Time: 1:00 - 3:00pm Venue: Room G5, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Registration details
The Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context is delighted to present this one-off workshop for graduate students by Visiting Professor Paul Schiff Berman, one of the world's leading theorists of the interaction between legal systems. Professor Berman will conduct the workshop on 'Legal Jurisdiction and the Deterritorialization of Social Life'. There is a paper to be read before the workshop - to register and receive a copy of the paper, please email Maks Del Mar: m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk. PhD students will be given priority, but LLM students are also welcome. Places are limited.
Social lives are increasingly unmoored from physical location. This deterritorialization arises in part from successive waves of technological innovation that have repeatedly transformed human conceptions of space, place, and proximity. Indeed, today electronic data—everything from e-mails and text messages to Facebook and Instagram posts to Twitter pronouncements to drone warfare data to search algorithms to financial transactions to cloud data storage—travels around the globe with little relationship to physical territory. In addition, all of this data is often in the custody and control of data intermediaries such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, private military contractors, and so on.
Three important consequences flow from this ubiquitous technology-enabled, data-driven global societal activity. First, the territorial location of data becomes increasingly arbitrary and substantively unimportant. Second, because of this deterritorialization of data, it will often be the case that territorially-based courts (or law enforcement authorities generally) are unable to easily enforce their decisions because those decisions require cooperation from relevant actors in far-flung communities. Third, as a direct result of the first two problems, governmental and judicial authorities are increasingly turning to multinational corporate data intermediaries to carry out and enforce their orders because only those companies have sufficient global reach to make legal rulings effective. But deputizing these intermediaries to become enforcement agents, while logical and possibly effective, raises new problems regarding the scope of governmental authority and the distortions involved in privatizing law enforcement.
This Seminar explores the deterritorialization of social life and considers a set of principles that might guide legal regimes considering these sorts of jurisdictional dilemmas in the data-driven era in which we find ourselves.
For directions to the venue, please refer to the map.
There is a paper to be read before the workshop - to register and receive a copy of the paper, please email Maks Del Mar: m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk. PhD students will be given priority, but LLM students are also welcome. Places are limited.
For more information on this event, please email lawevents@qmul.ac.uk.
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