Feminist Cyberlaw Series
Several articles, an edited volume, and a book chapter that uses an intersectional feminist lens to see how cyberlaws contribute to the oppression and liberation of marginalized people, all available for free.
Beyond Citation Justice (work in progress)
Contemporary citation practices normalize threats to marginalized people and overlook sources’ accessibility to readers. This Essay offers powerful, practical alternatives that any researcher can use to better align citation methods with feminist values.
Contemporary citation practices are often at odds with promoting marginalized voices, prioritizing safety in research, and pursuing accessibility in sourcing. Marginalized scholars have been in the academy for more than a century, yet colleagues consistently under-cite their work. Online legal research resources—including Google, Westlaw, and Lexis—normalize and amplify law enforcement threats to the safety of marginalized people. And the universal accessibility of sources using alternative means is often thwarted by paywalls, inaccessible to disabled readers or erased entirely due to “link rot.” These flaws are frequently furthered by scholars, practioners, and students unwittingly.
This Essay is an intervention. Citation practices are as political as they are practical, which is why the citation justice movement proposes citing marginalized voices wherever possible. However, methods also matter. When research causes harm to marginalized people or alienates marginalized readers, it matters little whether researchers cite marginalized scholars. Borrowing from the framework of feminist cyberlaw, this Essay expands the mission of citation justice by advocating for researchers to source citations consistent with the feminist values of safety and accessibility. Empowering marginalized scholars through recognition, escaping the grips of data cartels, embracing free and public resources, and ensuring that those resources are available to everyone brings citation practices into closer alignment with justice. This expansion to citation justice provides powerful, practical tools for creating liberatory sourcing and citation practices.
Feminist Information (work in progress)
When Stewart Brand proclaimed that “[i]nformation wants to be free,” he spoke in terms of cost. But free information is also about promoting the universal availability of knowledge. This expansive approach to information is powerful. It provides laws to average people. It presents reliable resources to library patrons. It produces details about the inner workings of government. But, like all cyberlaw issues, free information is entangled with feminist values. A mentality of “free information” also enables information intrusions that harm marginalized people.
This Article uses feminist cyberlaw to understand how free information engages with the Ringley Trio of feminist values: consent, accessibility, and safety. Photographs of people of color are scraped, analyzed, and sold by corporations to law enforcement without subjects’ consent. Classroom conversations between students and professors are recorded by universities to create accessible courses, which can simultaneously suppress free expression. And intimate imagery is released publicly, threatening people’s safety. Copyright and privacy laws are consistently implicated by these infringements and invasions, but these information intrusions can also be understood misalignments between free information and feminist values. Such conflicts are underlegislated and underlitigated. Interventions instead come from communities, who must ask whether information intrusions like these are ever justified. To answer this question, a fourth feminist value must enter the chat: accountability. Some may say that seeking accountability excuses monetizing, leaking, and weaponizing other people’s information. But are they right? This Article analyzes each information intrusion through the lens of feminist values and concludes that it does not matter if information wants to be free—it needs to be feminist more.
Feminist Use (forthcoming 2024)
The “copyright” essay for Feminist Cyberlaw argues that the library practice of controlled digital lending is a feminist use, not just a fair one. University of California Press (forthcoming 2024)
The legal endorsement of such some fair uses reveals an “FU” in fair use: fair use is supposed to serve the public, but it can wind up furthering oppressive uses, including sexist, racist, and colonialist ones. But rather than reclassify less-than-feminist uses as unfair, we ought to develop a vocabulary to distinguish legally fair uses from those that are more morally defensible, socially desirable, and politically powerful: feminist uses. Using bell hooks’ expansive vision for feminism, a feminist use is distinguishable from a legally fair one because it challenges oppression rather than perpetuates or intensifies it. Using the library practice of controlled digital lending as an example, this Essay explores how feminist uses engage the feminist values of consent, accessibility, and safety. By embracing a feminist use framework, we can powerfully identify uses, like CDL, that are truly and radically transformative. Not in the copyright sense, but in the grand societal one.
Feminist Cyberlaw (forthcoming 2024)
Co-edited with Meg Leta Jones, this volume brings together 18 scholars and practitioners to provide a fresh, feminist perspective on cyberlaw. University of California Press (forthcoming 2024)
Feminist Cyberlaw is the first book dedicated to examining the cyberlaw through a feminist lens. Essays crafted specifically for this volume by emerging and established contributors explore the ways that gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class affect one’s relationship to cyberspace and the laws that govern it. Through these essays, Feminist Cyberlaw complicates classic understandings of the field and forges a new path forward. A full list of contributors and topics is available here.
Defragging Feminist Cyberlaw (forthcoming 2023)
Feminism has always been a unifying principle of cyberlaw. Using an intersectional feminist approach, this Article explains how. 37 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1 (forthcoming 2023)
In 1996, Judge Frank Easterbrook famously observed that any effort to create a field called cyberlaw would be “doomed to be shallow and miss unifying principles.” He was wrong, but not for the reason other scholars have stated. Feminism is a unifying principle of cyberlaw, which alternately amplifies and abridges the feminist values of consent, safety, and accessibility. Cyberlaw simply hasn’t been understood that way—until now.
In computer science, “defragging” means bringing together disparate pieces of data so they are easier to access. Inspired by that process, this Article offers a new approach to cyberlaw that illustrates how feminist values shape cyberspace and the laws that govern it. Consent impacts copyright law and fair use, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, criminal laws, and free speech. Each of those laws is informed by the invasive act of sharing nonconsensual intimate imagery, better known as “revenge porn.” Two other laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the recent amendments to Communications Decency Act (CDA) Section 230, are crucial to promoting web accessibility for all people, including disabled people and sex workers. And safety influences privacy law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which affect the rights of pregnant people and targets of online harassment. This Article concludes that feminist cyberlaw is a new term, but feminism has always been foundational to making sense of cyberlaw.