immigration

Casting a “wide and imperfect net”: Legal research platforms as data brokers for government surveillance activities

Citation:
Sarah Lamdan, When Westlaw Fuels ICE Surveillance: Legal Ethics in the Era of Big Data Policing, 43 N.Y.U. L. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 255 (2019), https://perma.cc/42HV-9AW6 .

To be completely honest, this is a topic I have been avoiding reading or thinking very much about, although it has been on the forefront of a lot of law librarian minds for well over a year. However, as more and more lawyers, law students, and librarians organize a protest movement against what is happening, the more compelled I felt to educate myself about it.

So here we are — it’s time to talk about the relationship between the parent companies of Westlaw and Lexis and the federal government, notably the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as it has developed in the area of immigration surveillance.

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Law and Life are Complicated and Difficult

Citation:
Ana Aliverti, The Wrongs of Unlawful Immigration, Criminal Law and Policy, June 2017, Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 375–391, https://link-springer-com/article/10.1007/s11572-015-9377-y .

Yesterday I participated in the first in a series of facilitated dialogues about immigration. I volunteer for these facilitated dialogues here at the law school every year because it gives students who are taking the Lawyer as Facilitator class the chance to practice their skills on real humans who are talking about difficult things.

The interesting thing for me about this experience is that I HATE hard conversations and confrontation and differences of opinion. As with many people who have domineering parents and/or self esteem issues, every disagreement becomes, in my mind, a personal attack. And yet, I still volunteer to do this every year. I always hope it will help me get better at and feel better about having difficult conversations in relatively safe spaces, and yet every year I feel just as inept at doing this as I ever did.

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