Call for papers addressing the Internet’s Challenging Legal Nature

The Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression is announcing a call for papers on Speed, Scope, Scale: In Search of Solutions to the Internet’s Challenging Legal Nature and seeking submissions to contribute to an upcoming workshop addressing the complex legal landscape of the digital era.

This call for papers, to be presented in a workshop at the Universidad de Palermo, seeks to produce novel, critical and creative approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of the problems and their potential solutions. The following may serve as examples of the kinds of questions they are interested in addressing through this call:

• How do volume, speed and accessibility relate to the traditional constitutional standards developed on freedom of expression during the 20th century? Are these challenged or ratified by these novel problems; should they be revisited or changed?
• How do these problems affect our philosophical notions of causality, obligations, and responsibility? Do we need further conceptual developments under their light?
• Liability currently requires causality, attribution and intention (negligence or intent). Could there be other structures for selected scenarios? What could those look like? What questions would that raise from a constitutional and philosophical point of view?
• Does the difference between reproachable content and damages still make sense in the Internet age? Could the analysis of damages be separated from the content itself? What would the implications be for freedom of expression or legal certainty?
• So far the legal field has addressed these issues on a case by case basis.
• How should the universe of cases affected by these features be defined or assessed? Are there alternative means to define and craft liability for these cases? What principles could guide us in thinking about liability without strict causality? How should protected societal values be protected differently to incorporate different kinds of liabilities for content on the internet?
• How should the features of volume, speed, and accessibility be protected and distinguished from the potential risks they create? What kinds of remedies could be created to deal only with the latter and not affect the former?

Submission Guidelines

Applicants are invited to submit a non-anonymised developed abstract (maximum 600 words), in Spanish or English, in PDF format by email to cele@palermo.edu no later than 15 March, 2024. For more information, please click here.