Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism

by Julie E. Cohen

Overview

A work of ambitious interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the ways that law and technology interact. Our current legal system is to a great extent the product of an earlier period of social and economic transformation. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, as accountability for industrial-age harms became a pervasive source of conflict, the US legal system underwent profound, tectonic shifts. Today, struggles over ownership of information-age resources and accountability for information-age harms are producing new systemic changes. In Between Truth and Power, Julie E. Cohen explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. Systematically examining struggles over the conditions of information flow and the design of information architectures and business models, she argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is too is transforming in fundamental ways. Drawing on elements from legal theory, science and technology studies, information studies, communication studies and organization studies to develop a complex theory of institutional change, Cohen develops an account of the gradual emergence of legal institutions adapted to the information age and of the power relationships that such institutions reflect and reproduce. A tour de force of ambitious interdisciplinary scholarship, Between Truth and Power will transform our thinking about the possible futures of law and legal institutions in the networked information era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190246716
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/02/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	881 KB

About the Author

Julie E. Cohen is Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Cohen teaches and writes about privacy, surveillance, information platforms, intellectual property, and the governance of information and communication networks. She is also the author of Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction Part I. Patterns of Entitlement and Disentitlement Chapter 1. Everything Old is New Again--Or is It? Chapter 2. The Biopolitical Public Domain Chapter 3. The Information Laboratory Chapter 4. Open Networks and Closed Circuits Part II: Patterns of Institutional Change Chapter 5. The End(s) of Judicial Process Chapter 6. The Regulatory State in the Information Age Chapter 7. Networks, Standards, and Transnational Governance Institutions Chapter 8. The Future(s) of Fundamental Rights Conclusion Acknowledgments Endnotes

Editorial Reviews

"Julie Cohen, a legal scholar, is the latest to undertake the challenge of charting that process for an information-driven culture. While her book follows on other ambitious, synthesizing work such as Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Nicolas Suzor's Lawless, it uniquely offers a detailed look at how the rise of powerful information intermediaries operates within and with the active assistance of legal, regulatory and political systems." — International Journal of Communication

From the Publisher