Università Roma Tre

This course will provide an overview of the major issues related to the impact of digitalisation, interconnected networks, and artificial intelligence on contemporary law. Namely, it will focus on data-driven innovation and will explore the complex relationship between social and technological change and the evolution of the law. Controversial issues such as the regulation of digital platforms, decision making by algorithms, ownership of data, liquid surveillance, Internet of things, privacy in the social networks, smart contracting, liability in the cyberspace, will be analysed and discusses from a comparative law perspective. The main aim of the course is to provide an up-to-date overview about the major legal issues raised by the advent of digital technologies.

At the end of this course, students should:
• Develop a better understanding of the impact of digitalisation on contemporary law
• Develop the skills required for a lawyer working in an increasingly borderless and data-driven society
• Foster analytic and reasoning abilities by confronting the black-letter rules with a rapidly changing societal context
• Performing legal research and writing in English in the area of the law of digital technologies

Students have to study all the materials detailed in the Syllabus of the course (available at http://studylaw.uniroma3.it/digital-technologies-and-the-law_c10041.aspx) and uploaded in the Roma Tre "ELearning" platform.

A list of the materials follows:

D.J. Svantesson, Extraterritoriality in the context of data privacy regulation, 7 Masaryk U. J. L. Tech. 87 (2012)

Art. 3 GDPR

ECJ, Google Spain case (C-131/12); pars. 21-61
F. Bignami - G. Resta, Transatlantic Privacy Regulation : Conflict and Cooperation, 78 Law & Cont. Prob’s 231 (2015)

ECJ, Schrems case (C-362/14)
A. Keane Woods, Litigating Data Sovereignty, 128 Yale L. J. 328 (2018) (in part. 359-371)

Arts. 44-49 GDPR

J. Drexl, Designing Competitive Markets for Industrial Data. Between Propertisation and Access, 8 JIPITEC 257 (2017)
Proposal for a Directive on the Supply of Digital Content COM/2015/0634: art. 3
GDPR : art. 7

A. Metzger, Data as Counter-Performance, 8 JIPITEC 2 (2017)
T. Dreier, Germany: Creating New Property Rights on the Basis of General Legal Concepts: Without Limits?, 2 JIPITEC 152 (2011)

ECJ, Renckhoff case (C 161/17)

Courtland, The Bias Detectives, in Nature (2018)

J. Angwin – J. Larson – S. Mattu – L. Kirchner, Machine Bias, ProPublica, 23-5-2016

State v. Loomis, 881 N.W.2d 749 (2016)
Houston Fed. Teachers v. Houston Independent, 251 F.Supp.3d 1168 (2017)

L. Edwards – M. Veale, Enslaving the Algorithm: From a ‘Right to an Explanation’ to a ‘Right to Better Decisions’?, IEEE Security & Privacy (2018) 16(3), 46–54

Art. 22 GDPR
Y.J. Chen et al., ‘Rule of Trust’: The Power and Perils of China’s Social Credit Megaproject, 32 Columbia J. Asian L. 1 (2018)

M.Hu, Algorithmic Jim Crow, 86 Fordham L. Rev. 633 (2017) (excerpts)

S. Gunther, Facebook’s Real Name Policy : A Violation of the Corporate’s Responsibility to Respect Human Rights, https://www.business-humanrights.org/

ECHR Delfi v. Estonia


Yahoo v Ajemian 84 N.E.3d 766 (Mass. 2017)

G. Resta, Personal Data and Digital Assets after Death, EuCML 201 (2018)
Washington University v. Catalona, 437 F. Supp. 2d 985 (2006)

C. Piciocchi et al., Legal issues in governing genetic biobanks, J. Community Genet. (2018) 9:177–190
European Commission, The disruptive nature of 3d Printing
European Parliament, Report on three-dimensional printing, a challenge in the fields of intellectual property rights and civil liability

O. Lobel, The Law of the Platform, 101 Minn. L. Rev. 87, 166 (2016)

ECJ, Uber case (C-434/15)