Search

Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination. © 2023, The Author(s)., Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg.

Kollektivt författad skrivelse, "För ett bättre Lunds universitet nu", om villkoren för unga forskare vid LU, publicerad i LUM nr 7/2015, s. 34 under rubriken "Ta vara på unga forskares kapacitet!".

This essay concerns the issue of democracy and judicial review. The main focus is on the justification of both a positive and a negative attitude towards judicial review, and the values these justifications are based on. The analysis is made by textual analysis of four authors with different opinions of the subject matter: Robert Dahl and Jeremy Waldron who has a negative attitude towards judicial review, and Erwin Chemerinsky and Ronald Dworkin who are positive about it. In the analysis an analytic frame is used which consists of different dimensions and aspects of the problem of democracy and judicial review. The study shows that there are important differences in democratic values between a positive and a negative justification of judicial review. There are first of all a difference in the balance between popular government and constitutionalism. There are also differences on the view of the right balance between democracy as; process or substance, rule by the broad mass of the people or rule by an elite, spirit of the community or the rights of the individual. The study also shows differences between the two approaches concerning their view on the important democratic values of liberty and equality.