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This book explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways. We are witnessing the emergence of legal institutions adapted to the information age, but their form and their substance remain undetermined and are the subjects of intense struggle. One level for legal-institutional transformation involves baseline understandings of entitlement and disentitlement. Both lawyers and laypeople tend to think of legal entitlements as relatively fixed, but the ongoing transformation in political economy has set things in motion in ways that traditional accounts do not contemplate. In particular, the datafication of important resources and the shift to a platform-based, massively intermediated communications environment have profoundly reshaped both the organization of economic activity and the patterns of information exchange. The authority of platforms is both practical and normative, and it has become both something taken for granted and a powerful force reshaping the law in its own image. Another level for legal-institutional transformation involves the structure and operation of regulatory and governance institutions. Patterns of institutional change in the networked information era express a generally neoliberalized and managerialist stance toward the law’s projects and processes. They reflect deeply embedded beliefs about the best uses of new technological capabilities to manage legal and regulatory processes and account for activities of legal and regulatory concern.

Originally published 28 Conn. L. Rev. 981 (1996).It has become commonplace to say that we have entered the age of information. The words conjure up images of a reader's paradise -an era of limitless access to information resources and unlimited interpersonal communication. In truth, however, the new information age is turning out to be as much an age of information about readers as an age of information for readers. The same technologies that have made vast amounts of information accessible in digital form are enabling information providers to amass an unprecedented wealth of data about who their customers are and what they like to read. In the new age of digitally transmitted information, the simple, formerly anonymous acts of reading, listening, and viewing -scanning an advertisement or a short news item, browsing through an online novel or a collection of video clips -can be made to speak volumes, including, quite possibly, information that the reader would prefer not to share. This Article focuses specifically on digital monitoring of individual reading habits for purposes of so-called "copyright management" in cyberspace, and evaluates the import of this monitoring for traditional notions of freedom of thought and expression.

In the United States, proposals for informational privacy protection have proved enormously controversial. On a political level, such proposals threaten powerful data processing interests. On a theoretical level, data processors and other data privacy opponents argue that imposing restrictions on the collection, use, and exchange of personal data would ignore established understandings of property, limit individual freedom of choice, violate principles of rational information use, and infringe data processors' freedom of speech. In this article, Professor Julie Cohen explores these theoretical challenges to informational privacy protection. She concludes that categor ical arguments from property, choice, "truth," and speech lack weight, and mask fundamentally political choices about the allocation of power over information, cost, and opportunity. Each debate, although couched in a rhetoric of individual liberty, effectively reduces individuals to objects of choices and trades made by others. Professor Cohen argues, instead, that the debate about data privacy protection should be grounded in an appreciation of the conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise autonomy in fact, and that meaningful autonomy requires a degree of freedom from monitoring, scrutiny, and categorization by others. The article concludes by calling for the design of both legal and technological tools for strong data privacy protection.