The Record

Enhancing the Innovative Capacity of Venture Capital

How can law help translate great ideas into great innovations? Venture capital (VC) markets play an increasingly important role in funding innovation, and they have benefitted from substantial public support. While venture capital is almost synonymous with innovation, the ability of VC markets to catalyze innovations is often overstated. This Article examines the innovation limitations of VC and the role of law and policy in enhancing its innovative capacity.

Tech Drift & Powerlessness

Tech drift is the phenomenon where a change in technological context alters policy outcomes. Tech drift can cause legal vulnerabilities. Socially empowering policies such as labor and employment laws can become inaccessible or ineffective because of changing technological contexts. But tech drift begets more than legal weakness. It also constitutes tech politics, as one of tech drift’s outcomes is a shift in the locus of struggles over policy outcomes: from policy enactment, blocking, or reform to the very shaping of tech context.

Networked Governance

This submission introduces the phrase “networked governance” as a term to describe how a broad array of platforms— not just Facebook— are conceptualizing the engagement of external actors and organizations in the creation and implementation of content standards. This terminology builds on theories from new institutionalism/neo-institutionalism and organizational sociology, taking as its starting point the “demise of the isolated and sovereign actor or organization” and placing an emphasis on “understanding interaction” between interdependent actors and organizations.

The Governors’ Advisors: Experts and Expertise as Platform Governance

The paper discusses the types of experts engaged in platform governance before analyzing the tactics and methods at their disposal.

Who Are the Stakeholders in Platform Governance?

The goal of this essay is to more systemically explore the key actors involved in platform governance than has been done so far. What exactly does it mean to be a “governance stakeholder” — and how does it matter for our frames of analysis as to who and what is centered in such definitions? Who are the key “platform governance stakeholders”? And what combinations of actors matter in different domains of platform governance?