The event is a preliminary workshop of Planetary Workshop series and an inter-/cross-disciplinary effort to initiate a conversation among scholars whose research grapples with planetary futures from various different perspectives.

In the first roundtable, Temporalities will serve as the overarching theme, and participants will explore human/nature relationship with time, evaluation of future and nature, and finally mortality.

The unifying theme for the second roundtable is Crisis, encompassing topics from extreme weather events, to global and transnational challenges posed by climate change, as well as technologies like geo-engineering that are intended for -- and may become -- crisis.

The third roundtable will focus on Resources and how their exploitation, appropriation, circulation and distribution shape and reshape power -- both past and future, and how humankind’s relationship with the planet is projected in their (in-)materiality and (in-)scarcity.

 The fourth roundtable is about Social where we will explore various actions and actors that are vested with or organized to have the power to move for and against the planet.

This event is a closed-door session, accessible by invitation only.

Contact: Yirong Sun, ys5086@nyu.edu

China’s success in cultivating Big Tech firms has enabled it to emerge as a formidable rival to the United States in the digital sphere. But in the past few years, the Chinese government has embarked on a massive regulatory crackdown, targeting its largest tech corporations such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Meituan. Many Western experts have viewed this tech crackdown as an assault on private businesses, causing doubt among investors about whether Chinese firms are still investable. Professor Angela Zhang will go beyond the headlines to unravel the dynamic complexity of China’s regulatory governance. Drawing insights from her newly published book, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, she will introduce the dynamic pyramid model of regulation, an analytical framework that demystifies Chinese regulatory governance. She will examine the impact of the tech crackdown on the administrative state, the competitive landscape, and global tech rivalry. And she will peer into the future by examining China’s strategy for regulating generative artificial intelligence. 

Legal and political discourse about digital technologies focus on whether and how the technology should be regulated—including discussions about machine learning, often grouped under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence or “AI”. This panel will shift the focus to ask how the proliferation of AI impacts the practice of international law(-making). Examples abound. International organizations are increasingly using AI for operational and advisory functions, commercial technology companies are becoming active players in global law-making, data modeling and AI are emerging as central to planetary governance, and AI is challenging established concepts and rubrics of international economic law. This roundtable will convene a conversation among scholars and practitioners about “next-generation international law” How does our digital turn affect international legal decision-making? How might our model of diplomacy be rethought in light of technological advances? What role do AI and other digital technologies play in negotiating our geopolitical and climate challenges?

Panelists: Victoria Adelmant, Adele Barzelay, Laura O’Brien, Thomas Streinz, Yirong Sun

The OFA Symposium will examine the social, political, and economic implications of open source. We will explore how open source is changing the way we work, communicate, and interact with each other, and how it is shaping the future of technology and society. The Symposium will feature a diverse and group of speakers and participants, including researchers, policymakers, developers, and activists.

Thomas Streinz, Executive Director of Guarini Global Law and Tech, will present and join the discussion.

NYU Law and the NYU Center for Cybersecurity will host a conference on AI Crime, Security & International Regulation on November 9, 2023. This conference will consider both the opportunities and risks of AI in crime, national security, and international regulation. Senior government, industry, and civil society speakers will discuss tools and capabilities of AI in law enforcement and national security and the civil liberties concerns with its use. The keynote will focus on international AI regulation, with a panel of AI law and policy experts to follow.  This conference will follow a hybrid format.  Continental breakfast and boxed lunch will be provided for all in-person attendees. 

This conference has been approved for 4.5 New York State CLE credits (3 in professional practice and 1.5 in cybersecurity-general).

This session of the Guarini Colloquium will discuss how to regulate online disinformation and misinformation. We will be joined by Oreste Pollicino (Bocconi University; Senior Emile Noel Fellow, NYU Law), who will present his draft paper (with Giovanni De Gregorio) "A Constitutional Deal to Address Online Disinformation".

Globalization is not only a process of unification, as has been assumed; It is a process of unification and fragmentation. This Global Law 2023 International Symposium at Tilburg University will rethink the globality of global law. It approaches this questions by focusing on four major architectures through which globalization is taking shape: global value chains, global states (in the plural), the global biosphere, and global digitalization. 

Each architecture will be discussed in a different panel. This approach allows for the intervention of different disciplinary perspectives, legal and otherwise. In-sofar as the global involves a reconfiguration of the spatiality of law and governance, the transformations of space driven by these different architectures are the unifying theme of the symposium. Conversely, the symposium engages with “architectures” of the global to emphasize that globalization processes involve a reconfiguration of spatiality. Each of the panels picks up on this unifying theme, but does so from the distinctive perspective of its theme.

Guarini Global Law & Tech Director for Policy and Practice Angelina Fisher will join a panel on ‘Global‘ Digitlization, scale and plurality.

As part of the International Law Weekend 2023, organized by the American Branch of the International Law Assocation, Guarini Global Law & Tech will convene a panel on global AI regulation.

Rapid development of artificial intelligence is impacting professions, industrial sectors, governments, and practices of International Organizations. Comprehensive or sectoral regulation of AI systems or uses have been considered (or adopted) in many countries and international fora such as the OECD, G7, G20 and UN. How do these initiatives align with one another? How are they going to confront divergent approaches to data law, unequal distribution of digital infrastructures (in particular computing power), and diverse ideas about normative alignment between AI and human needs? This panel seeks to explore these questions and their implications for transnational regulation.

This session of the Guarini Colloquium provides an introduction into regulatory efforts in the EU, US, and China to address societal concerns arising from the rapid development and deployment of “artificial intelligence” by global digital corporations.

We will be joined by Nathalie Smuha, Emile Noel Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center at NYU Law, who will discuss current developments in global AI regulation (including the EU's AI Act) on the basis of her article "From a ‘race to AI’ to a ‘race to AI regulation’: regulatory competition for artificial intelligence".

This event was co-sponsored by Guarini Global Law & Tech with the US-Asia Law Institute at NYU School of law and the APEC Study Center at Columbia University

China has rapidly emerged as a global leader in artificial intelligence, closely rivalling the United States. China is also at the forefront of regulating AI. It has proactively introduced some of the world’s earliest and most comprehensive rules concerning algorithms, deepfakes, and chatbots, among others. Angela Zhang, global professor of law at NYU School of Law, took a dive deep into China’s regulatory landscape and provide a critical assessment of its AI governance strategies. She also forecasted the future direction of China’s AI regulation and explored its potential implications on the global community. Professor Benedict Kingsbury of NYU School of Law moderated the discussion.

How does China regulate its Big Tech companies? This question has profound implications for Chinese businesses and international investors. Since October 2020, Beijing has enacted a dizzying array of regulatory measures against Chinese tech firms in areas ranging from antitrust to data and labor regulation. This massive regulatory campaign started with the demise of Ant Group’s initial public offering (IPO) and has since expanded to a wide range of industries—from fintech and e-commerce to social media, food delivery, ride-hailing, and even tutoring.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium, we will discuss how to analyze these regulatory developments from domestic and global perspectives, based on the theoretical framework developed by Angela Zhang in her forthcoming book: “High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy” (OUP 2024, forthcoming).

How to regulate “generative AI” is now a major question across the world. The Italian Data Protection Authority’s orders against OpenAI’s operations of ChatGPT in Italy highlighted tensions between the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and generative AI infrastructures trained on massive datasets involving both personal and non-personal data. The emergence of generative AI infrastructures has led to rethinking in the EU’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), which aims for comprehensive, risk- and product safety-based AI regulation. National agencies including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) are exploring new regulatory measures in this area. In regulation, licensing, contracts, and litigation, the allocation of risk and responsibilities along the generative AI supply chain is vigorously in contention. The rapidly evolving regulatory discourse surrounding generative AI brings new valence to wider debates about concentration of infrastructural and platform power, safety, (non)alignment, responsibility, and their implications for competition, innovation, and socio-technological development. This conference brings together scholars, practitioners, public interest advocates, industry representatives, and policy-makers who are facing these questions daily in various contexts and at different scales.

This event has been approved for 4.5 New York State CLE credits in the category of Areas of Professional Practice and 2 New York State CLE credit in the category of Cybersecurity, Privacy and Data Protection (General). The credit is both transitional and non-transitional; it is appropriate for both experienced and newly admitted attorneys.

In his new paper, Alexandre de Streel contrasts the Internet libertarian John-Perry Barlow's famous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996 with the European Union's "Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade" from 2022 and the "Declaration on the Future of the Internet", which has been signed by more than 70 countries.

To ensure that platforms comply with those newly affirmed EU digital rights and principles, the EU adopted in 2022 two important laws: the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aim to increase contestability and fairness in EU digital markets, thereby contributing to the freedom of choice,  and the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to reduce illegal (and to a lesser extend harmful) content and products on the Internet.

In his paper, Alexandre de Streel asks whether the new EU laws will be better than a cyberspace left alone, focusing on the Digital Markets Act. He analyzes the nature of the DMA (building on earlier work with Pierre Larouche) and shows that it is a pro-competitive regulation which aims to create, in the words of Barlow, ‘a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by economic power’. He then goes on to analyze whether the DMA could lead to an Internet renaissance.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we will be joined by Professor de Streel to discuss his new paper.

In her new book (forthcoming with OUP in September 2023), Anu Bradford examines the efforts of the EU, US, and China to regulate the digital economy. She argues that there are three dominant regulatory models that most countries organize their regulatory regimes around. These models reflect different theories about the relationship between markets, the state, and individual and collective rights, and can be loosely captured by the regulatory philosophies embraced by the US, China, and the EU, respectively. These different views on how to regulate the digital economy involve contested societal choices and rest on different economic theories, political ideologies, and cultural identities. In making those choices, governments are forced to balance their support of innovation with the need to consider the implications of technology for civil liberties, the distribution of wealth, international trade, and national security, to name a few.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we will be joined by Professor Bradford to discuss her new book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology”.

Guarini Global Law & Tech will co-sponsor the following event by the US-Asia Law Institute featuring Winston Wenyan Ma in conversation with Maria Adele Carrai.

How is China regulating data, blockchain, and the emerging Web3? China’s regulatory approach is based on “cyber sovereignty.” The government actively promotes blockchain technology and has advanced plans for a sovereign digital currency, while also strictly prohibiting crypto mining and trading. With respect to the latest Web3 and metaverse developments, China’s tech companies are working on a “token-less” metaverse ecosystem with unique Chinese characteristics.

Using blockchain and CBDC as examples, we will explore China’s latest innovation policy and the post-20th Party Congress US-China tech race, from AI and semiconductor chips to quantum computing and electric cars. Winston Ma, the author of Blockchain and Web3: Building the Cryptocurrency, Privacy, and Security Foundations of the Metaverse, will discuss these questions with Maria Adele Carrai, co-editor of The China Questions 2 – Critical Insights into US-China Relations.

Registration is now closed. We look forward to seeing you at the event.

Thomas Streinz, Executive Director of Guarini Global Law and Tech, will deliver a keynote presentation on “the Future of European Data Law” at Digital Legal Talks 2022.

Digital Legal Talks will be an all-day event packed with exciting talks and sessions on law & digital technologies, with researchers from across the globe sharing their work, perspectives and ideas on the digitalization of society. This year’s conference will be held at De Zalen van Zeven, an old church building in the historic center of Utrecht.

DLT is the annual conference of the Digital Legal Lab, an interdisciplinary research collaboration between the law schools of Tilburg University, the University of Amsterdam, Radboud University and Maastricht University. Together, we explore how algorithms, digital platforms, data, automation and artificial intelligence affect our legal system and society.

Conference participation will be hybrid, with opportunities to attend and participate in person in Utrecht and online. For more information about the conference, including registration details, please visit https://www.sectorplandls.nl/wordpress/digital-legal-talks-2022.

As part of Guarini Global Law and Tech's ongoing research project on Global Data Law, we hosted panel event to explore how global data law works in practice by hearing from practicing global data lawyers!

This event featured a panel of NYU Law alumni and friends working in technology and data law at law firms and as in-house counsel. The panelists discussed how data and ‘global data law’ is relevant to their career and work, and shared their experiences of becoming data lawyers with NYU students. 

For more information about the event and this project, as well as information about future similar events, please contact guariniglobal@nyu.edu. 

The Asia Pacific Law Review (APLR) and Singapore Management University hosted a virtual workshop to discuss papers for its forthcoming special issue of the APLR on International Economic Law. At this workshop, Professor Thomas Streinz, Executive Director of GGLT, presented his paper Data, Digital Technologies and AI and led a discussion on a paper by Neha Mishra and Ana Maria Palacio Valencia on Regional Integration through Trade in Services/E-commerce (with a focus on digital trade).

The workshop was held virtually on 25 October 2022 from 2:00pm - 5:30pm (Singapore/Hong Kong time). For more information, click here.