When Fordham Law Professor Nestor M. Davidson moved to New York City eight years ago, hailing a taxi in the outer boroughs often amounted to a shared exercise in futility for him and other residents living outside Manhattan. Ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft have since transformed global transportation in densely populated cities such as New York, and in doing so have made Davidson’s travel life easier and his scholarly focus on urban law richer.
Davidson’s latest book, The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press), features reflections from numerous leading thinkers on how the sharing economy has shifted paradigms across a number of sectors, including in transportation and home sharing (e.g., Airbnb). The sharing economy is raising significant challenges for regulating these fast-moving, emerging models and for grappling with their implications in terms of the future of work, antidiscrimination, and consumer protection, among many other core concerns.
Davidson co-edited the book with John J. Infranca and Michèle Finck with whom he co-authored the chapter “The Place of the Sharing Economy.”
“The sharing economy not only raises questions about how cities are regulating and deploying technology but also leads to questions about consequences for data privacy, security, and intellectual property,” Davidson said.
Davidson is the Albert A. Walsh ’54 Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law and the faculty director of the Urban Law Center.