Research network

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard

Project description

Everyone is talking about “artificial intelligence” (AI) these days. And for good reason: AI is the driving force behind the ever-accelerating digital revolution that is affecting all areas of life. The research project “The normative order of artificial intelligence” is building a research network that addresses three sets of questions:

1. “Normative orders in AI?
What are the inherent normative orders of AI applications? Or what should they be?

2. normative reorganizations through AI?
How does AI (or its immanent normative orders) transform our existing normative orders? Or how should the latter be transformed by the former?

3. normative reorganizations of AI?
Can AI be regulated by external normative regulatory postulates – in particular by law? Or how should it be regulated and thus reorganized?

These questions are intertwined. For example, it can be critically observed that AI is neither an independent entity nor rational or objective in itself – contrary to corresponding misrepresentations or simplifications. Rather, it can represent a veritable (political, economic, cultural, etc.) instrument of power with immanent biases (complex of questions “Normative orders in AI?”). These biases can perpetuate existing (e.g. political, economic or social) asymmetries, perpetuate existing discrimination and make the quantification of the social appear to have no alternative. Soshana Zuboff, for example, sees all of this as ushering in the age of surveillance capitalism (question complex “Normative reorganizations through AI?”). In order to counteract this, the basic normative configuration of the corresponding AI applications would have to be changed (set of questions “Normative reorganizations of AI?”).

Events:

Program in the winter semester 2020/21

Lecture series “Shifting power through algorithms and AI”

Program in the winter semester 2019/20

Workshop
May 7 and 8, 2020
First Finnish-German Workshop on Foundational Matters of Criminal Law & Justice

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend
Building Normative Orders, Room 5.01
The event is canceled!

Lecture series “Liability Law and Artificial Intelligence”

Program in the summer semester 2019*

April 16, 2019, 4.15 p.m., 4.101 RuW, Uni Campus Westend
AI as the end of criminal law?
Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard (GU Frankfurt / Normative Orders)

April 30, 2019, 4.15 p.m., 4.101 RuW, Uni Campus Westend
Algorithmic Sentencing
Prof. Vincent Chiao, Ph.D. (University of Toronto)

May 21, 2019, 4.15 p.m., 4.101 RuW, Uni Campus Westend
Digitalization and criminal law – new perspectives
Prof. Dr. Dr. Eric Hilgendorf (University of Würzburg)

July 10, 2019, 8 p.m., 5.01 EXNO, University Campus Westend
Autonomous technical systems – new subjects of attribution for criminal law?
PD Dr. Boris Burghardt (HU Berlin / Fritz Bauer Institute)

*In cooperation with the Tuesday Seminar of the Institute for Criminal Sciences and Philosophy of Law

Further events and cooperations

June 6, 8 p.m., FKH Bad Homburg
Public lecture at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (FKH):
Criminal jurisdiction through algorithms?
Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard (GU Frankfurt, Normative Orders)

July 12, 2019, 6 p.m., cinema of the DFF, Frankfurt
In the series Talking About a Revolution:
Can robots be authors? A conversation about copyright and artificial intelligence around the films of Jan Bot
Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger / Prof. Dr. Alexander Peukert (both GU Frankfurt / Normative Orders)

July 16, 2019, 8:15 p.m., DFF Cinema, Frankfurt
In the series Talking About a Revolution:
Is cinema distorting AI? A conversation about privacy, IT trust and representation based on The Circle
Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger / Prof. Dr. Christoph Burchard (both GU Frankfurt / Normative Orders)

September 19 to 21, 2019, FKH Bad Homburg
Bad Homburg Conference 2019
Artificial intelligence – How can we trust algorithms?

Publication

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Beatrice Brunhöber

Project description

The increasing mechanization and digitalization of our lives means that more and more personal data is being collected. Ubiquitous computing means that all the technical devices we use, from smartphones to cars, also record and process information about us. On the other hand, it is becoming increasingly easy to collect, archive and evaluate information. The keywords here are big data and artificial intelligence. This often awakens desires for analysis beyond what is authorized and carries the risk of misuse of sensitive data.

Since the 1980s, data protection has therefore been a topic that has not only occupied public debate, but also legal scholarship. In Germany, the debate began with the protests against a planned census, the legal basis of which the Federal Constitutional Court declared partially unconstitutional in 1983. In the census ruling, the court developed the German version of a fundamental data protection right: the right to informational self-determination. Today, debates are not only dominated by criticism of state intervention, for example through data retention. The question of how to deal with private companies’ hunger for data is also increasingly coming to the fore. In jurisprudence, both problem areas have so far been discussed primarily in public law and private law. As a result, questions as to whether and to what extent the “data subject” should be protected under criminal law have so far played almost no role. The research project will close this gap.

The special feature of this subject area is that, unlike the majority of criminal law, the normative requirements for data protection under criminal law do not (or cannot) coincide with traditional values – as is the case with homicide and assault offenses, for example. This is because it is a relatively new phenomenon that is difficult to access in terms of moral or ethical values and, in view of its international dimension, is in any case exposed to a wide variety of “data cultures”. It is therefore an area in which normative orders are only just beginning to develop. The research project will examine their development in an interdisciplinary manner, so that concrete technical developments, philosophical findings as well as sociological and historical approaches can be included. In this way, social and economic analyses of the information society can be used to work out what is at stake from a legal perspective, in particular which conflicts and which claims need to be reconciled.

It is becoming apparent that data protection through criminal law is not about protecting all data from misuse or destruction, as one might think at first glance (e.g. protection against hacking of company data). If one places the topic in the context of information law and critically reconstructs the genesis of data protection, it should become clear that it is much more about protecting the individual from personal injury when third parties handle personal information.

Based on these analyses, it is possible to identify the criminal provisions that fall under data protection law. These are criminal provisions that essentially protect the right to informational self-determination. In particular, provisions that prohibit the secret recording of words and images or the disclosure of personal information must be taken into account. This ranges from the protection of the violation of patient confidentiality to the prohibition of “cyberbullying”.

The project focuses on the analysis of such “data-protecting” criminal provisions. With recourse to the aforementioned social and economic analyses, it is also necessary to examine whether there has been an over-criminalization in areas of data protection or whether criminal law protection falls short. To this end, an independent, genuinely constitutional assessment standard is developed that differs from the conventional criminal law approach. In this way, the normative purpose of the “data-protecting” criminal provisions can be worked out more clearly and the basis for a constitutionally-oriented interpretation of the criminal provisions can be laid: It is about protecting the right to self-determined handling of personality-relevant information.

The project was already started at the Humboldt University in Berlin with the habilitation thesis submitted there and incorporated into the Cluster of Excellence. The publication of the book requires extensive updates and additions because developments are rushing ahead in both technical and legal terms, as shown, for example, by the fact that the European General Data Protection Regulation has now come into force. The publication of the book will be accompanied and supplemented by a series of events at Goethe University on “Digitalization and Law”.

Publication:
Beatrice Brunhöber, Der strafrechtliche Schutz der informationellen Selbstbestimmung, Mohr Siebeck Verlag, series “Jus Poenale”, Tübingen, probably 2020 (forthcoming).

Event:
Series of events together with Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann at the Goethe University Frankfurt: “Digitalization and Law” probably in the summer semester 2020 (The series will be postponed!)

Workshop and Publication

Project leader: Prof. Nicole Deitelhoff

Project description

The state-led, UN-based process for finding norms for responsible behavior in cyberspace is currently deemed to have collapsed, following the failure of the UN’s Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) to produce an outcome document at their June 2017 meeting.

The primary bone of contention is whether International Law such as the right to self-defense (Art. 51 UNC) is applicable to cyberattacks. Another fundamental tension lies between the Chinese and Russian principle of “cyber sovereignty” – i.e. full state control over the Internet within state borders – and the US-led and Western approach of multistakeholder governance – meaning the current less centralized system of internet regulation through corporate interests, civil society, research institutes, and government institutions.

In the face of this impasse at the state level, IT firms have emerged as vocal and proactive norm entrepreneurs. Private actors have a claim – and perhaps even an obligation – to set cyber policy and norms due to (1) the ongoing unregulated nature of the internet and (2) their superior technical expertise. Remarkably, Microsoft has called for a “Digital Geneva Convention” to protect civilians from cyberattacks, united 70+ IT firms under the “Cybersecurity Tech Accord,” and has most recently partnered with France to launch the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace” for states, civil society, and firms. Siemens has started similar initiatives.
This research project aims to explore this move towards corporate norm entrepreneurship in cyberspace, and to broaden it as a nascent academic field. The International Relations (IR) literatures on (1) corporate norm entrepreneurship and (2) areas of limited statehood can inform this analysis and help systematize the field, as can scholarship from International (humanitarian) law and cyber studies. With this focus on cyberspace and the changing condition for the generation of normative orders, the envisaged project contributes directly to research field II on medial and digital transformations of normative orders and the cross-cutting theme on Law.
From the original “Digital Geneva Convention” proposal to its important role in crafting the “Paris Call” alongside France, Microsoft has not only pursued a seat at the table, but the seat at the head of the table. In this, the company certainly has been successful – Microsoft, Facebook and Google portray themselves on equal footing with states and international institutions. However, corporate press releases indicate that the provisions of Microsoft’s initiatives seem to be neither shared nor understood among their addressees – casting some initial doubt on the project’s prospects for success.

Workshop
Further information will follow

Field research and publication

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara

Project description

The following project focuses on the interface between migration and the media. In the current debate about normative orders in Western democracies, the issue of migration is of particular importance. However, it should be noted that migration, regardless of whether it is viewed positively or negatively, is understood as a unidirectional process. Migrants cross natural borders, such as the Mediterranean and/or the Sahara, in order to reach their final destination.

For people from the Sahel, however, these borders do not divide them, but unite them. Sahel means the “shores of the Sahara”. The Sahel connects the people of the savannah with those in North Africa and beyond. The word teraano (those who are on the move) has become established in the Soninka language for the people who move in the space between the shores. It was originally used to describe the travelers who crossed the Sahara (Ibn Battuta [around 1355] 1982, Barth 1857-1859, Johannes Leo Africanus 1550, Farias 2003). This is not about migration with a clear destination, but rather about a constant dynamic of going and returning. This dynamic combines mobility and communication that bridges geographical spaces, which John Urry (2007: 12) describes as an “infrastructure of social life”. An infrastructure that enables the movement of people, ideas, information from place to place, from person to person, from event to event (ibid). For Africa, a number of studies have been published that shed light on people on the move and the importance of media for the dissemination of information (de Bruijn, van Dijk (eds.) 2012, Hahn 2012, Nyamnjoh 2014). These studies are ethnographically centered. However, they neglect the global dimension of the phenomenon.

One approach to closing this gap is my own preliminary work with West African business people in Southeast Asia since 2010. These teraano are traveling both “by camel” and by plane. They are based in offices and apartments in Bangkok and Jakarta. With the help of their cell phones, they turn night into day by not adapting to the daily rhythm in Asia, but instead orienting themselves to day and night in Africa. They use their smartphones to do business, spread news from the village, keep in touch with family members, friends and acquaintances and business partners who are in the Sahel or (almost) anywhere else in the world. The media and digital applications used by these actors thus correspond to a fait social total (Maus 1923-1924), which determines not only the technical dimension of their existence, but also their social one. Their example can be used to examine the complexity of local media and their profound transformation. The study has a historical dimension in that it addresses the change from direct oral communication, via professional letter writers in the Sahel, via telegram and telephone to the smartphone and its applications. By focusing on the actions of African businessmen in Southeast Asia, insights are gained into the interface between media and migration, which help to shed light on the communicative nature of normative orders.

References:
Barth, Heinrich
1857-1858 Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855. Tagebuch einer im Auftrag der Britischen Regierung unternommenen Reise. 5 volumes. Gotha: Justus Perthes.
Battûta, Ibn
1982 Voyages III. Inde, Extrême-Orient, Espagne and Soudan. Paris.
Bruijn, Mirjam de; Dijk, Rijk van
2012 The social life of connectivity in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Moraes Farias, Paulo Fernando
2003 Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History. Fontes Historiae Africanae, new series. Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy.
Hahn, Hans Peter
2012 “Mobile Phones and the Transformation of Society: Talking about Criminality and the Ambivalent. Perception of new ICT in Burkina Faso.” In: African Identities, 46:1-12.
Johannes Leo Africanus
1550 La descrittione dell’Africa. In: Giovan Battista Ramusio (ed.): Primo volume, et Seconda editione delle Navigationi et Viaggi.
Nyamnjoh, Henrietta Mambo
2014 Bridging mobilities. Bamenda: Langaa & African Studies Center.
Urry, John
2007 Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
De Moraes Farias, Paulo Fernando
2003 Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History. Fontes Historiae Africanae, new series. Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy.
Hahn, Hans Peter
2012 “Mobile Phones and the Transformation of Society: Talking about Criminality and the Ambivalent. Perception of new ICT in Burkina Faso.” In: African Identities, 46:1-12.
Johannes Leo Africanus
1550 La descrittione dell’Africa. In: Giovan Battista Ramusio (ed.): Primo volume, et Seconda editione delle Navigationi et Viaggi.
Nyamnjoh, Henrietta Mambo
2014 Bridging mobilities. Bamenda: Langaa & African Studies Center.
Urry, John
2007 Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

International Conference and Publication

Project leader: Prof. Vinzenz Hediger

Project description

Cinema has been discussed as the paradigmatic cultural space of modern (mass) democracy by thinkers as different and far apart as Siegfried Kracauer, who developed an alternative to the bourgeois fear of masses and mass art in his criticism from the 1920s and his film books, and Alain Badiou, who cast cinema as a “democratic emblem” in an essay published in 2005. But how do modernization and democracy relate to cinema in a moment of the supposed crisis of (modern liberal) democracy? With a focus on three case studies of new players in the global cultural economy, all of which combine the emergence of a popular cinema with the (relative) consolidation of liberal democracy – India, Nigeria and South Korea -, this project argues that cinema, and particularly popular cinema, configures the demos in modern democracies by articulating and dramatizing the conflicts and crises of democratic polities, while developing a significant appeal beyond the geographical and political boundaries of these polities.

Among the most remarkable developments of the last thirty years in world cinema has been the emergence a number of new global players, i.e. thriving and market driven rather than state sponsored cinema industries with an international reach, operating below and beyond the confines of the American film industry’s continuing dominance of global middle class film consumption. Enabled by new digital technologies of production and distribution, these new global players include most notably the various Indian film industries, including, but not limited to, Hindi or so-called “Bollywood” cinema; South Korea; and Nigeria. While the Indian cinema industry has dominated its home market since the introduction of sound in the early 1930s and has consistently found an audience in Non Resident Indian or NRI diaspora communities as well as in the Middle East since the 1950s, Indian cinema’s globalized presence coincides with the country’s market liberalization policies in the 1990s. These, in turn, are part of the second wave of globalization after the end of the Cold Ward, which involves, most notably, the emergence of a new world trade system around the GATT treaties and the establishment of the WTO. South Korea’s film industry, which is now one of the dominant cultural industries in East Asia with a strong presence in global pop culture, began its rise in the 1990s and emerged from a policy of market liberalization, combined with tax incentives that induced the Chaebols, the large industrial conglomerates, to enter film production. The Nigerian video industry, which has an output of around 1000 feature films per year and has an audience across Africa and in African diasporas in the Americas, Europe and Asia, emerges out of a situation of economic crisis and in response to the complete collapse of state sponsored film production in the country in the 1980s.
Broadly speaking, to all three cases applies what film critic and scholar Meena Pillai argues in her work on Malayalam (Kerala) cinema:

“As earlier notions of kinship and identity based on clans, natal homes and blood relations disintegrated with the rise of industrialization, spread of Western education and more individualistic and capitalistic modes of production and consumption, there was a need for forms of art and thoughts that could bring together the newly liberated individuals and mobilize them into a new collective. Cinema was inextricably caught in this task of imagining a stable and viable national/subnational community.” (Raghavendra 2017, 267)

What is more, the rise and global reach of a self-sustaining, market driven cinema industry coincides in all three cases with the emergence and consolidation of or the transition to liberal democracy. As historians Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee and Adiya Mukerjee argue, the mass movement of resistance against colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries in India was “influenced deeply by democratic thought and traditions of the Enlightenment” and “succeeded in making democracy and civil liberty basic elements of the Indian political ethos”, establishing India as the largest democracy in the world after its liberation from British rule in 1947. (Chandra, Mukherjee, Mukherjee 2008, 28) While governed by authoritarian rulers and military dictatorships until the 1980s and 1990s, both South Korea and Nigeria have since evolved into relatively stable liberal democracies, if by liberal democracy we understand a political system in which parties loose elections and accept the result, and in which no section or fraction of society dominates the political system permanently at the expense of other sections. (Lefort 1991)
These parallel histories are all the more remarkable as they unfold against the backdrop of a growing sense of crisis of Western liberal democracy. In the United States, for instance, still the dominant player in the global economy of cinema, this crisis plays out as a conflict between two competing visions of egalitarianism and two concomitant and mutually exclusive conceptions of democracy: an inclusive democracy based on the notion of the continuous expansion of equal civil rights, and an exclusive, ethnic or racial democracy in the tradition of John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson, in which equality is the equality of “white” people, combined with the selective attribution and revocation of civil rights based on ethnicity. One can argue that this conflict, which has marked the history of American Democracy since the 1830s and through the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, has now engulfed the American political system in its entirety, with Barack Obama, the first black president, being the emblematic figure of the first and Trump, who replaced the portrait of president Lincoln in the Oval Office with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the epitome of the second type of mass democracy. One can further argue that since its inception, and particularly since the emergence of the feature film, cinema has been a privileged site for the articulation of this conflict. The first full-length feature film produced in American, D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” from 1914, celebrates the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, while the representation, or rather – non-representation – of non-“white” people in American cinema has been a matter of contention and public debate throughout the 20th century.
Against the backdrop of the literature on questions of representation and the experience of mass democracy in American cinema, and drawing on more recent work on non-Western cinemas, this project looks at the three cases of India, South Korea and Nigeria in a comparative perspective and inquires into the relationship of cinema and democracy under the conditions of a globalized economy. The exploratory claim of the project is that, rather than contributing to a process of “undoing the demos”, cinema, through its broad appeal and wide reach, has a privileged role in configuring the demos in modern democracies, dramatizing the conflict and articulating the potentials, but also the pathologies of modern democratic polities.

References
Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, India Since Independence. Revised and Updated edition, New Delhi: Penguin India 2008, 28.
Lefort, Claude, Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press 1991.
Raghavendra, M.K. (ed.), Beyond Bollywood. The Cinemas of South India, New Dehli: Harper Collins India 2017, 267.

Configuring the Demos: Cinema, the Global Digital Economy, and the Crisis of Democracy
International Conference

International workshop

Project managers: Prof. Dr. Rainer Klump and Prof. Dr. Darrel Moellendorf

Project description

The normative foundations of economic policy no longer play a significant role in the mainstream of modern economic research. There are neither outstanding publications and debates on the subject, nor are there any sustained tendencies to (re)include a compulsory subject “economic policy” in the curriculum of basic economics education, which was removed from the compulsory canon as superfluous in the course of the Bologna reforms. One can regret this development because it means that many bridges from economics to the social sciences and humanities remain broken, or because there is a widespread feeling outside economics that the causes of the 2008 financial crisis have not been adequately addressed within the discipline. However, it is also possible to trace and critically discuss the developments inherent in science that have caused or facilitated the disappearance of an independent doctrine of (normative) economic policy in economics.

The project will focus on the latter. It examines how and why all traditional justifications for active economic policy intervention within the economic sciences have been called into question over the last 50 years. It demonstrates how this development has been accompanied by processes of globalization, privatization and deregulation, which ultimately also formed a central cause of the global financial and economic crisis from 2008 onwards. Finally, it develops clues as to what a new theory of (normative) economic policy could look like that provides answers to the challenges of the 21st century such as digitalization or climate change.
The project follows on from the reflections on the conflict between self-interest and common good orientation in economics, which have been a characteristic of market-based capitalist economic systems since the early modern period. While Klump / Pilz (2018) analyzed the emergence of the self-interest orientation in the 16th century and placed it in the context of the history of ideas, Klump / Wörsdorfer (2011) examined the normative foundations of ordoliberalism in the first half of the 20th century. Wörsdörfer (2014) has also dealt with the development of the modern economic curriculum, but did not address the normative foundations of economic policy.

Motivation
In the traditional theory of economic policy, as it was presented and taught until around the beginning of the 1970s, there were three main areas or objectives that motivated and legitimized economic policy interventions. They focused on the creation, use and distribution of overall economic prosperity, as measured by gross domestic product. The distribution objective aimed to achieve a distribution of income and wealth that was perceived as fair. The goal of economic stabilization could be derived from the area of income distribution, which in turn was broken down into the sub-goals of steady economic growth, full employment, price level stability and balance of payments equilibrium. Finally, the goal of achieving allocative efficiency, which was intended to ensure the best possible use of scarce resources and thus implicitly also contained a justification for the protection of the natural environment, was located on the development side. The central economic policy task in this segment was considered to be the correction of so-called market errors, which included the prevention of monopolistic market structures on the one hand and the regulation of markets with externalities, asymmetric information, increasing economies of scale or other deviations from the ideal of the perfect market on the other.

The project will now trace how, from the 1970s at the latest, a process began that led to almost all of the above-mentioned reasons for economic policy interventions becoming less important by the early 2000s. In the end, all that remained was the goal of economic growth, which was interpreted primarily as an expression of allocative efficiency. This development took place gradually and in several stages – from research to teaching and political practice. Initially, there was a growing body of work in economic research that favored the subordination of other goals to the goal of economic growth and placed the efficiency of the (unregulated) market in the foreground. Through changes to economics textbooks and the economics curriculum, the new paradigm, which increasingly narrowed the normative foundations of economic policy, became influential for generations of students over decades. Eventually, it also diffused into political practice, where it favoured the policy of general market liberalization, which motivated both the globalization of goods and capital markets and the privatization and deregulation of individual economic sectors.

Literature
Klump, R. / Pilz, L. (2018), “Durch Eigennnutz zum Gemeinwohl: Individualisierung, Reformation und der “Geist des Kapitalismus”, Working Paper 01/2018, Cluster of Excellence “Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen”, Frankfurt am Main.
Wörsdorfer , M. (2011), “On the Affiliation of Phenomenology and Ordoliberalism: Links between Edmund Husserl, Rudolf Eucken and Walter Eucken”, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 18, 5521-578.
Wörsdörfer , M. (2014), “Inside the ‘Homo Oeconomicus Brain’: Towards a Reform of the Economics Curriculum?”, Journal of Business Ethics Education, 11, 1-36.

International workshop
July 3, 2019
Normative Economic Policy: Past Experience and Future Challenges

Online event
11. December 2020
Normative Economic Policy

Conference

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Alexander Peukert

Project description

The conference will discuss the question of how different areas of law (in particular private commercial and media law, criminal law, data protection law and financial market law) deal with the tension between global digital communication and local legal systems and whether general trends can be identified in this respect since the turn of the millennium.

The fact that there is a profound tension between the mediality of global computer networks and local law has long been known and frequently problematized. However, the responses of different areas of law to this challenge are rarely analyzed in the necessary level of detail. The same questions arise in all areas of law affected by digitalization: What claim to validity do local legal regimes make with regard to global digital issues (jurisdiction of the courts/authorities, applicable law, scope of application of the substantive statute)? In this respect, is there a discernible tendency for local laws to be triggered more easily and, conversely, to be applied with an extraterritorial claim (cf. EU data protection)? Are the legal requirements for cross-border digital behavior becoming stricter (liability levels, regulatory density)? How relevant are technical standards (“Code is Law”) and hybrid private-public governance structures (e.g. Memoranda of Understanding, Network Enforcement Act)?
By addressing these cross-cutting issues for six areas of private and public antitrust law, it may be possible to identify general patterns of legal reaction to global digitality. To enrich the empirical material, each area of law will be discussed from the perspective of German/EU law and a non-EU law. The comparison between areas of law will thus be complemented by the classic legal comparison, which means that the conference will be held in English. On the basis of this rich material, a theory of the law of global digitality can possibly be developed.

International conference
The Law of Global Digitality
December 2 and 3, 2019, Frankfurt am Main