Information & Legitimacy
In this research initiative we look at the role information plays in legitimizing governance and power. This may sound perplexing at first, but quickly becomes clear when we look at two hotbeds of political change.
The first is how the workings of politics are changing, especially in the Western world. A limited set of established intermediaries, including well-known newspapers and television channels, together with the political elites would control much of the information flows on politics in societies. Among other things simple economics, the investment necessary for creating and disseminating information, made it an elite club. Today, millions of people run their own digital printing presses, publishing blogs, contributing to wikies, creating media remixes, or aggregating meta-information that quickly highlights emerging trends. This has brought with it a renaissance of the metaphor of a "market place of ideas" or deliberative visions of "New England town halls" - and fueled a sense that more information flows automatically improve democratic processes.
The second is how societies have reacted to shocking abuses of power: The US response to Watergate was the passage of watershed freedom of information acts. Transparency and information was seen as the natural and effective antidote to government corruption. Similarly, the abuses of power in the private sector - from Enron and Worldcom to Maddoff - have resulted in a whole wave of additional transparency norms. Here, too, transparency and information is seen as a the appropriate response to misbehavior.
But is it? Is shaping our society into one in which everybody can find out everything about anybody - an egalitarian version of Bentham's panopticon - the best possible solution we can come up with? How exactly does information legitimize power and governance, and what are its limitations and weaknesses? These are some of the questions we hope to address here,
Court Citations
The Supreme Court of the United States of America is the highest court in the USA and hence the decisions that it lays out are of immense political and social importance.
One way in which the US Supreme Court justifies its decisions is by the use of precedents. It is a legitimizing strategy as current decisions are hence not motivated by political ideologies but rather dictated by a binding prior decision, a precedent. Hence, the Supreme Court is not inventing new law but applying existing case law to a new situation. In this way over time, stability is ensured in the legal system, as it constrains how courts can decide.
Spearheaded by centre director Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, together with post-doctoral researchers and Tracy Loh, this research looks at the decisions laid out by the Supreme Courts and the precedents that were cited for these decisions. We seek to understand the citation practices of the Supreme Courts and whether and how they have changed over time.
Demystifying Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is rightly seen as one of the intellectual parents of much of the governance of information discourse. His "law is code" argument is both powerfully simple, and naturally persuasive. The theory on which it rests is built in significant part on a belief in a certain ind of market, and a certain kind of transparency.
This research questions some of Lessig's underlying assumptions - and suggests that this may have consequences for the breadth and generality of his "law is code" concept; the research as published in the 2008 Wisconsin Law Review.
