ISP Fellow Anne Huang on "In the Virtual Shadow of the Law: The Chimerical Study of Law and Social Software"
Anne Huang, ISP student fellow, will be presenting "In the Virtual Shadow of the Law: The Chimerical Study of Law and Social Software." The aim of this Paper is to clarify our understanding of social software—software designed for bottom-up group interaction—as it relates to formal legal rules. It claims that, as important as social software has become, social software as an independent legal study is ultimately chimerical: the legal questions in social software are so situation-specific that to study it as a distinct entity, and the policy questions surrounding it, is a fruitless inquiry. The law should not create a generalized policy for the context of social software. Instead, we should redirect meaningful discussion from social software to its governing social norms, while keeping in mind the interactive relationship between those norms and code.
Anne Huang is a second-year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School and a Student Fellow with The Information Society Project at YLS. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Computer Science from The College of William and Mary and researched network performance monitoring systems for her honors thesis. Anne is currently Articles Editor of the Yale Journal of Regulation and Senior Editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, and has served in the 2006 Access to Knowledge Conference.