Call for papers: "Big Data: New Challenges for Law and Ethics”

Call for papers Keynote speakers - Professor Dean Wilson, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK - Assist. Professor Nadya Purtova, TILT, Tilburg University, The Netherlands - Assoc. Professor Joanna J. Bryson, University of Bath, UK, and affil. at The Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University, USA - Professor Renata Salecl, Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Slovenia - Assoc. Professor Primož Gorkič, Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia - dr. Matej Kovačič, The Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia - Assoc. Professor Aleš Završnik, Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Slovenia

“Big Data” is a phrase that has been used pervasively by the media and the lay public in the last several years.

Amongst many other fields, social control and crime control in particular have become one of the key emerging use cases of big data. For example, police predictive software produce probability reports on criminality and assure us that by using this, societies will reduce crime. Other programs are looking for patterns that would help us predict a terrorist attack. Criminal justice systems are using technological solution too, for instance, to predict future crimes of those applying for bail or those to be sent on a parole. Underlying these and many other potential uses of big data in crime control, however, are a series of legal and ethical challenges relating to, among other things to privacy, discrimination, and presumption of innocence.

The leading questions the conference speaker will tackle are: - how the operations of society, political systems, and, in particular, social control and crime control, is changing due to large data bases and algorithmic data mining and predicting powers? - Will computers decide who to prosecute and who should be sent to jail? - Which programmes and systems of algorithmic predictions are already in place in the criminal justice systems around the globe? - Why this can be dangerous in terms of fundamental human rights and fundamental principles of democratic societies? 2 - Is the new GDPR a suitable framework for »algocracy«, i.e. rule by the algorithm? - How can we propose solutions that may not hinder the development of the technology, but enable more nuanced, ethically and legally sound solutions to be developed in the future? We invite paper proposals from scholars across the social sciences and humanities studying big data challenges for law and ethics. Themes of interest include (tentative list): - big data and crime control - predictive policing - automated justice - big data and discrimination - big data and social sorting - ethical dilemmas and predictive analytics - big data and international law - big data and personal data protection law - big data and cyber espionage - big data and citizen empowerment

Please submit proposals for papers (300 words) with your name, address and affiliation by February 28, 2017 to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bdl2017

Participants will be notified by March 31, 2017.

The conference is organized within the research project »Law in the age of big data: Regulating privacy, transparency, secrecy and other competing values in the 21st century« carried out at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana and Faculty of Law University of Ljubljana, and coordinated by Assoc. Professor Aleš Završnik. It is funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.