Making social media an instrument of democracy

In recent years, the responsibility of social media platforms towards their users and society at large has become a major political issue. However, the regulatory responses to the crisis of social media are still mostly considered unsatisfactory, as demonstrated by the widespread criticism of the German Network Enforcement Act of 2017. This article compares the current constitutional discourse on social media regulation with the debates that accompanied the last major transformation of the media landscape: the rise of broadcasting. While we certainly do not find a roadmap for social media regulation in the past, the key concept of the broadcasting discourse—the idea of media as a sphere of ‘institutional freedom’—can be applied to the challenges of today and can be used to strengthen the democratic function of social media.     

Regulating for responsibility: reputation and social media

The framework brought forward by the United Kingdom's Defamation Act 2013 underlines a traditional hierarchy of expression in which news media are viewed as high-level speech. Although of a different form, social media are a dominant means of expression. The current study explores the rationale for a more robust and forceful discussion of responsibility in speech on social media platforms. The underlying premise here is that speech should be viewed as a qualified good and that a more appropriate paradigm is one found in the phrase ‘freedom to participate’.     

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

ABSTRACT

From a cursory look at the terms of service of the main social networking websites, it is immediately possible to detect that Facebook’s show a peculiar configuration. Although they represent a mere contract between private parties, these terms adopt the traditional jargon of constitutional texts and articulate their contents in terms of rights, principles and duties. This curious pairing between norms regulating social media and the constitutional sphere is also apparent in a series of non-binding documents that are unequivocally named ‘bill of rights’ and seek to articulate a set of principles to protect social media users. This paper examines whether the emergence of a constitutional tone in this limited number of texts could be related to the effective, or aspirational, constitutional function that these documents exercise. The identification of a series of significant shortcomings will lead to exclude that social media’s terms of service and bills of rights of social media users currently play a constitutionalising role. Nevertheless, the possibility to theoretically justify the use of these documents as mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment will be adduced as an evidence of the potential constitutional aspirations of these texts.     

International human rights for mentally ill persons: the Ontario experience

This article is part of a working project which assesses Ontario's mental health legislation and practice vis-à-vis international human rights standards. The paper focuses on procedural safeguards provided by the major international human rights instruments in the field of mental health law such as the UN Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness (MI Principles) and the European Convention on Human Rights as interpreted by the European Human Rights Court. In analysing Ontario's compliance with international standards, the paper will explore some problems arising from the implementation of the legislation with which the author is familiar with from his experience as counsel for the Consent and Capacity Board. The paper aims to generate discussion for potential reforms in domestic legal systems and to provide a methodology to be used as a tool to assess similar mental health legislation in other local contexts.     

Advocates,experts, and suspects: three images of lawyers in Chinese media reports

Research on the public image of lawyers often focuses on lawyers’ role as advocates and neglects other representations. Based on the content analysis of 669 media reports of Chinese criminal cases between 1979 and 2009, this article provides a typology of lawyers’ media images: as advocates, as experts and as suspects. Even when lawyers are characterized as defenders of suspects, media depictions of their roles are vacuous and lawyers may be considered unnecessary and dispensable. Furthermore, the characterization of lawyers in the case stories has a binary quality that is contingent upon the media's substantive judgment of case outcomes. With findings from the Chinese case, the article calls for more attention to lawyers’ images in the media, both in China and in comparative research on the legal profession.     

Social rights,child rights,discrimination and devolution: untangling the web

Abstract

This article examines judicial reviews of two areas of social security policy and practice in the UK – the household benefit cap and the restriction of bereavement benefits to bereaved spouses and civil partners. While each case ostensibly concerned discrimination against claimants, in practice much of the legal argument centred on the impact on claimants’ children. The judiciary is revealed to be deeply divided on the lawfulness of the acknowledged discrimination. The article considers what lessons can be drawn about the relative weight that ought to be afforded to claimants’ property rights, the best interests of affected children, anti-discrimination provisions and the state’s stated policy imperatives of cost control and administrative convenience. Insights are also sought into whether devolutionary differences can be identified between the approaches of courts in London and Belfast.     

Ghana: capacity-building workshops for lawyers and judges

In 2004, AIDS Alert Ghana (an Accra-based NGO) commenced a series of two-day workshops to enhance the capacity of lawyers and judges to respond to HIV/AIDS. The workshops are organized by the AIDS Alert Law Project (AALP).     

'I've lost the plot': an everyday story of legal aid lawyers

This paper examines the impact on a specific group of solicitors in the United Kingdom of recent changes in the delivery of legal services. These changes are seen as a form of the New Public Management (NPM), and the paper explores the proposition that NPM is producing a public sector characterized by high output but low morale, through an analysis of qualitative data from a group of 'political' legal aid practitioners. The data is seen to support the high-output/low-morale thesis, and the paper argues that one effect therefore of legal aid reform may be to damage the 'political' lawyer's project of empowering the client and countering social injustice.     

Adolescents as offenders, social order, and the morality of work in a postindustrial society: The Australian experience

This article argues that traditional views of employment as both financially necessary and morally imperative for guaranteeing a relatively smooth transition from adolescence to responsible adult status are naive in the context of a postindustrial society. Increased youth unemployment since the mid-1970s has excited considerable anxiety and debate about the criminal potential of “youth,” generating debate and research claiming a causal link between youth unemployment and crime. Analyzing this gives rise to inquiry about some of the old assurances and certitudes of full-time, waged labor in a context where full-time, waged labor is steadily becoming a minority activity for most people of working age. The pursuance of youth, political, and economic policies based on assumptions about an indefinite growth in the labor market, or a return to the “full-time employment” of the past, are problematic and require rethinking. Rather than providing corrective measures that entail the restoration of now unfeasible certainties (“full” employment), effort can be better spent appreciating the significance of the shift toward a postindustrial society and considering other ways of providing the inner stability and the fundamental social experiences for young people once obtained through waged work.     

Professionalism in higher education: important not only for lawyers

This article considers how, in light of the changing legal profession and higher education, academia could address professionalism training. The authors put forward an argument that, if professionalism is to be understood as a set of skills, values and attitudes required for any lawyer, it is now a good time to consider how these could be taught and assessed in law and non-law degrees. The formation of professional values and attitudes is a long process that continues throughout a person’s life. The earlier students are exposed to professional values, attitudes and skills, the better the quality of service these future lawyers will provide to the public. Taking into account the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) recommendations, the article suggests some practical ways as to how professionalism could be developed in higher education.     

Health and human rights: challenges of implementation and cultural change

The author identifies the evolution of discourse about human rights to health in medical law, health law and public health law, as well as in major international instruments. He emphasises the importance of General Comment No 14 on Art 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. He argues that its breadth but also its specificity in terms of accountable benchmarks and measures of health service provision are likely to frame discourse on "rights to health" in the succeeding years. He identifies the need for translation of the rhetoric in such instruments into meaningful and patient-informed data so that it becomes possible to compare and contrast advances (or otherwise) in rights to health within and among different countries.     

Social media video analysis methodology for sarin exposure

As social media becomes increasingly ubiquitous, many events are recorded and released on social media platforms, including chemical weapon attacks. We develop an objective tool in order to evaluate brief and unstructured social media videos for analysing sarin exposure from a civilian medical pathology perspective. We developed and validated this new questionnaire using a standardized procedure that includes content domain specification, item pool generation, content validity evaluation, a pilot study, and assessment of reliability and validity. In total, 51 sarin attacks and 48 matched videos were analysed. Cronbach’s α for all 20 items was 0.75, which indicates adequate internal reliability. The test–retest reliability was 0.96, which indicates good internal reliability. The inter-observer intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.97. After verifying sampling adequacy with the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure and the factorability of the items with Barlett’s test of sphericity, a factor analysis was performed. According to the principal axis factoring, a six-factor solution explained 51.86% of the total variance. The receiver-operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the Video Score Questionnaire has a sensitivity of 0.817, a specificity of 0.478, and an efficiency of 65.3. Therefore, the Video Score Questionnaire is reliable and valid for evaluating sarin attacks from brief and unstructured social media videos.

Key points

• Chemical weapons are still used as a method of warfare.
• Social media videos are an important source of information.
• We developed a validated scale which can analyse sarin exposure in short and unstructured videos.