Online Consultation and Democratic Information Flow
Peter M. Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law & Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Tuesday, February 28, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, Second Floor
The use of new media by governments around the world to engage the general public more directly in actual policy making raises significant questions of democratic theory and practice. Visiting Professor Peter M. Shane, the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at Ohio State University, will discuss his ongoing research on two of these questions: Under what circumstances might online consultation actually make democratic participation more meaningful? What role could the regular availability of online consultation play in engineering an information and communication ecology more genuinely supportive of democratic information flow?
About Peter
Peter M. Shane is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Professor Shane clerked for the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel and as an assistant general counsel in the Office of Management and Budget, before entering full-time teaching in 1981 at the University of Iowa. Professor Shane was dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law from 1994-1998, and Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management (now, Heinz College) from 2000-2003. His public service activities include positions as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, as International Trade Commission agency team lead for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, and as a consultant to the Federal Communications Commission. In 2008-09, he served as executive director to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and was the lead drafter of its report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009). Professor Shane has been a visiting faculty member at the Boston College, Duke and Villanova Law Schools, and inaugurated the Visiting Foreign Chair for the University of Ghent Program in Foreign and Comparative Law in 2001.