The Faculty of Law community is invited to attend the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics online conference, Transparency in the Digital Environment.
Transparency has become an astonishingly popular ideal over the last couple of decades. Its traditional habitats, public law and political theory, have lost their monopoly to define it. It has globalized and spilled over to new disciplinary discourses – quite prominently, in algorithms and automation – thus becoming a well-nigh self-justificatory virtue, “the cultural signifier of neutrality.” Transparency promises that we can witness, immediately, what happens in the chambers of power, and by virtue of this witnessing, fix what needs to be fixed.
Can transparency deliver its promise in a digitalized environment? Does power hide not only from transparency but in transparency? Is it just a figurative placeholder for information release practices, or has it become a meta-discourse to assess the successfulness of those practices? To what extent is it legal, social, cultural, technical, material?
The online conference features legal scholars from North America, Scandinavia, Europe, and Australia who are contributors to a special issue, guest edited by Professor Ida Koivisto, University of Helsinki Faculty of Law, in the open-access online journal Critical Analysis of Law (CAL): An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review.
Since 2014, CAL has been co-edited by Professors Markus Dubber and Simon Stern in collaboration with U of T Law student editors.
Conference contributors:
- Oana B. Albu, Copenhagen Business School
- Mark Fenster, University of Florida, Law
- Mateusz Grochowski, Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Private Law (Hamburg)
- Hans Krause Hansen, Copenhagen Business School
- Fredrik Heintz, Linköping University, Computer Science
- Agnieszka Jabłonowska, European University Institute
- Anders Jensen-Urstad, Dataskydd.net
- Ida Koivisto, University of Helsinki, Law
- Riikka Koulu, University of Helsinki, Law
- Francesca Lagioia, European University Institute
- Stefan Larsson, Lund University, Technology and Social Change
- Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute
- Katja de Vries, Uppsala University, Law
- Monika Zalnieriute, University of New South Wales, Law & Justice
Co-sponsor:
