Old Problems, New Media: Revenge Porn and the Law

by | Oct 11, 2015

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Interviewee: Ann Olivarius

Ann Olivarius is Senior Partner of McAllister Olivarius, an international law firm based in London. She has managed complex legal matters for over 25 years, focusing on both civil rights and corporate law. Her groundbreaking work was recognized by the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund which presented her with the Martha Stewart Miller Legal Challenge Award in 1992.|Ann Olivarius is Senior Partner of McAllister Olivarius, an international law firm based in London. She has managed complex legal matters for over 25 years, focusing on both civil rights and corporate law. Her groundbreaking work was recognized by the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund which presented her with the Martha Stewart Miller Legal Challenge Award in 1992.|Ann Olivarius is Senior Partner of McAllister Olivarius, an international law firm based in London. She has managed complex legal matters for over 25 years, focusing on both civil rights and corporate law. Her groundbreaking work was recognized by the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund which presented her with the Martha Stewart Miller Legal Challenge Award in 1992.

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Interviewee: Holly Jacobs

Dr. Holly Jacobs is the founder of Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and has previously served as the organization’s President and Executive Director.  She has a BA from Boston College in Psychology, and an MS and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Florida International University.  While obtaining her PhD, Dr. Jacobs served as a statistical consultant for three and a half years, advising clients on the set-up, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of their research. Her dissertation assessed the effects that job features and personal characteristics have on work engagement through the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety, and availability. While pursuing her graduate degrees, Dr. Jacobs became a victim of revenge porn when explicit photos and a video of her were distributed all over the Internet.  After several failed attempts to receive help from law enforcement, and discovering that there were very little resources for victims like herself, she launched the End Revenge Porn (ERP) campaign in August 2012. Through ERP, she and her colleagues provided support to thousands of other victims like herself, brought global attention to this issue, and advocated for legislation that would criminalize this behavior. A year after ERP’s launch, Dr. Jacobs started its parent organization CCRI, whose mission is to provide resources and advocacy for victims of online harassment. Dr. Jacobs has written articles about her experience as a victim and work as an advocate. She has also been interviewed on the Today Show, Katie Couric, Fox News, CNN, Al...

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Interviewee: Mary Anne Franks

Mary Anne Franks, Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair, is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights and technology. She teaches classes on criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, Second Amendment law, family law, and law and technology. Professor Franks is also an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy and an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project (ISP). Dr. Franks is the author of the award-winning book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Stanford Press, 2019). In 2020, she was awarded a grant from the Knight Foundation to support research for her second book, Fearless Speech (expected 2022). Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the California Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others. Dr. Franks has also authored numerous articles for the popular press, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. She has delivered more than a hundred lectures to a range of audiences around the world, including law schools, domestic violence organizations, law firms, and tech companies. She was named a member of the American Law Institute in October 2018. Dr. Franks is the President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted the first model...

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Interviewee: Erika Rackley

Erika Rackley’s principal research interests are in law, gender and feminism, with a particular focus judicial diversity and the nature of judging, feminist legal history and image-based sexual abuse (including ‘revenge porn’). Alongside her sole-authored research, she has co-led large collaborative, cross-disciplinary research projects including the Feminist Judgments Project (with Rosemary Hunter and Clare McGlynn) and, more recently, the Women’s Legal Landmarks Project (with Rosemary Auchmuty). Her individual and co-authored scholarship has shaped legislation and policy in the UK and has been widely cited by senior members of the national and international judiciary and in government, parliamentary and policy/NGO reports. It has been supported by research grants from the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust and Australian Research Council. In 2014 was awarded a Phillip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of her achievements and scholarship in the field of law. Erika regularly comments in the media and tweets at @erikarackley.

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Interviewee: Clare McGlynn

Clare McGlynn is a Professor of Law with particular expertise in the legal regulation of pornography, image-based sexual abuse (including ‘revenge porn’ and 'upskirting') and sexual violence. She qualified as a solicitor with City firm Herbert Smith Freehills and in 2020 was appointed an Honorary QC in recognition of her work championing equality for women in the legal profession and shaping new criminal laws on extreme pornography and image-based sexual abuse. She has held a Chair in Law at Durham Univerity since 2004 and has served as Deputy Head of the Law School and Deputy Head of the Faculty of Social Sciences (Research) from 2012-2015 when she had specific responsibility for diversity & equality, research strategy and the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014). She was a member of the University’s Taskforce on Sexual Violence , a member of the University’s governing body, University Council from 2014-2018 and from 2015-2019 the Director of the University's ESRC Impact Acceleration Account which provides funding and support for research impact across the social sciences. She has been appointed to the REF2021 Law Assessment Panel. She is a member of the UK Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel hearing appeals in cases of sexual misconduct, bullying and harassment.

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Interviewee: Lilian Edwards

Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. She worked at the University of Strathclyde from 1986–1988 and the University of Edinburgh from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at the University of Strathclyde, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at the University of Edinburgh. She resigned from that role in 2018 to take up a new Chair in Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University. She also has close links with the Oxford Internet Institute. She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law (Hart, 2018). She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper ("Slave to the Algorithm" with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT* in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy  where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a partner in the Horizon Digital Economy Hub at Nottingham, the lead for...

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Interviewer: Kira Allmann

Kira Allmann is the OxHRH Communications Director and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on digital inequality, exploring community-driven grassroots solutions to closing the digital divide. She leads several research projects, using ethnographic methods to study the role of community-owned internet networks, local digital skills training, and public internet access points in promoting digital inclusion. Kira is also a research partner of the Whose Knowledge? campaign, which works to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the web. She completed her DPhil in Oriental Studies (Islamic World) at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and also holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford) and a B.A. in Government and Linguistics (The College of William and Mary).

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Welcome to RightsUp, a podcast from the Oxford Human Rights Hub. We look at the big human rights issues of the day, bringing in new perspectives from all over the world by talking to experts, academics, practicing lawyers, activists and policy makers who are at the forefront of tackling these difficult issues.

RightsUp is brought to you by the Oxford Human Rights Hub, providing global perspectives on human rights (oxhrh.law.ox.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, with the support of a grant from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), a University of Oxford initiative that seeks to stimulate and support interdisciplinary research.

Written, produced and edited by: Dr Kira Allmann, Max Harris, and Laura Hilly
Music by Rosemary: Allmann.

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