Margot E. Kaminski

Margot E. Kaminski, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, received the 10th Annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers (PPM) Award from the Future of Privacy Forum. This award recognizes leading privacy scholarship that is relevant to policymakers in the U.S. Congress, at U.S. federal agencies, and for data protection authorities abroad.

Kaminski and her coauthor, Gianclaudio Malgieri, will present their winning paper, “,” to policymakers, academics, and industry privacy professionals at the U.S. Senate in February.

"U.S. lawmakers at both the federal and state level have recently proposed using 'algorithmic impact assessments' to mitigate AI bias and discrimination. Our paper provides a close look at how this policy tool might work in Europe, including significant suggestions for policymakers in other countries."

The paper addresses how a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) links the two faces of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) approach to algorithmic accountability: individual rights and systemic collaborative governance. Kaminski and Malgieri address the relationship between DPIAs and individual transparency rights, and propose that impact assessments link the GDPR’s two methods of governing algorithmic decision making by both providing systemic governance and serving as an important “suitable safeguard” (Art. 22) of individual rights.

"U.S. lawmakers at both the federal and state level have recently proposed using 'algorithmic impact assessments' to mitigate AI bias and discrimination," Kaminski said. "Our paper provides a close look at how this policy tool might work in Europe, including significant suggestions for policymakers in other countries."

Kaminski joined the Colorado Law faculty in 2017 and serves as director of the Privacy Initiative at Colorado Law’s . She specializes in the law of new technologies, focusing on information governance, privacy, and freedom of expression. Her recent work has examined autonomous systems, including AI, robots, and drones (UAS). In 2018, she researched comparative and transatlantic approaches to data privacy in the Netherlands and Italy as a recipient of the Fulbright-Schuman Innovation Grant.

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University of Colorado Law School Associate Professor was one of 13 faculty members across the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus selected to participate in the Research & Innovation Office's (RIO) 2020 Faculty Fellows cohort.

Established in 2018, the Faculty Fellows program supports CU �鶹ӰԺ’s most promising faculty in achieving their research goals and promotes collaboration by "shrinking the campus." This is done by cultivating a community of diverse, creative research leaders to help drive collaboration and innovation across the university, and includes a series of intensive research leadership retreats. Chen is the first law professor to participate.

The 2020 cohort includes faculty from the College of Engineering and Applied Science, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Leeds School of Business, and reflects the diversity of expertise, research, scholarship, and creative works taking place across campus.

Chen is the faculty director of Colorado Law’s Immigration and Citizenship Law Program and holds faculty affiliations in the departments of political science and ethnic studies. Her research examines the role of federal regulatory agencies in promoting the integration of immigrants and racial minorities into U.S. society. She is the author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era, which will be published in 2020 by Stanford University Press.

"Immigration law is undergoing rapid change and is a ripe area for scholarly engagement. I’m excited to join the RIO Faculty Fellows so that I can gain skills and opportunities to extend the reach of my research and elevate the public discourse. Many thanks to those at CU who supported my selection and believe that scholarship can make a positive public impact," Chen said.

Read the announcement from RIO.

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The University of Colorado Law School is pleased to announce that Professor Helen Norton will deliver the Norton will speak on "The Government’s Speech and the Constitution" on Tuesday, Dec. 3 at 5:30 p.m. in Wittemyer Courtroom. The Scott Lecture is presented annually by a member of the faculty engaged in a significant scholarly project selected by the dean.

Drawing on her new book, The Government’s Speech and the Constitution, published by Cambridge University Press, Norton will discuss the uses and abuses of the government’s expressive powers through the lens of constitutional law.

Governments must speak in order to govern, and so governments have been speaking for as long as there have been governments--from early proclamations and simple pamphlets, to the electronic media of radio and television, and ultimately to today’s digital age, Norton explains. When does the speech of this unusually powerful speaker violate our constitutional rights and liberties? And under what circumstances does the Constitution prohibit our government from lying to us? Norton will discuss how the government’s speech has changed the world for better and for worse, and why the government’s speech deserves our attention—and at times our concern.

This event is approved for one general CLE credit.

When: Tuesday, Dec. 3, 5:30 p.m.
Where: Wittemyer Courtroom, University of Colorado Law School
Cost: Free

Registration is not required to attend the lecture.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact lawevents@colorado.edu or (303) 492-8048.

The Austin W. Scott Jr. lecture is named for Austin Scott, a member of the law school faculty for 20 years. He was a beloved teacher as well as a prolific writer. His scholarly work was in the fields of criminal law and procedure. In 1973, former Colorado Law Dean Don W. Sears established the lecture series in his memory. Each year, the dean of the law school selects a member of the faculty engaged in a significant scholarly project to lecture on his or her research.

about the Austin W. Scott Jr. Lecture.

More about Helen Norton

Professor , who holds the Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Chair in Constitutional Law, focuses her teaching and scholarship on constitutional and civil rights law. Before entering academia, she served as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton administration. Her constitutional law scholarship has appeared in the Duke Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, and the Supreme Court Review, among other journals.

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On Friday, Nov. 1, Professor Anna Spain Bradley delivered the keynote address at the 13th annual Colorado Bar Association’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Conference in Denver. Her talk, "," addressed how current and future global trends will influence the practice and profession of ADR and the key skills and competencies that arbitrators, mediators, negotiators, lawyers, and other ADR professionals should have to prepare for the coming changes. She emphasized the importance of understanding identity and diversity in a global world.

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"At its core, constitutional law addresses the uses and abuses of government power. This includes the uses and abuses of the government’s expressive powers," Norton said. "When we see or hear the terms 'government' and 'speech' in close proximity, we often think of the constitutional issues triggered when the government regulates our expression. In this book I focus on the constitutional issues raised when the government itself is doing the talking."

"When we see or hear the terms 'government' and 'speech' in close proximity, we often think of the constitutional issues triggered when the government regulates our expression. In this book I focus on the constitutional issues raised when the government itself is doing the talking."

Professor Helen Norton

Norton, who holds the Rothgerber Chair in Constitutional Law at Colorado Law, focuses her teaching and scholarship on constitutional and civil rights law. Before entering academia, she served as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton administration. Her constitutional law scholarship has appeared in the Duke Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, and the Supreme Court Review, among other journals.

Q: First, let’s start with a definition. How do you define government speech?

When I talk about the government’s speech, I’m referring to the speech of a governmental body like an agency or congressional committee (think of the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of tobacco) as well as the speech of an individual who speaks when backed by the government’s power (like the attorney general announcing official policy or a police officer interrogating a suspect).

Q: How is speech by the government different from when anyone else speaks?

The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power, its enormous resources, its often privileged access to key information, and its wide variety of expressive roles. The government speaks not only as sovereign, but also as employer, as educator, as property owner, as commander-in-chief, and in many other roles. For all these reasons, the government’s speech has unusual potential for great value as well as great harm.

Q: Why does the government’s speech deserve our attention right now?

The government’s speech can serve, or instead threaten, democracy. We need to empower our government to operate effectively to serve and protect us, even while we need to limit its power to harm us. Think of governmental threats that silence dissenters as effectively as jailing them, or governmental lies that pressure their targets into abandoning their constitutional rights as effectively as denying those rights outright. These concerns are as important now as they’ve ever been.

Q: Are there ever instances when the government can lie to its citizens? Under what circumstances?

The government’s lies, like our own, can be complicated. Sometimes the government tells lies in hopes of achieving important public objectives: think of undercover police officers’ falsehoods about their identities, which are told to discover and stop wrongdoing. But of course, the government’s lies sometimes inflict devastating injuries—for example, when the government lies to the public to avoid legal or political accountability or to justify certain military actions. This requires us to wrestle with hard questions about when we can effectively challenge those lies through constitutional litigation and when we must instead rely solely on political action like protesting and voting.

Q: You’ve written extensively about free speech as it relates to artificial intelligence, employers, and the government. What inspired you to write this book about government speech?

I’ve worked for the government myself when I helped lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division during the Clinton administration, so I have some experience with the challenges and benefits that come with speaking for the government. After I entered academia, my early work in this area focused on the value and importance of the government’s speech so long as its governmental source is made clear to the public. As the years passed, I also became interested in the dark side of the government’s speech—in other words, the government’s destructive expressive choices. This led me to wonder whether and when the Constitution limits the government’s speech. This book represents my efforts to describe and analyze the tensions between these two sides of the government speech coin.

Q: How has writing the book influenced your future scholarship?

Thinking about the constitutional rules that apply, or should apply, to the government’s speech invites lots of important and challenging questions both about the nature of speech and the nature of government. It requires us to expose our views about how government does and should work, and our views about how speech does and should work. What value does the government’s speech offer, what dangers does the government’s speech threaten—and does the Constitution protect us from those dangers? These are questions that I’ll continue to explore.

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On Sept. 25, Professor Anna Spain Bradley delivered the keynote address at the annual in Westminster, Colorado. Her presentation focused on understanding judicial behavior and decision-making through insights about human cognition and neuroscience, building off her 2018 article "," published in the U.C. Irvine Law Review.

Pictured: Professor Spain Bradley with the Hon. David Welch, Chief Administrative Law Judge, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Washington, D.C.

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, professor and Ira C. Rothgerber, Jr. Chair in Constitutional Law, will present her paper, "Discrimination and the Speech That Enables It," at an Oct. 25 symposium at the University of Chicago titled "What’s the Harm? The Future of the First Amendment."

An abstract of the paper is as follows:

"Speech sometimes enables illegal discrimination. Think, for example, of an employer’s or landlord’s statement that 'Whites Only Need Apply.' Or an employer’s harassing speech that creates a hostile workplace environment, thus changing the terms and conditions of employment in discriminatory ways. Or employers who ask about candidates’ pregnancy, religion, or disability; landlords who ask about prospective tenants’ sexual orientation or marital status; and health insurers who ask about applicants’ genetic history.

This paper examines how the antiregulatory turn in the Court’s contemporary free speech doctrine threatens legislatures’ constitutional power to address stubborn equality problems. Consider, more specifically, the many federal, state, and local antidiscrimination laws that not only prohibit employers, insurers, lenders, and other decisionmakers from considering certain characteristics when making decisions about important life opportunities but also go on to regulate those decisionmakers’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class status. These provisions aim to discourage illegal discrimination on the front end by preventing decisionmakers from asking questions eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. Although the First Amendment implications of these provisions have received little attention to date, these laws are now increasingly under constitutional attack from corporate and other commercial entities that seek -- with growing success -- to insulate their speech from regulation.

This paper explains how the government’s regulation of speech that informs or otherwise facilitates the speaker’s discriminatory conduct can further both equality and free speech values. It identifies the relationship between an antisubordination understanding of certain equality law questions and a listener-centered approach to certain First Amendment questions: both attend to asymmetries of information and power in justifying legislatures’ efforts, both longstanding and new, to address important problems of inequality. It thus offers theoretical and doctrinal explanations for how and why the First Amendment sometimes permits the government to regulate decisionmakers’ speech that enables illegal discrimination."

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People applying for U.S. citizenship have seen application wait times double since 2016, according to a from the Colorado State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) prepared in part by University of Colorado Law School faculty and students. 

The increased wait times are contributing to a backlog of more than 700,000 naturalization applications, impacting applicants’ civil rights, including their ability to vote in the 2020 election, according to the committee’s report. The report draws on committee research and a hearing it held at Colorado Law in February.

, a Colorado Law associate professor and faculty director of the school’s Immigration and Citizenship Law Program, served as project director and contributed to the report, along with several of her Colorado Law students. 

"Naturalizing is an important step in America, and impediments on the ability to naturalize have negative consequences for civil rights, voting rights and the democratic process. That is a key concern for the state advisory committee and the commission," Chen said. "Yet naturalization is about more than elections. It is about civic engagement and belonging in America."

U.S. immigration officials have had a backlog of naturalization applications before. Historically, they occur partly because applications rise ahead of election years. However, Chen said the backlog last cleared in 2006 and the present backlog is unprecedented in size and still growing. Colorado’s backlog growth, with 9,325 applications in the queue, is one of the worst in the country.

Nationally, the committee found processing times have jumped from an average 5.6 months in 2016 to 10.1 months in early 2019. 

Wait times vary by U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices around the country, but the Denver Field Office, for example, has an average wait of 10 months and wait times can range from 9.5 months to 20 months. USCIS is mandated by statute to decide on applications with 120 days.

Wait times could be even longer than the numbers suggest. An American Immigration Lawyers Association survey found roughly 45% of applicants at the Denver Field Office experienced processing times longer than published times. A potential contributor: about 77% of survey respondents reported an increased rate of Requests for Evidence following initial naturalization interviews. 

The committee report also pointed to several recent policy changes that might be causing delays, such as increased background check requirements for military naturalizations.

"There is a pattern of rising naturalization applications preceding elections. One striking thing we found is that naturalization applications, at least in Colorado, have returned to pre-election levels," said Chen. "But the processing times and backlogs are still very high."

The Colorado State Advisory Committee, of which Chen is a member, recommends USCIS look at new policies and technologies to streamline their processes, while maintaining standards. They also recommend Congress hold USCIS accountable to the 120-day processing timeline.

Further Reading

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story cited the U.S. naturalization application backlog clearing in 2015. The backlog last cleared in 2006.

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