ISP Launches Digital Future White Paper Series

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School announced the launch of its Digital Future White Paper Series on December 15, 2020. The series will highlight novel challenges for regulation, inviting participation by academics, researchers, technologists and legal practitioners. White papers in the new Digital Future series will bring both legal analysis and ethical frameworks to bear on the emerging problems of the digital world.

“Our goal in this series is to create a venue for leading thinkers to tell us how new digital technologies are affecting law and society and make recommendations for reform,” said Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School and the founder and director of ISP.

“I’m thrilled to be editing the Digital Future White Paper Series at the ISP, which is the epicenter of some of the most important thinking and research on the intersection between law and technology,” said Visiting Fellow Andrew Burt ’14, author of the inaugural white paper and one of the editors of the new series. “And being able to launch the series with people like Nabiha Syed, President of the Markup, and Nik Guggenberger, Executive Director of the ISP, under the direction of Jack Balkin, is as much an honor as it is lots of fun.”

“At a time when digital technologies pose so many challenges to current legal and ethical standards,” added Syed ’10, a visiting fellow at ISP. “I can't think of a better home — or a more pressing need — than for a white paper series focused on law and technology at the ISP."

The first white paper, “Nowhere to Hide: Data, Cyberspace, and the Dangers of the Digital World,” addresses the many challenges that cyberspace and digital technologies now pose for traditional legal and ethical standards. While the adoption of new technologies brings with it a host of benefits, the new white paper argues that these same technologies are also upending the role of foundational legal concepts like privacy, trust, and even selfhood.

The ISP plans to publish several other white papers over the course of the next two years. The new initiative is supported by Immuta, a data governance company founded in 2015 to help organizations automate data governance, data security, access control, and privacy protections. Immuta is headquartered in Boston, MA with offices in College Park, MD and Columbus, OH.

The Information Society Project (ISP) is an intellectual center at Yale Law School. It supports a community of interdisciplinary scholars who explore issues at the intersection of law, technology, and society.