Global data law Course

The Law of Data Infrastructures

What is the relevance of data’s geographical location for its legal regulation?

How are transnational data flows being regulated through law and infrastructure?

The Law of the Cloud

How are legal technologies used to structure infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) in the “cloud”?

Who has legal and technological access to what data in the ”cloud”?

The Wealth of Data

What is the value of data and who owns it?

Who benefits and who loses when everything becomes digitized?

How does law facilitate and how might it counteract data wealth concentration?

International Organizations as Global Data Governors

What laws and policies should govern international organizations’ collection and use of data?

How might international organizations facilitate data sharing between each other and with developing countries?

The course will consider private and public legal technologies of global data governance including: ways of establishing jurisdiction over data (including data localization); data ownership and open data; data contracting and licensing; and legal-technological solutions for data portability, interoperability, and data sharing. The course will also explore emerging models of data governance, with a focus on transnational data flow regulation by the US, EU, China, and India, but also including indigenous data sovereignty, collective data governance in “smart cities”, protection of data under international law in “data embassies”, and international organizations’ governance regimes and potential role as facilitators or intermediaries in global data governance.

It explores the many unresolved legal questions posed by: data flows that transcend jurisdictional boundaries of individual countries; highly uneven concentration of control over data; and difficulties for developing countries and disadvantaged communities to benefit from the digitalization of the global economy. Should transnational flows of personal and non-personal data (such as weather, oceans, urban and rural observations, business and government data) be regulated and, if so, how? How should sharing of such data be structured between different actors? International Organizations (UN, World Bank, IPCC, etc) collect and hold vast amounts of data but claim to be immune from national and EU laws (including GDPR). What laws and policies should govern their collection and use of data? What is the role of transnational digital infrastructure (cables, satellites, data centers, cloud computing including for governments and IOs, APIs, etc.) in enabling or restricting data flows?

In examining foundational concepts, legal technologies, and emerging models of global data law, the aim of the course is multi-fold. First, to explore whether (and if so how) data is distinctive as an object of legal regulation and as a medium of global ordering. Second, to tease out unique features of data and its enabling infrastructure in order to understand better the challenges posed by digitalization to existing mechanisms of law and global governance and to craft legal, regulatory, and policy innovations in response to such challenges. Third, to open up analytical pathways for understanding how private and public power operates beyond the state and how law may channel, enable, and check such power in the digital domain. Particular attention will be paid to certain digital infrastructures which project considerable regulatory effects transnationally, such as open source software, the Internet, and cloud computing.

The course is connected to the Guarini Externship: Global Legal Practice in Digital Society, for which students need to understand how digital technologies operate globally under complex and often inchoate patchworks of legal regulation. It builds on the two conferences on “Data law in a global digital economy” and “Global Data Law” that the Guarini Global Law & Tech initiative organized during the academic year 2018–2019.

Spring 2021
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:00-10:15 AM, FH310
Instructors: Benedict Kingsbury, Angelina Fisher, Thomas Streinz
More information on NYU Law.

This course was first offered in spring 2020 and was being offered again in spring 2021 due to strong student demand.
For the academic year 2021/2022, we decided to split the course into two parts: Global Data Law I (offered in fall 2021 and fall 2022) and Global Data Law II: Ordering and Power (offered in spring 2022).