Canadian Lawyer 4Students

* Q& A Adjunct professor Peter Jenkins teaches a course at Osgoode Hall Law School called Legal values: Law, ethics & social media. Offered for the second time in the winter 2014 term, it's a small first-year course open to 20 students, with five spots reserved for upper-year students. Jenkins spoke with 4Students assistant editor Heather Gardiner about the course. What is the course about? It defines social media in a broadly construed sense. It's not just the traditional things that come to mind when you think of social media, such as social networks [like] Facebook and micro blogs such as Twitter, but also other forms of social media broadly defined, such as collaborative projects [like] Wikipedia, content communities [like] YouTube, and even things like WikiLeaks. Then [there are] two types of virtual worlds: online social virtual worlds such as Second Life and online gaming virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft. So there's all different types of categories subsumed within the rubric of social media as a whole, not just social networks. How is social media connected to the law? Some of the major areas of the law that relate to social media are issues of defamation obviously, in the sense of some people who are victims of cyber stalking and trolling, and there you get into criminal law as well. There are issues of contract law in the sense of the terms of service that you click on when you enter a site. There are issues involving constitutional law, particularly privacy issues and freedom of speech issues. So it intersects with the law in many, many different ways. At the same time it's a bit of a feedback loop because not only do these legal issues affect social media, but social media affects the development of the law. It's fundamentally changing what our conception is of things like reasonable expectations of privacy and other basic legal concepts. C A N A D I A N Law yer 4 students fall 2013 11

• Cover