By looking at the nature of data that may be disclosed by governments, Harlan Yu and David Robinson provide an analytical framework that evinces the ambiguities underlying the term “open government data.” While agreeing with their core analysis, I contend that the authors ignore the enabling conditions under which transparency may lead to accountability, notably the publicity and political agency conditions. I argue that the authors also overlook the role of participatory mechanisms as an essential element in unlocking the potential for open data to produce better government decisions and policies. Finally, I conduct an empirical analysis of the publicity and political agency conditions in countries that have launched open data efforts, highlighting the challenges associated with open data as a path to accountability.

This Essay uses the opportunity to examine Roe v. Wade forty years after it was decided and Lawrence v. Texas ten years after it was decided as a platform from which to analyze the status of the civil rights paradigm in American law. A comparison of the two decisions illustrates an important and new point about how civil rights law is deployed to achieve very different goals.

What civil rights movements and arguments framed under the rubric of equality do best, and a project for which the law is perfectly suited, is ending de jure exclusions and categorical inequalities. The U.S. Supreme Court did precisely that in Lawrence and it may do that again in a marriage case in the near or distant future. What civil rights movements and equality arguments do not do so well is dismantling hierarchies. Roe is importantly different from Lawrence in part because it involved a far messier, more complex set of hierarchies than were present in the challenge to sodomy laws.

The decision in Roe triggered a massive countermobilization by antichoice advocates both inside and outside of the legal system. Claims of reproductive rights now seemingly languish in a political stalemate that has changed little in forty years. By contrast, Lawrence was litigated narrowly, carefully avoiding a challenge to other laws that criminalize consensual adult sexual acts. No conservatives are demanding its reversal, but lower courts have seized on the narrowness of its holding, making it less powerful in challenges to anti LGBT discrimination than was expected when the decision was announced. This Essay adds to the legal literature an explication of these points, and argues that the exclusion-hierarchy distinction provides a partial explanation of why today Lawrence seems a safe precedent, while Roe remains wobbly.

This Essay responds to an article by Hila Shamir previously published in the UCLA Law Review, in which she suggests that human rights has failed as a framework for addressing human trafficking and that instead a labor model would be more successful. Although her article identifies potentially important benefits of a labor perspective, the binary framework it establishes, pitting human rights and labor against each other¬, is counterproductive. Her article mischaracterizes the current antitrafficking framework and undervalues the importance of rights to a robust response to human trafficking. This Essay discusses the value of Professor Shamir’s labor paradigm and the role of human rights in antitrafficking responses. It then suggests that labor–based and human rights–based responses are not mutually exclusive, and that, ultimately, a successful response to human trafficking will need to incorporate strategies and methodologies from a range of perspectives.