Digital Justice: Lecture Series
There are now a wide range of tools available to monitor employees, boasting sophisticated features like keystroke logging, website monitoring, and video surveillance. From a legal perspective, employee monitoring is almost exclusively analyzed in terms of the impact it has on ‘informational privacy’. On this logic, the concern with workplace surveillance is that it implicates the employee’s control over information and data. And if informational privacy risks can be appropriately managed, then monitoring can be justified.
This article pushes against this dominant narrative. We argue that there are two significant reasons why employee monitoring is concerning which go beyond the use of information and data. First, we address how monitoring affects the physical and spatial components of privacy. Second, we claim that monitoring can be so severe in certain cases that it constitutes a form of imprisonment. This revised approach to the wrongness of employee monitoring has significant legal implications.
Hadassa Noorda is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Criminal Law. She works in the area of philosophy of criminal law. Her most recent publications appeared in Criminal Law and Philosophy, New Criminal Law Review and Criminal Justice Ethics. Educated in both law and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University (LL.B., LL.M., BA, MA, PhD), Hadassa was a Dworkin Balzan postdoctoral fellow and a Postdoctoral Global Hauser Fellow at NYU, a research fellow at Columbia Law School, and a Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Jeevan Hariharan is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Private Law at Queen Mary University of London. His core research focuses on privacy, tort law, moral philosophy and intellectual property. Jeevan holds BA (First Class) and LLB degrees from the University of Sydney, where he was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy, as well as an LLM (First Class) from the University of Cambridge, where he received the Lucas-Smith Memorial Prize for the top law student at Queens’ College. He is currently finishing his PhD at UCL, supported by a Faculty of Laws Research Scholarship, on the protection of ‘physical privacy’ under English law.
Jeevan and Hadassa will present their article on imprisonment at work. Earlier, they have written a blog on the topic, which can be found here.
Format: in-person, Moot Court (3rd Floor REC A)
The legal domain is being fundamentally transformed by the introduction of new digital technologies. Digitization promises to promote efficiency, objectivity, and ease of use in adjudication, legal practice, and the administration of justice. At the same time, concerns have been raised about issues such as algorithmic bias, digital illiteracy, and threats to judicial autonomy. The Digital Justice Lecture Series aims to offer a space for critical reflection on the future of law and legal practice.
This series of events is a collaboration between six prominent centers for research at the University of Amsterdam: the Paul Scholten Centre for Jurisprudence (PSC), the research priority area Human(e) AI, the Amsterdam Center on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice (ACLPA), the research initiative Digital Transformation of Decision Making (DTDM), the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT), and the Institute for Information Law (IViR).