Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher. He is perhaps most well known for the concept of the “public sphere.” Contrasted against this sphere are the state and the private sphere.
Kara Swanson’s presentation on blood banks highlighted the move to commodify blood first, and then — at least partly in reaction to product liability concerns — to de-commodify it and move to a service-provider, gift-based system.
Facebook’s massive growth came because they gave users what they wanted: connect with your friends, see what their doing, conveniently share with them, and so on — and do it for free. But now they’re publicly traded, and satisfying users has become secondary to profit growth.
The purpose of history is to provide a mildly depressing, reality-based narrative that helps guide future decisions.
Frank Fischer’s Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry argues that the public in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has increasingly gown critical and distrustful of the professions and their practices.
There is a commonly held perception that the United States in the nineteenth century lacked rules and regulations that we today commonly associate with intrusive “big government.”
There are many approaches to protecting privacy, but many of them run into conflicts, either with existing protections (perhaps especially the First Amendment) or with those who are suspicious of government regulation. But privacy rights do not necessarily need to be protected in a novel new form as a new right — one could instead leverage existing theories of property to do it.
One key reason to study history? To learn from the past: (1) take small steps. (2) favor reversibility, (3) plan on surprises, and (4) plan on human inventiveness.
In Kermit Hall’s words, the nineteenth century saw the “triumph of contract” over property, tort, and equity, as the law came “to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produces.”
In many respects, the so-called “black codes” put in place in the South immediately after the Civil War exemplify the potential extremes …
In Breaking the Vicious Circle, Justice Stephen Breyer tackles the problem of regulation and risk in the American context.
Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, and Christopher S. Yoo recently published an article, Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed to Repeat it?, on Tim Wu‘s book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.