S.J.D. Candidate
amorag [at] sjd.law.harvard.edu
Dissertation
The Law and Political Economy of Attention
The attention of consumers and citizens is a prerequisite for all communications, choices and transactions in the market and the public sphere. Firms and other social actors must obtain access to attention before they can sell goods and services, transmit information or engage in persuasion. To those actors, individuals’ attention is an extremely valuable resource, in part due to its scarcity and rivalry. At the same time, individual control of attention is a cognitive capacity at the heart of one’s ability to act rationally in pursuit of her interests. This gives rise to fundamental conflicts between competing interests surrounding control over attention, which play out in a political economy that increasingly subjects individuals’ attention to external control and commodification. In my research, I wish to uncover mechanisms of platform control over access to individuals’ attention, to understand how these mechanisms shape the distribution of power in the political economy, to trace the ways in which these mechanisms are configured by law, and to examine how different stakeholders strategically attempt to shape the law in order to gain advantages in struggles over attention.
Fields of Research and Supervisors
- Law, Political Economy and Technology with Professor Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School, Principal Faculty Supervisor
- Advertising, First Amendment and Intellectual Property Law with Professor Rebecca Tushnet, Harvard Law School
- The Behavioral Economics of Attention-Driven Markets with Professor Oren Bar-Gill, Harvard Law School
Additional Research Interests
- Law and Political Economy
- Information and Democracy
- Artificial Intelligence
Education
- Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2022 – Present
- Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program 2021-2022 (requirements fulfilled, degree waived)
- Tel Aviv University, Israel, LL.M. 2020
- Tel Aviv University, Israel, Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students 2015-2019
Representative Publications
- Eyal Benvenisti, & Amnon Morag, “Regulatory Capture and the Marginalized Majority: The Case for Constitutional Protection of the Majority’s Disposable Income“, 22 The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 171 (Dec 2019).
- Eyal Benvenisti & Amnon Morag, “The Right to Property and the Global Economy: The Political Economy of the Israeli Basic Law of 1992”, University of Haifa Journal of Law and Government (‘Mishpat Umimshal’) 22 (Feb 2021).
Last Updated: August 18th, 2022