a shorthand for a wide set of policies, many of which do not meet Thaler & Sunstein’s criterion that nudges be both essentially costless as well as “surprising” from a rational-choice perspective. This definitional confusion produces analytic confusion, as well. My view, however, is that other researchers are right not to limit themselves to the scope of what Thaler & Sunstein have been inclined to defend. The zero-cost restriction is unnecessary to a convincing defense of regulation, even “paternalistic” regulation. Further, describing some policies as zero cost tends to lead us to neglect opportunity costs or interactions with other policies, as I show with the example of disclosure rules. I therefore close by proposing a more careful analytic taxonomy of modern regulation.