23 Facts About Jack Balkin

1.

Jack M Balkin was born on August 13,1956 and is an American legal scholar.

2.

Jack Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.

3.

Jack Balkin is a scholar of Constitutional and First Amendment law.

4.

Jack Balkin clerked for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

5.

Jack Balkin taught at the University of Missouri at Kansas City from 1984 to 1988 and at the University of Texas from 1988 to 1994.

6.

Jack Balkin has taught at Harvard University, New York University, Tel Aviv University, and Queen Mary College at the University of London.

7.

Jack Balkin was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and a Member of the American Law Institute in 2020.

8.

Jack Balkin argued that ideology is an effect of the "cultural software" or tools of understanding that become part of human beings and that are produced through the evolution and transmission of memes.

9.

Jack Balkin coined the term ideological drift to describe a phenomenon by which ideas and concepts change their political valence as they are introduced into new social and political contexts over time.

10.

Hence Jack Balkin claimed that legal argument has a self-similar "crystalline" or fractal structure.

11.

Jack Balkin argues that there is no contradiction between these approaches, properly understood.

12.

Jack Balkin uses the term "constitutional rot" to describe the process by which democracies become less responsive to public will and less devoted to the public good over time.

13.

Jack Balkin argues that the framers of the US Constitution believed that all republics would decay over time, and they designed the Constitution so that it could ride out periods of constitutional rot in the hopes of a later renewal of republican institutions.

14.

Jack Balkin argues that America's constitutional system evolves through the interplay between three cycles: the rise and fall of dominant political parties, the waxing and waning of political polarization, and alternating episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal.

15.

Jack Balkin explains that America's politics seems especially fraught because America is nearing the end of the Republican Party's long political dominance, is at the height of a long cycle of political polarization, and is suffering from an advanced case of constitutional rot.

16.

Jack Balkin argues that America is in a Second Gilded Age, and predicts that it is slowly moving toward a second Progressive Era.

17.

Jack Balkin argues that protection of freedom of speech in the digital age will increasingly rely less on judge-made doctrines of the First Amendment and more on legislation, administrative regulation, and technological design.

18.

Jack Balkin argues that we have moved beyond the traditional dyadic model of free expression in which nation states regulated the speech of their citizens.

19.

Jack Balkin coined the term "information fiduciary" to describe the legal and ethical obligations of digital businesses and social media companies.

20.

Jack Balkin argues that people must trust and depend on certain digital businesses and social media companies, and are especially vulnerable to them.

21.

Jack Balkin argues that digital information fiduciaries must act in a trustworthy fashion toward their end-users.

22.

Jack Balkin argues that the obligations of information fiduciaries and the duty not to be algorithmic nuisances are part of new laws of robotics.

23.

Jack Balkin argues that robotic and artificial intelligence technologies mediate relationships of power between different groups of people; therefore law must focus on regulating the people, firms, and social groups who use robots and artificial intelligence as much as on the technologies themselves.