Welcome to The Corner!
Hello and welcome to The Corner, the official blog of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology! For twenty-four years, VJOLT has published scholarship addressing questions of the law and its interaction with technology. Today, we are launching a blog to strengthen our (and your) voice.
To say a little about myself, I grew up in San Antonio, Texas and did my undergraduate studies at Texas A&M. I truly love Texas, and I couldn’t tell you what possessed me to come all the way to Virginia (other than that whole law school thing). My decision to leave Texas is even more unusual because Texas has the best Mexican-influenced food (sorry, California!), and San Antonio has the best of the best (take that, Austin!).
When it comes to the law, my first experiences came with an internship with a district attorney and through working at a small law firm. Since then, my career path has taken a definite turn towards public service in state and local government. Public interest law has been a consistently rewarding and positive experience, and that’s where I intend to start my career. This past summer, I fought Medicaid fraud while working for the Texas Attorney General. Admittedly, I can’t say it’s for everyone — I’ve gotten some weird looks when I talk about how “exciting” the work was — but the combination of complex litigation work and opportunity to protect resources meant to assist those in need made for a uniquely gratifying summer.
On the academic side of things, I’m a third-year law student at the University of Virginia. I entered law school with a general interest in digital privacy. Through my coursework, that general interest has developed into something like a passion for new developments in the Fourth Amendment, such as how statutes such as the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act can be interpreted or amended to handle challenges presented by technologies that have emerged since their passage. From how antitrust law applies to social media companies, to handling the emerging phenomenon of deep-fakes, there’s so much to be said about how the law functions in these areas to ensure beneficial and secure uses of technology.
And that is where this blog comes into play. The blog format itself provides exciting opportunities that a traditional academic publication usually doesn’t offer. That gives us (and our readers) some serious advantages. We can add small building-blocks to complex, newly-emerging scholarly questions, such as the privacy questions involved in digital COVID contact tracing; those questions that don’t require a 10,000-word article, but still need to be addressed, or new questions that need to be taken piece-by-piece instead of all at once. And for those just starting out in academic writing, a shorter, less-formal piece will be more manageable to write and easier to prepare for publication. To add to all of that, our format will be less strict, allowing us to address issues through interviews and other media that a traditional journal publication couldn’t use. In short, this is the perfect place for submissions by professors who want to write something shorter than an academic article, practitioners who want to comment on new developments in their field, students with an interest in law and technology, and everyone in between.
Again, welcome! If you have any questions or you’re interested in writing a featured post, feel free to email me at thecorner@vjolt.org, and we’ll go from there!