Law In The Digital Age

"The papers collected in this volume address the emerging issues in fresh and thoughtful ways. They lay the foundation for taming the brave new world that technological progress is now thrusting upon us"--

Explores the potential impact of digital technologies on the legal profession. The text argues that lawyers must move quickly to embrace new technology - such as video conferencing, the Internet and other leading-edge IT systems - or go under.

Legal education is at a crossroads. As a media-saturated generation of students enters law school, they find themselves thrust into a fairly backward mode of instruction, much of which is over 100 years old. Over those years, legal education has resisted many credible reports recommending change, most recently those from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and from the Clinical Legal Education Association. Meanwhile, the cost of legal education continues to skyrocket, with many law students graduating with crushing debt they have difficulty paying back. All of these factors are likely to reach a crescendo in the next few years, setting the stage for a perfect storm out of which can come significant change. But legal education has successfully resisted systemic change for many years. Given that dubious track record, the only way significant change can reasonably be predicted is if something is different this time. Fortunately, there is something different this time: the ubiquity of technology. Since the MacCrate report in 1992, the internet has achieved massive growth, and a generation of students has grown up with sophisticated and pervasive use of technology in nearly every facet of their lives. This book describes how the perfect storm of generational change and the rising cost and criticisms of legal education, combined with extraordinary technological developments, will change the face of legal education as we know it today. Its scope extends from generational changes in our students, to pedagogical shifts inside and outside of the classroom, to hybrid textbooks, all the way to methods of active, interactive, and hypertextual learning. And it describes how this shift can--and will--better prepare law students for the practice of tomorrow.

The digital age began in 1939 with the construction of the first digital computer. In the sixty-five years that have followed, the influence of digitisation on our everyday lives has grown steadily and today digital technology has a greater influence on our lives than at any time since its development. This book examines the role played by digital technology in both the exercise and suppression of human rights. The global digital environment has allowed us to reinterpret the concept of universal human rights. Discourse on human rights need no longer be limited by national or cultural boundaries and individuals have the ability to create new forms in which to exercise their rights or even to bypass national limitations to rights. The defence of such rights is meanwhile under constant assault by the newfound ability of states to both suppress and control individual rights through the application of these same digital technologies. This book gathers together an international group of experts working within this rapidly developing area of law and technology and focuses their attantion on the specific interaction between human rights and digital technology. This is the first work to explore the challenges brought about by digital technology to fundamental freedoms such as privacy, freedom of expression, access, assembly and dignity. It is essential reading for anyone who fears digital technology will lead to the 'Big Brother' state.

The growing presence of digital technologies has caused significant changes in the protection of digital rights. With the ubiquity of these modern technologies, there is an increasing need for advanced media and rights protection. Media Law, Ethics, and Policy in the Digital Age is a key resource on the challenges, opportunities, issues, controversies, and contradictions of digital technologies in relation to media law and ethics and examines occurrences in different socio-political and economic realities. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on cybercrime, invasion of privacy, and muckraking, this publication is an ideal reference source for policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, government officials, and active media practitioners.

The world of law is a world of information. Rules, judgments, decisions, interpretations, and agreements all involve using and communicating information. Today, we are experiencing a significant transition, from letters fixed on paper to information stored electronically. The digital era, where information is created, stored, and communicated electronically, is quickly approaching, if not already here. The future of law will no longer be found in impressive buildings and leather-bound books, but in small pieces of silicon, in streams of light, and in millions of miles of wires and cable. It will be a world of new relationships and greater possibilities for individual and group communication, an environment where the value of information increases as it is shared. In Law in a Digital world, M. Ethan Katsh explores how these new technologies will alter one of our most central institutions. He considers the different ways in which people will not only electronically read and write, but also interact with our vast storehouses of legal knowledge and information. He envisions how sounds and pictures will play into the largely imageless print world of law, and looks at the future importance of graphic and nontextual communication. He explores how the flexible, personalized organization of data will transform the way we gather information, and whether information can or cannot be contained, raising questions of copyright and privacy. What happens to the law when information is more plentiful and accessible? What happens to those people who suddenly have access to information never before available? Does the use of information in a new form change the institution, the user, and those who come in contact with the user? And, what role does the lawyer play in all of this? For citizens, for lawyers, for all those who will be part of the digital world rushing toward us, Katsh answers these questions while considering the implications of this new era.

This book examines the role of international law in securing privacy and data protection in the digital age. Driven mainly by the transnational nature of privacy threats involving private actors as well as States, calls are increasingly made for an âinternationalâ privacy framework to meet these challenges. Mapped against a flurry of global privacy initiatives, the book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the extent to which and whether international law attends to the complexities of upholding digital privacy. The book starts by exploring boundaries of international privacy law in upholding privacy and data protection in the digital ecosystem where threats to privacy are increasingly transnational, sophisticated and privatized. It then explores the potential of global privacy initiatives, namely Internet bills of rights, universalization of regional systems of data privacy protection, and the multi-level privacy discourse at the United Nations, in reimagining the normative contours of international privacy law. Having shown limitations of global privacy initiatives, the book proposes a pragmatic approach that could make international privacy law better-equipped in the digital age.

"Under what circumstances should Internet Service Providers (ISPs) be held liable when copyrighted material is made available over the Internet without authorization of rights holders? Is Google's controversial Library Project to scan millions of books into digital format an ambitious plan for public good or is it just another format of copyright infringement under the digital age? When audience enjoys watching live broadcasts of sports events, who are the rights holders behind the scene, and how do they protect their rights and interests from being infringed? All these questions have become highly important under the digital age, and therefore drawn serious attention from legal scholars and legislators worldwide. For direction, the world looks to influential legal regimes arising from the U.S. copyright law, the EU Directives, along with the jurisprudence and legal theory that attaches to each. But the world also looks to China, where a rapidly evolving legal regime holds its own course. This very useful book compares the legislation and case law of Chinese copyright law with those of the United States and European countries, focusing on three subjects - the liability of Internet Service Providers, the 'fair use' versus 'fair dealing' copyright doctrine, and the copyrightability of live sports telecasts - all of which are unsettled questions of law under the existing copyright regime"--P. [4] of cover.