Volume 1, Issue 2

The rise of digital technologies has led to the emergence of digital private and public powers, which pose significant societal risks, challenge human rights, and reshape the rule of law. Digital power, as a new form of power, possesses inherent legal characteristics from both factual and normative perspectives. Therefore, it is crucial to integrate digital power into legal studies and frameworks. While subject to legal regulation, digital power also has the potential to address the limitations of human law, enhance human rights, and strengthen the rule of law. It is therefore argued in this study for the necessity of expanding legal studies from a focus on algorithm research to the broader study of digital power. This study also highlights the unique mission of the digital rule of law, to harness digital power in shaping a future legal system that empowers and promotes societal well-being.

This article examines the legal response to a controversy on dietary information in the context of commercial court and appellate court rulings. Against a backdrop of health and environmental crises, the construction of information on such risks has become a sensitive issue for market actors, as a result of which courts are asked to arbitrate conflicts. This is particularly important at a time when informational mediations carried out by new actors increasingly take the form of digital ratings and augmented information. The dispute involving the firm Yuca and the French agro-industrial processed meat sector is a case in point. This paper analyses the structural arguments put forward in this legal dispute at the first instance and appeal stages. In the light of law and socio-economics, it untangles questions pertaining to the link between denigration and freedom of expression and the definition of the role of scientific research and consensus in the decisions. This leads us to shed light on the contents of the changing missions of two central types of actors: the mediators who monitor and regulate market practices and the judges that arbitrate these mediations and settle controversies.

The explosive advancement of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, typified by ChatGPT, is steering humans towards an uncontrollable trajectory to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Against the backdrop of a series of transformative breakthroughs, big tech companies such as OpenAI and Google have initiated an “AGI race” on a supranational level. As technological power becomes increasingly absolute, structural challenges may erupt with an unprecedented velocity, potentially resulting in disorderly expansion and even malignant development of AI technologies. To preserve the dignity and safety of human-beings in a brand-new AGI epoch, it is imperative to implement regulatory guidelines to limit the applications of AGI within the confines of human ethics and rules to further counteract the potential downsides. To promote the benevolent evolution of AGI, the principles of Humanism should be underscored and the connotation of Digital Humanism should be further enriched. Correspondingly, the current regulatory paradigm for generative AI may also be overhauled under the tenet of Digital Humanism to adapt to the quantum leaps and subversive shifts produced by AGI in the future. Positioned at the nexus of legal studies, computer science, and moral philosophy, this study therefore charts a course for a synthetic regulation framework of AGI under Digital Humanism.

All throughout the so-called “Global South”, hundreds of millions of individuals from entire communities in the rural, poorer, or most peripheral areas are not officially recorded by the States they are citizens of or they habitually reside in. This is why several of such States are resorting to extensive and purportedly “universal” digital remote onboarding programs, pioneered by India’s Aadhaar, whereby individuals are centrally recorded onto a public database with their identity (and possibly citizenship) confirmed. Whenever paper documents are obsolete, inaccurate, deteriorated, or inexistent, individuals may have their identity confirmed through an “introducer”, who mediates between marginalised communities and central authorities and is entrusted by both with this delicate task. Introducers, however, cannot by themselves grant someone the status as “citizen”: they may at best confirm his or her existence and identity. These onboarding programs are enabled by wide-covering sets of technical standards, ranging from data protection and cybersecurity to interoperability, safety, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Meanwhile, similar technologies, relying on analogous standards, and fundamentally aimed at a similar purpose (that is, registering all those who fall within the prescriptive jurisdiction of a State), are deployed by border officials in the context of migration management – especially in “developed” countries. The “unofficial” and “outside-the-scope-of-the-law” components of said migratory patterns are growing exponentially due to combined effects of climate, insecurity, and geopolitical factors, increasingly originating “borderline” situations whereby identity and citizenship are challenged and contested: statelessness, refuge, nomadism (both traditional and “digital”), and internal displacement. Strikingly enough, discussions around what technical standards to adopt, and who should select them, as well as on what the role of “introducers” could be, towards the digital onboarding of individuals experiencing “borderline” configurations of citizenship are entirely neglected in socio-legal and security scholarship alike. Complemented with concrete policy proposals, the present work accepts the ambition to start bridging this gap.

Unveiling the cognitive patterns that underpin linguistic expressions, conceptual metaphor serves not only as an effective means for speakers to convey their values but also as a crucial tool for listeners to comprehend unfamiliar topics. This study undertakes a corpus-based analysis of conceptual metaphor expressions within the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. Utilizing a corpus derived from the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and employing both Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis Theory, this research examines metaphors in terms of their types, orientations, and underlying rationales. The study identifies the most-use semantic domains of Journey, Human, War, and Object metaphors, indicating that the overall orientations are characterized by Tool, Dependency, Human, and Risk, reflecting both the aspirations and concerns of humanity. This study addresses a gap in metaphor research regarding the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, offering valuable insights for policymakers and AI developers in understanding and shaping public perception of AI technologies.

The increasing significance of online communication services is not yet matched by adequate protections for particularly vulnerable groups, such as minorities, who are disproportionately affected by various forms of digital violence. This article examines a legislative initiative introduced by the German government in 2023, which aims to supplement the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and address certain enforcement gaps in safeguarding individual rights. The analysis reveals that the initiative still faces substantial legal challenges, especially given the harmonizing nature of the DSA, which may require a more refined approach to its ambitious goals. However, a review of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law concerning the state’s obligation to protect individuals from hate speech suggests that the primary issues outlined in the draft should continue to be pursued. The article contextualizes the initiative within the socio-technical environment where ethno-cultural minorities are targeted online, particularly through hate speech. By situating the initiative within the current socio-legal framework and incorporating a comparative perspective – drawing on regulatory models from Canada, the UK, and Australia – it highlights key challenges that lie ahead.

The difficulty of deepening the promotion of “factor-level” data circulation and utilization lies in the feasibility of the legislation of data transaction. This involves meta-issues such as the definition of data ownership, the positioning of data assets, and privacy protection systems. From the perspective of inclination, i.e., focusing on promotion while giving consideration to regulation, the legislation of data transaction in China is established on the theoretical basis of an “incomplete contract”. Such perspective identifies different areas that can be the subject of regulation, ranging from data rights, behavior control to the separation of personal data and information. On this basis, the driving mode of the legislation of data circulation and utilization is not the simple and direct data transaction with market-oriented mechanism, but the exploration of data licensing under government authorized operation beforehand in China. Such approaches should be considered during the licensing of public data, and the government’s right to obtain necessary compensations for the costs of data processing should be reserved. What’s more, legislative clauses of data security are essential in transactions, but compliance and conditional liability exemptions can be adopted to safeguard the realization of the goals of data transaction to a great extent.