The emerging reality of digital technologies has an increasing impact
on the structures and processes of modern constitutional States. Faced
with these challenges, different countries and legal areas are
increasingly creating laws regulating freedom of speech online,
digital markets, public digital administration, smart contracts in the
private markets, blockchain technologies, social media platforms, and
many other issues. Such emerging regulatory trend has been framed as
'digital constitutionalism'.
Despite mutual influences, circulation, and cross-fertilisation,
these regulatory instruments often differ and diverge, depending on
their own constitutional tradition, structures, and cultures.
Moreover, besides the traditional distinctions between US and European
constitutionalism, an increasingly apparent divide emerges between
Global South and Global North approaches to the constitutional
regulation of digital technologies.
Against this background, this class aims to provide students the
instruments to analyse, assess, and address such issues using
comparative law methodology. Through analogy and contrast, they will
be able to identify different regulatory approaches, their varying
effectiveness, and their respective entrenchment in the institutional
structures of the constitutional systems under analysis. They will
also be able to identify and evaluate policy proposals in the field of
legal regulation of digital technologies, thus acquiring skills
increasingly essential for lawyers, both as legal professionals and as
legal advisers to national governments and international organisations.
