State GHG Regulation in a Trump Era: Energy Efficiency as BACT

With the Obama USEPA's Clean Power Plan unlikely to come to fruition under the incoming Trump administration, this article examines another avenue that states (or USEPA) may use to regulate GHG emissions from major stationary sources: by more aggressively pursuing energy efficiency as “best available control technology” under the Prevention of Significant Deterioration program of the Clean Air Act. This article argues that such regulation may validly include efficiency measures both “at-the-source” and—more ambitiously—“beyond the fence line.”     

Silencing Bad Bots: Global,Legal and Political Questions for Mean Machine Communication

As digital automation expands across social contexts, the way in which legal systems respond when algorithms produce lies and hate presents a pressing policy problem. Search results, autofill suggestions, and intelligent personal assistants generate seemingly objective information for users in order to be helpful, efficient or fun but, as social technologies, can also produce prejudicial and false content. Chatbots and trending lists have made headlines for quickly being transformed from sweet to spiteful and political to inaccurate. As humans progressively engage with and rely on machine communication, the legality of algorithmically created information that harms the reputation or dignity of an individual, entity or group is a policy question posed and answered differently around the world. This article compares various defamation and hate speech laws through the lens of algorithmic content production – mean machine communication – and presents a set of outstanding issues that will require international and interdisciplinary attention.     

Asia-Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications’ industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.     

Some technological implications for ascertaining the contents of contracts in web-based transactions

This paper points out some unexpected relationships between specific aspects of contract law and specific Internet-related technologies. The discussion is not about the interplay between “Law” and “Technology,” or the “Law” and the “Internet.” The aim is modest: to identify some theoretical chokepoints created by the technologies involved in web-based commerce and to point out the legal uncertainties persisting in this area. The analysis is confined to the process of contract formation, not to matters of substantive law. It is during this process that parties assume their contractual obligations and the contents of a contract crystallize.     

Commercialising smallholder agricultural production in Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Many smallholder farmers in Lao People’s Democratic Republic are transitioning from subsistence to commercial production. This article employs the Agriculture Innovation System (AIS) framework to report on empirical findings from six case studies of Lao smallholder production. It identifies the actors, organisations, and institutions involved in systemic commercialisation of subsistence farming and articulates patterns of interactions that contribute to the relative success of the transition. Of the factors identified in the case studies, the most important enablers of commercial production and adoption of innovative technologies were technical and financial assistance, access to markets, and the formation of farmer associations/organisations.     

The Rise of Policy Institutes in the United States, 1943-1971

In the period after World War II, an eclectic assortment of scholars, policymakers, and managers presided over the creation of academic centers for the study of war. This article examines the intellectual and administrative assumptions of many of these actors. Made up of academic scholars from the fields of political science, sociology, and economics, they advanced a vision based on what might be called “instrumentalist-positivist social science,” but in appeals to donors they employed basic scientific language.¹