Black History Month

My friend who is living in London and completing her PhD at LSE saw these in Walgreens recently. On the one hand, one could say that this was unconscious racism; on the other this was probably an oversight and a thoughtless, inconsiderate act rather than a malicious one. Slavery, racism, apartheid - these are travesties that ravage human history, and recent ones, too. They are also fresh wounds for some people on a daily basis. In the spirit of Black History month, let us work on challenging and vanquishing our prejudices, but also on vanquishing thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

First Conference Paper Accepted

I was notified yesterday that my submission, "Enforcing a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in Public: Online disclosure and contextual integrity", was accepted to the Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues' Canadian Law Students' Conference. The paper highlights fault lines between values of government transparency and personal privacy using the examples from the Prop 8 debate in California and the harassment of BNP supporters in the UK. It then argues that violating the contextual integrity of material posted online in such a way as to incite harassment falls within hate crime or human rights legislation and should be prosecuted accordingly, rather than inventing new laws to deal with technology that facilitates this kind of behaviour. 


The conference will be held March 15-16 in Windsor, ON, and I am looking forward to presenting my ideas.