Legislators face the challenging task of drafting copyright law, which takes into account the views of various stakeholders, intended policy and technological developments, whilst ensuring that the wording and language that is used is accurate and precise. Meeting these objectives means that the law in its legislative form can be hard-to-understand, complex and not easily accessible to the layperson. This article explores steps, which have been put in place by various organisations and online resources, to assist in the understanding of copyright for the public and schools, with particular focus on education and teaching materials – as presented on Copyrightuser.org.
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In this paper, we analyse the development of the term “legal capabilities”. More specifically, we do three things. First, we track the emergence and development of the notion of legal capabilities. The term legal capabilities was used in legal research long before the capability approach was introduced in that field. Early on, its conceptualisation mainly reflected elements of legal literacy. In more recent writings, it is claimed that the notion is based on the capability approach. Second, we critically analyse the current use of the term legal capabilities and show that there is no proper theoretical grounding of this term in the capability approach. This is problematic, because it might give rise to misunderstandings and flawed policy recommendations. Third, we suggest some first steps towards a revision of the notion of legal capabilities. Starting from the concept of “access to justice”, legal capabilities have to be understood as the real opportunities someone has to get access to justice, rather than merely as formal opportunities or internal capabilities.
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Recent years have seen a massive growth in ethical and legal frameworks to govern data science practices. Yet one of the core questions associated with ethical and legal frameworks is the extent to which they are implemented in practice. A particularly interesting case in this context comes to public officials, for whom higher standards typically exist. We are thus trying to understand how ethical and legal frameworks influence the everyday practices on data and algorithms of public sector data professionals. The following paper looks at two cases: public sector data professionals (1) at municipalities in the Netherlands and (2) at the Netherlands Police. We compare these two cases based on an analytical research framework we develop in this article to help understanding of everyday professional practices. We conclude that there is a wide gap between legal and ethical governance rules and the everyday practices.
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