'Lights, Camera, Execution!': Political scientist Helen Knowles co-authors new book on capital punishment and popular culture

A new book by poli sci prof and legal researcher extraordinaire Dr. Helen Knowles, SUNY Oswego, has hit the shelf.  It explores the dark edge of the border where popular culture and criminal justice meet.  In this sense it is partly reminiscent of John D. Bessler's unsettling Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Northeastern 1997) (Amazon).  Supreme Court followers will remember Dr. Knowles for her landmark study of Justice Kennedy in The Tie Goes to Freedom (2009 & updated 2018) (Amazon).

In Lights!, Camera!, Execution!: Cinematic Portrayals of Capital Punishment (Lexington Books 2019) (Amazon), Knowles and co-authors Bruce E. Altschuler and Jaclyn Schildkraut explore the interplay of popular portrayal of the death penalty with the real thing, considering the implications of mass media for policy-making when, literally, lives are on the line.  Here is the publisher's abstract:
 

Lights, Camera, Execution!: Cinematic Portrayals of Capital Punishment fills a prominent void in the existing film studies and death penalty literature. Each chapter focuses on a particular cinematic portrayal of the death penalty in the United States. Some of the analyzed films are well-known Hollywood blockbusters, such as Dead Man Walking (1995); others are more obscure, such as the made-for-television movie Murder in Coweta County (1983). By contrasting different portrayals where appropriate and identifying themes common to many of the studied films – such as the concept of dignity and the role of race (and racial discrimination) – the volume strengthens the reader’s ability to engage in comparative analysis of topics, stories, and cinematic techniques.Written by three professors with extensive experience teaching, and writing about the death penalty, film studies, and criminal justice, Lights, Camera, Execution! is deliberately designed for both classroom use and general readership.

Amity Dubai hosts global mass comm conference

My plenary session on "the death of journalism?" and desinformación online.

In June, I had the privilege of talking about mass communication and the law as a plenary speaker at the International Conference on Current Practices and Future Trends in Media Communication at Amity University Dubai (#CPFTMC2019).  I'm indebted for the opportunity to my long-time friend and colleague Dr. Manish Verma; to Dr. Fazal Malik, dean of humanities, arts and applied sciences at Amity Dubai; and to Prof. Marut Bisht at Amity Dubai.

Dean Fazal Malik and Professor Manish Verma

They gave me the latitude to talk about my nascent theoretical framework for analyzing legal responses to the problem of media misinformation / disinformation —colloquially if ambiguously termed "fake news," or unambiguously, as I prefer, in Spanish, desinformación.  My rubric ranges from non-responses, what I call "the Wild West" approach, to authoritarian responses.

The best of the conference of course came from what I was able to learn from my colleagues of such far-ranging experiences, backgrounds, and focuses of study.  I'll comment on some photographic highlights here, though this testimony will not express how deeply this program enriched my experience in comparativism.

Top paper honors went to Abdulla Saad of Amity Dubai. I was fortunate to serve as a judge on his panel, and his presentation was a favorite of mine. A mass communication scholar and proclaimed leading world expert on karak chai, Abdulla is researching online humor in the face of the gravest of circumstances, such as oppression and war.

Interdisciplinary presenters brought perspective to problems in mass communication. Social media researchers Fathima Linsha Basheer and Sudha Bhattia are considering the implications of this factoid: ten minutes' tweeting yields 13% oxytocin increase in brain.  Oxytocin is also known as "the love hormone."

"Dr. G.," Dr. Geentanjali Chandra, is the head of the law school at Amity Dubai.  Amity Dubai is the only school outside of India accredited to allow its graduates to sit for the bar in India.

Dr. G. kindly invited me to talk to a law class. Students studying at Amity Dubai are surprisingly diverse. The UAE creates a curious dynamic: Indian migrants--already an intrinsically diverse population--make up some quarter of the population of the Emirates and have established multi-generational households. Yet they remain Indian citizens. As a result, the young generation has a unique global identity.

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One class, changed everything. One experiment, gone wrong. Brace yourself for what is about to come. 💀☠️ #cpftpm2019 #outoforderamity #filmmaking #filmtrailer #supportfilm #darkcomedy

A post shared by Ruslan Baiazov (@rus.apocalypse) on Jun 16, 2019 at 10:40am PDT

Amity Dubai studded the scholarly program with creative contributions from the range of student talents fostered at the university, including fashion, dance, and film. Film students spent just one week creating a short-film horror project titled, "Out of Order." I'm getting in the ground floor as a fan of up-and-coming director Ruslan Baiazov.

Fourth Amendment privacy case, set for oral argument Nov. 29, touches on US-EU data protection divide

I've published a short preview of Carpenter v. United States, 819 F.3d 880 (6th Cir. 2016), cert. granted, No. 16-402 (U.S. June 5, 2017) (SCOTUSblog), a Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), set for oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, November 29.  Here's an excerpt; link below to the full article and the ABA publication in which it appears.

U.S. Supreme Court accepts cell phone privacy case with transnational implications

A privacy case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court will give justices an opportunity to examine “the third-party doctrine” in U.S. constitutional law. The doctrine manifests a central feature of American privacy policy, marking a divide that has flummoxed transnational data transfer negotiators.

*  *  *

The urgent problem on the transnational scene is that the secrecy paradigm is incompatible with emerging global privacy norms. In EU data protection, for example, privacy follows data downstream. A person can divulge information with strings attached, and the strings are enforceable against subsequent recipients, such as Internet retailers. Even in public places, a data collector, such as a surveillance camera owner, has affirmative obligations to captured subjects. This incompatibility goes a long way to explain the incongruence of European apoplexy and American nonchalance in reaction to global surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.

*  *  *

However suspenseful, Carpenter proffers bad facts to kill the third-party doctrine outright. As the Sixth Circuit observed, ordinary people know that cell phones communicate with nearby towers, and their location data are not as damningly precise as GPS. The privacy intrusion was therefore modest, and statute afforded some safeguard. What will be interesting to see in Carpenter is whether more justices lend their voices to the Alito or Sotomayor position, and whether the replacement of Justice Scalia with Justice Gorsuch unsettles the Court’s fealty to originalism.

Read the article at pp. 5-6 of the fall 2017 newsletter of the Privacy, Cybersecurity & Digital Rights Committee of the Section of International Law of the American Bar Association, available here in PDF. 

“A Fair Shake for the Sheikh,” or “Cut Qatar Some Slack”: On World Cup 2022

My photo at a Qatar Stars League double header in March 2016: Empty stands tell the tale of native public interest in football.  However, Prof. Susan Dun reported that populous foreign laborers do pack matches for the leagues they follow: another piece of the untold story in Qatar.

I was just in Oxford, UK, for “Sport 5.”  (The full name of the conference, sponsored by Inter-Disciplinary.Net, is in the previous post about my contribution there.)  I tweeted some of the highlights of Sport 5 (link to Twitter from the ribbon atop this page, Sept. 13-15, 2016).  I want to share a bit more about one paper at Sport 5 that stood out for its unconventional thesis.  The paper came from this year’s conference coordinator, Professor Susan Dun, a communication scholar at Northwestern University in Qatar.

I don’t want to steal Dun’s thunder or evidence, so I’ll give only cursory treatment to her thesis and outline three rationales that I found persuasive.  My own impressions have mixed with recollection, so blame me for any misstatements.

In essence, Dun posited that however much Qatar deserves condemnation for corrupt dealings with FIFA (see generally Blake & Calvert’s The Ugly Game), the ills of the kafala labor system, or dreams of air-conditioned desert stadiums, the regime is not getting a fully fair shake in global perception.  She made a compelling case, and activists, journalists, and scholars investigating the social and economic implications of the upcoming World Cups in Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022—myself included—should take note.

First, Dun placed the Qatari bid for 2022 in the context of Qatar’s ambitious struggle for political legitimacy through soft-power sport.  In its rush onto the world stage, Qatar was not ready for intense scrutiny and scathing criticism that accompanied the award (and then was amplified by the FIFA corruption fiasco, pointed out David Storey of the University of Worcester, who, by the way, presented a fascinating paper on the GAA).  Within Qatar, criticism of Al Thani leadership is not just legally problematic, but socially taboo.  So Qataris were utterly ill equipped to respond to an external public relations crisis in a way that would have seemed natural to Western observers—with press conferences, collaborative inquiries, and affirmative information dissemination.  Instead Qatar took an outmoded defend-or-deny stance, which only bloodied the waters.

Second, Dun explained that Qatar actually implemented a great many reforms to redress exposed deficiencies, for example, illegalizing passport retention and improving living conditions for foreign laborers.  The communications failure has meant that reform stories have not gotten much play.  Meanwhile, reform has been slowed by understandable challenges.  Employers might still seize passports.  Wrangling the middlemen is a laborious process in part because rapidly developed Qatar lacks regulatory and enforcement mechanisms that Westerners take for granted in key areas, such as workplace safety and banking.  Communications failure again means that these impediments are not explained.  Reform is necessarily incremental, but unresolved problems on the ground are misconstrued to signal government indifference, if not malice.

Third, Dun documented a media affection for criticism of Qatar.  In part the penchant seems driven by ignorance.  Journalists, bloggers, et al., tend not to be familiar with Qatar, so are more likely to republish judgmental commentary without critical analysis for fairness and accuracy.  I suspect that hostility toward a wealthy Islamic state in the post-9/11 era also plays a role.  Again, communications failure exaggerates the problem.  Dun gave evidence that even Russia is more likely than Qatar to get a fair shake in media coverage.  I can attest that in my own research, I only recently read about changes in Russian labor law—allegations not unlike those that have plagued Qatar for years—to hasten World Cup infrastructure development at the expense of worker rights.  (See Martin Müller, How Mega-Events Capture Their Hosts: Event Seizure and the World Cup 2018 in Russia, Urban Geography, 2015, doi).

Dun got push-back in discussion with Sport 5 attendees, but she held firm.  To be clear, Dun makes no motion whatever to justify human rights abuses; quite the contrary.  She simply laments that the whole story of Qatar's reform is not being told.  It would be a mistake to pull the World Cup from Qatar, she says, because there are desirable reforms occurring that should not be undermined.  (This is happily consistent with Benavides and my extension in World Cup Dreaming of Jeremiah Ho's incrementalist theory).  She makes that case well enough that those of us who fancy ourselves objective observers should pay attention.