Scott Shackelford

• JD PhD
• Indiana University Bloomington

Making predictions is generally a somewhat foolhardy endeavor, especially in a field as dynamic as the Internet of Things (IoT), but history can be a useful guide. After all, according to George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, “The best qualification of a prophet is to...

As any new frontier opens or industry matures, it’s natural to search for analogies and historical precedents to guide both our actions and perceptions. President Kennedy famously compared space exploration to seafaring. ¹ The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning discussed further...

The Internet of Things (IoT) exists at the intersection of “cyberspace” and physical space, though the line between the two is increasingly blurry. As Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, has said, “This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that...

New inventions often open the door to unanticipated impacts that are difficult to foresee as they interact with and influence the evolution of systems around them. Take tractors, for instance. ¹ Today, they are everywhere—in lots of different forms. Before the late nineteenth...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the notion that nearly everything we use, from gym shorts to streetlights, will soon be connected to the Internet; the Internet of Everything (IoE) encompasses not just objects, but the social connections, data, and processes that the IoT makes possible. Industry and financial analysts have predicted that the number...

As with security, concerns are replete over how best to scale privacy in the emerging Internet of Everything (IoE). How should we define “privacy” in an environment where our thermostats may know more about us than close friends? Is privacy even possible? Or, perhaps...

Success sometimes has unexpected or counterproductive consequences. For example, as the makers of Kleenex, Q-Tip, and Band-Aid know, widespread success can cause a trademark to become “genericized” in the United States and elsewhere, undermining a brand’s investment in a unique identifier. In the case...

Beginning in 2020, smart devices sold in California that connect “directly or indirectly” to the public Internet have to be equipped with “reasonable” cybersecurity features such as a unique password. ¹ But how, exactly, should we define “reasonable” security? More broadly, are we...

Cambridge Core - Language and Linguistics - Governing New Frontiers in the Information Age - by Scott J. Shackelford

Governing New Frontiers in the Information Age - by Scott J. Shackelford March 2020

In September 2015, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter announced that it would adopt a new corporate form, that of a benefit corporation. Kickstarter is far from alone in this decision; in fact, it joined a growing list of tech firms that are moving toward adopting a benefit corporation designation. The result of the legal movement is that corporate...

Although there has been a relative abundance of work done on exploring the contours of the law of cyber war, far less attention has been paid to defining a law of cyber peace applicable below the armed attack threshold. Among the most important unanswered questions is what exactly nations’ due diligence obligations are to their respective private s...

I. Introduction II. A Short History of Russian Hacking of U.S. Government Networks and Critical Infrastructure III. Unpacking the Ukraine Grid Hacks and Their Aftermath IV. Analyzing Policy Options to Help Promote the Resilience of U.S. Government Systems and Critical Infrastructure ... A. Contextualizing and Introducing Draft Version 1.1 of the NI...

With the Russian government hack of the Democratic National Convention email servers and related leaks, the drama of the 2016 U.S. presidential race highlights an important point: nefarious hackers do not just pose a risk to vulnerable companies; cyber attacks can potentially impact the trajectory of democracies. Yet a consensus has been slow to em...

Rarely does a day seem to go by without another front page story about a firm being breached by cyber-attackers. Even experts in the field are far from immune from the unsustainable status quo. For example, Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has said: “We have a faith-based approach [to cybersecurity], in that we pray e...

According to Frank Montoya, the U.S. National Counterintelligence Chief, "[w]e're an information-based society now. Information is everything. That makes company executives, the front line not the support mechanism, the front linein [determining] what comes."1 Chief Montoya's remarks underscore the central role played by the private sector in ongoi...

U.S. rhetoric has not matched reality in the free trade or sustainability contexts, as may be seen by the ongoing debates surrounding a range of behaviors that violate international trade rules. The U.S. government’s failure to adhere to the rules that it was instrumental in crafting sets a particularly troubling precedent. These trade distortions...

This Article analyzes recent business realities and regulatory trends shaping the proactive cybersecurity industry. To provide a framework for our discussion, we begin by describing the historical development of the industry and how it has been shaped by the applicable law in the United States and other G8 nations. We then catalogue the proactive c...

Although the atmosphere and cyberspace are distinct arenas, they share similar problems of overuse, difficulties of enforcement, and the associated challenges of collective inaction and free riders. Moreover, “[m]illions of actors affect the global atmosphere[,]” just as they do the Internet. With weather patterns changing, global sea levels rising...

Although there has been a relative abundance of work done on exploring the contours of the law of cyber war, far less attention has been paid to defining a law of cyber peace applicable below the armed attack threshold. Among the most important unanswered questions is what exactly nations’ due diligence obligations are to one another and to their r...

The wearable revolution is upon us. Bulky chest straps and large wristbands are going the way of flip cellphones and floppy disks. In the near future, for example, it may be commonplace for athletes to wear Biostamps or smart T-shirts with embedded sensors during practices, games, and even sleep. And while athletic competitors may have been one of...

A heated debate is underway about the appropriate role of nation-states in Internet governance and enhancing global cybersecurity, as was illustrated most recently during the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12). Meanwhile, national governments are increasingly seeking to secure their critical infrastructure through r...

The multifaceted cyber threat is increasingly impacting the bottom lines of firms and is spilling over into larger issues of geopolitical importance including international security. Firms, in particular managers and boards of directors, are at the epicenter of this storm, but so far surveys have revealed that few businesses are taking the necessar...

For some time now, there has been a well-documented movement toward alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and away from traditional litigation through courts in the United States and around the world. The benefits of the ADR movement are manifold, ranging from greater control over the process of dispute resolution to alleviating overburdened courts....

There is a growing consensus that nations bear increasing responsibility for enhancing cybersecurity. A related recent trend has been the adoption of long-term strategic plans to help deter, protect, and defend against cyber threats. These national cybersecurity strategies outline a nation’s core values and goals in the realm of cybersecurity law a...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are an increasingly important component of international investment law. There are currently more than 2,000 BITs involving some 175 countries active around the world. These agreements cover a huge range of industry sectors and business activities. The United States and China are negotiating an expansive BIT tha...

Views range widely about the seriousness of cyber attacks and the likelihood of cyber war. But even framing cyber attacks within the context of a loaded category like war can be an oversimplification that shifts focus away from enhancing cybersecurity against the full range of threats now facing companies, countries, and the international community...

This book presents a novel framework to reconceptualize Internet governance and better manage cyber attacks. Specifically, it makes an original contribution by examining the potential of polycentric regulation to increase accountability through bottom-up action. It also provides a synthesis of the current state of cybersecurity research, bringing f...

Effective space governance has become increasingly important to spacefaring and non-spacefaring powers given the interrelated problems of space weaponization and orbital debris, but thus far the applicable frameworks remain limited and outdated. For example, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) establishes space as being free from national appropriati...

Firms have increasingly been turning to cyber risk insurance to better manage the cyber threat and any resulting legal liability from data breaches. But how useful is cyber risk insurance? This Article analyzes the impact of cyber attacks on firms, some of the applicable U.S. law shaping private sector responses to data breaches, and the extent to...

This Article focuses on the relationship between the legal regimes governing offshore resources in the continental shelves and the deep seabed, particularly in reference to the extent to which continental shelf claims are encroaching on the deep seabed. The question of how well these respective legal regimes regulate resource exploitation will also...

This Article reviews both the applicability and desirability of the two vying regimes for state responsibility under international law as applied to cyber attacks: the effective and overall control standards. Due to the technical difficulties with proving attribution for cyber attacks, along with the unreasonably high burden of proof required by th...

Hackers have been online since a Cornell graduate student infected MIT’s burgeoning network with the first Internet worm on November 2, 1988. But recently cyber attacks on states have proliferated both in numbers and severity. The best-known recent example of such a cyber attack was on April 27, 2007. In a matter of hours, the websites of Estonia’s...

Territorial sovereignty has in large part defined both international relations and international law since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The primary exception to this principle is the international commons. In these areas, which include the deep international seabed, the Arctic, Antarctica, and outer space, concerns over free passage outweighed th...

History is replete with epidemics that have decimated ever larger populations, from the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C., to the global swine flu of 1918-9, to AIDS and the dire modern predictions surrounding H-5N1. Due to the rapid pace of globalization, the world is fast becoming a global germ pool. Diseases, such as tuberculosis, that used to be res...

For most of the twentieth century, international courts and tribunals rarely enjoyed blanket jurisdiction over foreign nationals. This has changed with the advent of ‘investment treaty arbitrations.’ Investment treaty arbitration is a treaty-based regime that uses rules and structures of international law and private arbitration to make governmenta...

What is genocide? Can a State be held judicially accountable for its commission? What affirmative obligations do States have to prevent genocide? The International Court of Justice (ICJ) offered new answers to these perennial questions on February 26 when it held in the Application of the Genocide Convention (“Bosnian Genocide”) case that: (1) Serb...

On April 27, 2007, Estonia suffered a crippling cyber attack launched from outside its borders. It is still unclear what legal rights a state has as a victim of a cyber attack. For example, even if Estonia could conclusively prove that Russia was behind the March 2007 attack there is no clear consensus on how Estonia could legally respond, whether...

Over a century after Warren and Brandeis first presented the right to U.S. jurists for their consideration, privacy has become a central player in U.S. law. But nations around the world, in particular the common and civil law nations of Europe that share similar legal cultures with the United States, are grappling with how best to strike a balance...

Free trade, free markets, and international investment are the paths to prosperity, but despite widespread adoption of these staples of the Washington Consensus more than 1.2 billion people still live on less than $1 per day. The search for determining the missing factor beyond these orthodox remedies for relieving poverty has led some to conclude...

India, the most populous and diverse democracy in the world, has a legal system to match. This system, a composition of ancient Hindi panchayats (village assemblies), Islamic law, and a formal British judiciary, has long been under immense strain, stifling economic competiveness and the pursuit of justice alike. As Lord Delvin famously quipped “If...

For nearly 800 years the writ of habeas corpus has been a bulwark against the unlimited exercise of executive power first in England, and later the United States. Throughout much of U.S. history, habeas corpus has continued the English tradition of being a check on executive power and thus bolstering the separation of powers. More recently, the wri...

Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe. By J. Paul Lomio and Henrik Spang-Hanssen. Copenhagen, Denmark: DJØF Publishing, 2008. Pp 329. ISBN 978-87-574-1715-9 US$34.95. - Volume 36 Issue 1 - Scott Shackelford