Global data law I

The Law of Data Infrastructures

How do the physical infrastructures of cables, satellites, and data centers interact with data law?

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

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 Value of Data

What is the value of data and who owns it?

Who benefits and who loses when the world becomes datafied?

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 Law of Transnational Data Transfers

How does data “flow” across borders?

Why do some jurisdictions impose data transfer restrictions or territorial data localization requirements?

Law and technology of data sharing

What are the mechanisms through which data becomes portable and interoperable?

How are legal and technological limits to data sharing being used in different political, economic, and social contexts?

The course explores conceptual and practical issues of 'data law' and the specifics of efforts around the world to regulate data – collection, processing, storage, transmission, use, control, disclosure, theft, destruction. Private and public legal technologies of global data governance covered include: ways of establishing jurisdiction over data (including data localization); property regimes for data ("who owns the data?"); open data; data contracting and licensing; and legal-technological solutions for data portability, interoperability, and data sharing. We cover both personal and non-personal data (such as weather and oceans observations, smart cities, data from industrial sensors). A background in this area is useful but not required. Early in the course we provide introductions to key transnational technologies which interact with data law: computer networks and the internet, cloud computing, open source software, encryption, APIs and other data-sharing modalities, and the physical infrastructures of cables, satellites, and data centers.

The global dimensions of this arise from some basic features: data flows that transcend jurisdictional boundaries of individual countries; highly uneven concentration of control over data; the transnational spread of data-trained technologies such as fintech, facial recognition, and other uses of AI; fundamentally different views about rights and values, as well as different interests; and difficulties for developing countries and disadvantaged communities to benefit from the digitization of the global economy. We include discussion of data held and used in entities which pose special legal issues, including International Organizations (UN, World Bank, IPCC) -- they claim to be immune from national and EU laws (including GDPR), but what laws and policies should govern their collection and use of data?

Students will get from this course an understanding of how special features of data and its enabling infrastructure underpin challenges that digitization poses to existing mechanisms of law and global governance. The course opens 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. The class will think collectively about legal, regulatory, and policy innovations that are being tried or could be developed to meet such challenges.

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 2025
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:00-10:25 AM, VH 204
Instructors: Benedict Kingsbury & Angelina Fisher
More information on NYU Law.

This course was developed by Angelina Fisher, Benedict Kingsbury, and Thomas Streinz. It was first offered in spring 2020 and was also offered in spring 2021 due to continued strong student demand. In the academic year 2021/2022 the course was offered in two parts: Global Data Law I (focusing on infrastructures and legal technologies of data governance) in fall 2021; Global Data Law II: Ordering and Power in spring 2022.