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Announcing our 2020 Fall Symposium: Technology Law as a Vehicle for Anti-Racism

We cordially invite you to join us for this free online event on November 12th and 13th, 2020. Please RSVP and register so that we can send you Zoom Webinar access. Registration will remain open until the day of the event..

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE

Once registered, you will receive the Zoom webinar login details, as well as email updates as we announce panelists and details over the next few months leading up to the symposium.

The nexus of technology and the law has played a major role in amplifying racial injustices in many of society’s institutions. The killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and many others by police just this past summer alone precipitated a new era of reckoning with the egregious treatment that Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color are subject to in the United States, including the ways modern technology has aided in this treatment. Even as demonstrators and social reformers took to the streets and the Web to protest these injustices, technologies were further weaponized to quell their voices.

But technology and the law can also be instruments for structural change. As future lawyers, the student leaders of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (BTLJ) are eager to dissect the roles of technology law and policy and investigate how they can be channeled to serve the interests of racial justice. Therefore, we are convening this special symposium with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (BCLT). We have invited leading and rising legal academics to share their research and perspectives on the intersection of technology, law, and race. In conversation with one another, they will help us explore and propose options for anti-racist paths forward for the field of technology law.

For this symposium, which we’ve entitled “Technology Law as a Vehicle for Anti-racism,” we are honored to host Congressman Ro Khanna (CA-17), and former FCC Commissioner and acting Chair Mignon Clyburn as our keynote speakers. We look forward to the lessons we can draw from their insights based on their many years of anti-racist law- and policymaking experience. 

Additionally, our panels will broach a variety of tech law topics as they intersect with race. A few of these topics include:

  • The role of surveillance technologies on the policing of racial minorities
  • The racial implications of online speech
  • Telecommunications policy and the widening digital divide 
  • Comparative legal approaches to privacy and their implications for racial minorities

We hope that this symposium will help usher in a field-wide inclusion of anti-racism into technology law, policy, and scholarship. 

CLE Credit will be offered.

We cordially invite you to join us for this free online event on November 12th and 13th, 2020. Please RSVP and register so that we can send you Zoom Webinar access. Registration will remain open until the day of the event.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE

Once registered, you will receive email updates as we announce panelists and details over the next few weeks leading up to the event.

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