Keeping Up with New Legal Titles

Reviews Safiya Umoja’s book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Baker discusses some of the main points of this book which covers the secrecy of commercial search algorithms and the issues of not understanding how these search engines process searches. The review also touches on the problems of racist classification of people and the misrepresentations in classifying people in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the bias in library discovery systems. Overall, Baker recommends this book for its dynamic discussion of classification systems and information structures and for use in advanced legal research courses when the instructor focuses on the benefits and risks associated with algorithmic technology.