French law students embrace common law; Le Havre confronts modern environmentalism, slave history

Le Havre, France

Our cultural and legal understanding of reputation and privacy are among the countless features of the social contract undergoing rapid evolution in the Trump political era, in Europe as well as the United States.

(All images by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with no claim to underlying content.) 

Once a fringe area of tort law to which most new lawyers had no exposure at all in law school, defamation and privacy have taken center stage in society, in part thanks to their weaponization in polarized politics and popular culture. Hulk Hogan famously shut down Gawker with a multi-pronged privacy suit masking a billionaire's vendetta (Holiday). Melania Trump sued a blogger and the Daily Mail for falsely claiming she worked as a high-end escort (DiBenedetto). And Donald Trump, well, Donald Trump... inter alia, won a fee award and suffered a massive loss, not over sexual relationships as much as deceptions that ensued.

Faculty of International Affairs, University of Le Havre

Last week, I had the great privilege to teach a one-credit course on American litigation over defamation and privacy to undergraduate law students at the University of Le Havre in the Normandy region of France. You can check out the course and course materials at the blogspot, Litigating Reputation in America. I'll leave the downloadable documents in place for the duration of summer 2026 (Perma.cc for later review).

"Litigating Reputation in America" course site

I centered the class on the fascinating transnational defamation civil suit that French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron are prosecuting in Delaware against American podcaster Candace Owens. The case arises from a host of Owens's sensationalist assertions, especially that Brigitte Macron was born a man. A hearing on a motion to dismiss, on jurisdictional grounds only, is scheduled for June 22.

Notwithstanding the seemingly readily disprovable falsity and outrageousness of the assertions at issue, the Macrons face an uphill battle in U.S. courts. Kalshi thinks they'll win (63.7% presently). But the smart money in American defamation litigation is never on the plaintiff. Cf. Tucker Carlson's successful defense against Karen McDougal on grounds, more or less, that no one takes Carlson seriously, so his outrageous assertions could have done no harm.

Meanwhile, in January, a French criminal court convicted 10 defendants of cyberbullying Brigitte Macron with the born-a-man claim (CNS). The contrast between an uphill civil suit in the States and criminal prosecutions in Paris fairly indicates a profound divergence in how social, economic, and political cultures in the United States and Europe, especially in France, respectively value reputation and free speech, and how law and process accordingly balance the two.

In an intensive 15 classroom hours, 24 Le Havre students learned the fundamentals of defamation and privacy torts and engaged with 11 contemporary, ripped-from-the-reporter case studies I prepared for them. The students explored the development of defamation and privacy litigation from client counseling to discovery and dispositive motions, alongside key rules of civil procedure. They argued Rule 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss and negotiated settlements, then rounded out the week with a two-hour final exam.

Civil-law law books, including obligations, at La Galerne Bookstore, Le Havre

I've been teaching American law modules to English-as-a-second-language law students in Europe for 20 years, and never have I seen students perform so well. They embraced the rough-and-tumble of the American adversarial model, while remaining sensitive to issues of professionalism and public policy. True to European thinking, they evinced skepticism of corporate-protective defense doctrines and absolutist free speech claims. They readily adapted their civil-law-trained thinking to precedent-driven common law and analogical argument.

It happened that the well circulated American news story dropped while I was in France, as Futurism put it, "College Professors Say Incoming Students No Longer Understand Middle School Math and Science." I commented on some of my friend chats that the same surely is true for English and arts; it's just harder to quantify.

When I started teaching legal writing in the late 1990s, the challenge was to get students to pay attention to their choices of subjects and verbs. Now many students don't even know what I mean when I say "subject" and "verb." An aside: Shout out to my own relentless K12 grammar instructors: Sharon Reuwer, who in elementary school literally hit me on the head with a book—you could do that back then—until I got my sentence diagramming right; and to Dr. Barbara Dezmon, who in middle school initiated me in language as forensic art, more than mere mechanics.

So as my undergraduate French students dissected their case studies, synthesizing argument from facts and points of law, I could not help but observe, and wonder why, they delivered work product more adeptly than I can expect from most first-year graduate students in the United States. That's not to impugn my home students' potential, nor to generalize unfairly, nor to disrespect those who put in the work and rise to the occasion, but only to fear that too many Americans are inexcusably ill served by their K16 preparation.

Haropa Port offices, Le Havre

I am deeply indebted to the organizing and teaching faculty of the Le Havre program. Professor Baptiste Allard is the driving force behind the program at the University of Le Havre Faculty of International Affairs, along with his Le Havre collegaue, Professor Pierre Capelle. The students are now in week two of the four-week program, in a comparative study of constitutional and administrative law with Professor Akram Faizer of the Duncan School of Law at Lincoln Memorial University.

In the coming weeks, the French students will further explore American law and legal skills with Professor Christine E. Cerniglia, director of clinical and experiential legal education at Stetson Law, and Professor Melanie Reid, associate dean of faculty at the Duncan School of Law. Professors Cerniglia and Reid aim to develop an ongoing relationship with Le Havre that will see American students participating, too, to exchange learning with their French counterparts.

Catène de containers (2017),
a prominent contemporary sculpture by Vincent Ganivet;
behind: post-war apartments in the brutalist architectural style of Auguste Perret

I had some time in Le Havre for tourism, which afforded me the opportunity to explore some scholarly interests in areas including environmental law and the legal history of human rights and the transatlantic slave trade.

Professor Allard is my partner on the environmental law team of the Global Law Classroom, a project born of Professor Reid's ingenuity. I have learned volumes from Professor Allard about the role of global shipping and sea transportation in global environmental law and climate change. Admittedly, there are times when the ins and outs of EU shipping regulations make my eyelids droop. But in Le Havre, I took a boat tour of Haropa Port, and what I saw there charged the subject with a new vitality for me.

Entrance to Port of Le Havre

I've seen many commercial ports in the world, but never so close, gliding on a small passenger boat through an intracoastal waterway alongside massive tankers and container ships. The Port of Le Havre is the largest container port in France, with three terminals, and also receives world-class cruise liners. Oil is the port's number one cargo commodity, implicating the port in contemporary geopolitics. Seeing the scale of the operation, it's impossible not to wonder at humanity's ability to transform a natural landscape to commercial ends, and also to be fretful over environmental risks and consequences.

Kriti Journey, a crude oil tranker, flagged Marshall Islands

Hafnia Nanjing, an oil and chemical tanker, flagged Singapore

 

Container loading

Almost as intriguing as the physical operations of the port are its works in communications and public relations. The boat tour I took and the port's public exhibition center are awash with boastful facts. There also are brochures and special exhibition days that feature recent and upcoming green initiatives at the port. That's good, of course. Yet for the touristic observer such as me, even unusually informed as I am, it's impossible casually to disentangle fact and propaganda, much less to interrogate the presentation for greenwashing.

Vole au Vent, a heavy-lift, self-elevating, jack-up installation vessel, flagged Luxembourg,
loading locally manufactured wind turbines for off-shore destinations

A register of slave transactions,
Maison de l'armateur

The Port of Le Havre also figures in the history of slavery. People from Africa were trafficked through Le Havre, part of the triangular route, to French colonies in the Americas. Le Havre was the imputed port of origin for more than 450 slave voyages trafficking at least 142,341 persons from 1571 to 1848, according to data at Slave Voyages

Maison de l'armateur

. A memorial plaque in "the slave streets of Le Havre" remembers 90,000 trafficked persons. Either way, incredibly, Le Havre was only the third largest slave port in France, where an estimated 1.38 million people were embarked for enslavement.

"Closet" celebrating accomplished
free persons of color,
Maison de l'armateur

The Le Havre Ship Owner's House, or Maison de l'armateur, is a preserved 18th century residence that showcases the opulent lifestyle of the successful merchant of the time. That lifestyle was built on a range of commodities, slavery included. Yet Africans who passed through Le Havre, including those who remained and were enslaved before definitive abolition in France in 1848, were omitted from patriotic historical narratives—whitewashing.

Socially and legally, modern France has dedicated itself peculiarly, present populist inclinations notwithstanding, to memory initiatives, that is, the compulsory remembrance of historical wrongs. The criminalization of Holocaust denial is probably the most often cited example of "French memory laws." But brutal colonialism and the slave trade figure in too.

Accordingly seeking to balance its presentation, the Ship Owner's House presently features a fascinating tandem exhibition, Reminiscences: Phantoms of Slavery (May 8 to Sept. 20, 2026). The exhibition is not set aside in a single space, the usual museum M.O.; rather, the African story is told right alongside the ordinary exhibition with the juxtaposition of radically differently themed art and information. The juxtaposition is often clever, for example, haunting the vestibule of a genteel bedroom with an amber glow behind silhouettes of African celebrants.

Émile Loubon, Le Port du Havre au XIXe siècle (1843),
with museum tags showing offloaded goods

Diorama depicting post-colonial reparations rally, Maison de l'armateur

Acerbic art characterizing a black stain on whitewashed history, Maison de l'armateur

There's plenty in Le Havre to stimulate the mind, not to mention the palate, of the law student and law professor. I hope the students who endured my lessons got something worthwhile from the week, if I dare not hope they learned as much as I did.

I offer my sincere gratitude to the students and staff at Le Havre, to Professors Allard and Capelle, as well as Professor Allard's husband for his hospitality, and to Professors Cerniglia, Faizer, and Reid, as well as Professor Cerniglia's partner, for their generous friendship and collegiality.

Jusqu’au Bout du Monde (2018) by Fabien Mérelle, Port of Le Havre; St. Joseph's Church, behind

Belgian scholar finds fault on both sides of Atlantic, charts midway course for U.S.-EU data privacy

KU Leuven Profs. Jan Wouters, Evelyne Terryn, and Peggy Valcke; Sylvia Lissens; me; KU Leuven Prof. Marieke Wyckaert, dissertation committee chair; and via Zoom, Prof. Przemysław Pałka, Jagiellonian University, Poland (photo presumed © and used with permission) 

Congratulations to newly minted-Doctor Sylvia Lissens, who defended her dissertation in the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven in Belgium on October 1.

Dr. Lissens's dissertation is The U.S. and EU Approach Towards Personal Data Protection: "A Collision of Tides or a Convergence of Waves?": A Legal Exploration of the Differences and Convergences Between the United States and the European Union. The first paragraph of the dissertation gives a sense of its ambitious scope:

This research addresses the question of what the core differences between the U.S. and EU legal approaches towards personal data (protection) are and if there are signs of convergences. The question is approached through functional comparative law research conducted on three levels to reflect the perspectives of the three main stakeholders: the private sector, civil society, and the public sector, consisting of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The United States and the European Union seem to understand and qualify personal data differently in words and deeds, but upon closer inspection they have more in common than may seem at first sight. Consequently, it was possible to develop a roadmap for how the U.S. and EU approaches can co-exist, based on the convergences between the U.S. and EU approaches towards data privacy on all three levels.

I have learned and benefited immensely from serving on Lissens's dissertation committee for about the last five years. I myself posited a convergence in the data privacy expectations of American and European people many years ago, before the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) superseded its predecesor EU Data Protection Directive. I dared not then conceive a practical framework for a U.S. "adequacy" determination under what became the GDPR, which is the aim of Dr. Lissens's work. 

Faculty of Law at KU Leuven, Belgium
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The dissertation is especially bold by European standards for suggesting that the EU might have to trim the sails of the GDPR to meet the United States partway. Most works in this vein take the GDPR at face value as a favorable norm. Lissens rather criticizes the GDPR for exporting worldwide norms with almost imperial ferocity, thus failing to give legal regimes and cultural communities around the world an opportunity to develop data privacy standards that might be qualitatively different or appropriately more or less protective of personal liberty. This critique resonates with contemporary critical perspectives in comparative law, which might note that the individualist model of privacy right that the GDPR promotes discounts the prominence of collectivist values in non-European legal systems.

On October 1, Lissens defended her theses ably against healthy skepticism both from European interrogators and from me. I asked whether the hodgepodge of U.S. state data protection systems, as long as Congress remains paralyzed, can possibly be GDPR "adequate" when the state systems reach only consumer transactions. 

Consumer privacy is mostly what the GDPR is worried about, Lissens reasoned, and the EU might have to settle for the states' laboratory approach. Contrary to what I have witnessed as the prevailing ethos among young people in Europe, Lissens argued that European people might have to become comfortable with the notion known to U.S. law that being photographed in a public place is not a privacy violation.

On the national security front, Lissens, like EU courts and human rights advocates, finds plenty cause for concern in dragnet U.S. security surveillance. But she also calls out EU member states for national security practices that are not so different from American methods.

I asked Lissens whether the U.S.-EU Data Privacy Framework can hold up when it does not require the United States to divulge to European complainants how their privacy was compromised or what was done about it. She fairly answered that European citizens usually can expect nothing more from their own governments. 

Moreover, Lissens questions the competence of European courts in the EU treaty system to apply data protection law at all to the national security apparatuses of EU member states, much less to challenge U.S. policy. While she has admiration for the work of European privacy advocates such as Max Schrems, she challenges the very premise of the Schrems decisions in the EU Court of Justice insofar as they assumed jurisdiction over national security policy by way of data protection enforcement.

Among Lissens's distinguished credentials is a 2020-21 stint at Duke University, my alma mater in law, where she held a scholarship to study as a master's student and started adding expertise in U.S. law to her multi-jurisdictional expertise. Lissens, who herself has taught comparative law and graciously visited my class in the past via Zoom, is on the academic job market. She is a gifted scholar and teacher, so schools, place your bids.

'The Shipbreakers' (2000) is classic Langewiesche; Hong Kong ship-breaking convention enters force

William Langewiesche, 2007
Internaz via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Journalist William Langewiesche died at age 70 in June (N.Y. Times).

I came to know Langewiesche's work through his 16 years with The Atlantic. He wrote subsequently for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. His long-form journalism, including nine books, is legendary. He tackled big, complex, and notorious subjects, such as ocean piracy and nuclear proliferation, helping readers to make sense of the world through concise and compelling prose.

Upon his passing, commentators have rushed to recommend their favorite Langewiesche works. Mine has been little mentioned, so I want to put it on the record.

For a quarter century, I have been haunted by Langewiesche's remarkable cover story for the August 2000 Atlantic, "The Shipbreakers." As The Atlantic teased:

On a six-mile stretch of beach at a place called Alang, in India, some 200 ships stand side by side in progressive stages of dissection, spilling their black innards onto the tidal flats. Here is where half the world's ships come to die—ripped apart by hand into scrap metal. Alang is a foul, desperate, and dangerous place, and a wonder of the world.

Typical of Langewiesche's work, the story sits at the intersection of many important subjects: contemporary colonialism, social and economic development, environmental protection, labor regulation, and accountability, or lack thereof, for transnational corporations. I can't board an ocean-going vessel today without feeling haunted by Langewiesche's narrative and worrying that I'm contributing to an ongoing human rights tragedy.

Horrifying conditions Langewiesche described in 2000 unfortunately continue today, human rights abuses having been abated only modestly and more in some jurisdictions than in others. Langewiesche focused on India, and Indian enforcement only pushed the most hazardous and ill regulated ship-breaking practices further into Bangladesh and Pakistan. 

There have been much needed regulatory innovations in recent years that mean to effect reform. The European Union adopted a Ship Recycling Regulation in 2013. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform wrote:

From 31 December 2018, EU-flagged commercial vessels above 500 GT must be recycled in safe and environmentally sound ship recycling facilities that are included on the European List of approved ship recycling facilities. The List was first established on 19 December 2016 and is periodically updated to add additional compliant facilities, or, alternatively, to remove facilities which have ceased to comply. Currently, the List comprises facilities operating in the EU, Turkey and US. 

Ship-breakers, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2005
Adam Cohn via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The EU adopted the regulation after accession to the 2009 Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (International Maritime Organization), which entered force just recently, on June 25, 2025. India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan also have signed on to the convention. At least, then, standards for proper ship-breaking are being articulated.

However, neither the EU regulation nor the overarching Hong Kong Convention solves the problem of jurisdictional reach to ships under flags of convenience. The shipping industry has long relied on re-flagging vessels to circumvent regulations of all kinds, and the problem remains intractable. Newly articulated standards will only work insofar as nations refuse to provide a haven for illicit ship-breaking and for its concealment by re-flagging.

Meanwhile, the cruise industry continues to burn through generations of ships in never-ending pursuit of size and extravagance.

"The Shipbreakers" was long posted in full text at Longform, but recently became unavailable there, apparently upon a change of ownership of an underlying ISP. (But archived at the time of this writing.)

Rest in peace, William Langewiesche.

Global collab promotes teaching law without borders

Peltz-Steele, Lewinbuk, Rott-Pietrzyk, Kim, Rigó
© Used with permission

Collaborators and I had the privilege of discussing the Global Law Classroom (GLC) at the 17th Global Legal Skills Conference (GLS 17), hosted by the Global Legal Skills Institute and the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University (MUNI Law) in Brno, Czechia, last week.

The GLC is a collaboration of faculty around the world to bring together students across borders, via Zoom, to study international and comparative law and learn from each other. I wrote about the GLC here at The Savory Tort about a year ago, after a 2022 pilot run and just before we executed the first official program over eight weeks in fall 2024. I used the GLC as a one-credit component of my Comparative Law class, and I will again in the upcoming fall 2025.

© Used with permission

© Used with permission

In presenting on the GLC to our GLS 17 colleagues in Brno on Thursday, we provided a demonstration hypothetical in data protection for attendees to discuss in small groups. I developed the fact pattern initially with Cristina Blasi Casagran, Autonomous University of Barcelona, and we used it in the fall 2024 GLC human rights module to demonstrate divergence in U.S. and EU approaches to privacy.

For GLS 17, I created a video narrative (below) and briefed the audience on the salient doctrine of the respective legal systems (inset below video) (both CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The GLC is the brainchild of Melanie Reid, Lincoln Memorial Law, who could not join us in Brno, but will lead a discussion of the project later this summer at the annual conference of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS).

The GLC faculty team in Brno was led by Rosa Kim, Suffolk Law, and also comprised Katerina Lewinbuk, South Texas College of Law; Balázs Rigó, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) (Hungary), and Ewa Rott-Pietrzyk, University of Warsaw (Poland). It was great fun for the five us to be together IRL after so much labor together on Zoom.

I'll have another report from GLS 17 here at The Savory Tort on Wednesday, June 4.

Digital rights defenders gather in Taipei to tackle mass surveillance, online propaganda, authoritarianism

Culled from my notes, here are some of the most interesting things I heard last week in Taipei at RightsCon, the world's leading summit on digital rights for technology, commercial, civil society, and government sectors.

A dragon towers over the 2025 Taiwan Lantern Festival in Taoyuan.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Chinese Surveillance Technology

China is methodical in suppressing conversation around the world about the repression of the Uyghur people, according to representatives of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). Within days of her speaking at the Hudson Institute, WUC Chair Rushan Abbas said, her sister and aunt in China disappeared. Chinese officials sometimes approach venues hosting conferences that will discuss the Uyghurs and offer them double the price to cancel the conference contract, according to Haiyuer Kuerban, director of the WUC Berlin office. Now governments in England and Germany are keen to buy from Chinese firms such as Huawei the very tech that Chinese authorities use to surveil Uyghur activists and their families, Kuerban said, a perverse reward for the facilitation of human rights abuse.

Linjiang night market bustles in Taipei.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

If you use a China-based media service such as WeChat even outside China, you might be helping the Chinese surveillance apparatus. Open Technology Fund Fellow Pellaeon Lin explained that censors scan files shared online and "fingerprint" them to tailor the blocking of sensitive content from recipients in China. Scanning and fingerprinting happens on Chinese tech even when users share content wholly outside China. Chinese users, meanwhile, can't penetrate "the great firewall" as easily as in the past, Lin explained. Authorities can see when a VPN is used, if not the content, and that's reason enough to bring someone in for questioning. Tor is better than a VPN because it wraps and disguises internet traffic within innocent transmissions. But Lin warns, it's a game of cat and mouse; the censors are always refining their methods.

Undersea Infrastructure

Remember that all of these panels took place in Taiwan, so criticism of China carried a grave sort of resonance. While discussion of digital rights naturally suggests the metaphysics of cyberspace, the infrastructure of the infosphere exists very much in the real world. One fascinating panel of experts fretted over the vulnerability of the world's undersea cables. Recent outages, such as the cut cable in the Gulf of Finland at Christmas, concerningly exhibit indicia of human agency. Professor Yachi Chiang, of the National Taiwan Ocean University, said, to my surprise, that Taiwan is located at right about the world's highest-density crossroads of undersea traffic. She's right; you can see it at the Submarine Cable Map by TeleGeography:

Submarine Cable Map CC BY-SA 4.0

The security challenges of this network are massive. About 20% of damage results from natural forces, such as deterioration and shark bites, Chiang said; sharks like to bite cables. About 70% of damage is caused by people. A lot of that is inadvertent, anchoring by fishing vessels. But there's no easy way to determine whether there was a malicious act, much less a nation behind it. In the Christmas incident, Finnish officials have alleged a deliberate anchor drag by a Cook Islands-flagged vessel doing Russia's bidding, NPR reported in December.

Taiwan had five incidents already in 2025, Chiang said, with four domestic lines and one international line disrupted. In one incident, the Taiwan Coast Guard took a vessel into custody and detained the crew. That incident was suspicious, because the boat had irregular routing for fishing and inexplicably bore a changeable nameboard. But the capture was exceptional, only possible because the ship was in Taiwanese waters, Chiang explained. On the high seas, ships bear flags of convenience, and any claim against the vessel must be taken up with the flag nation. Those claims in distant and ill developed bureaucracies go nowhere. So some better coordinated legal response is needed to protect the undersea information infrastructure, Chiang concluded.

Authoritarianism in Africa

While the United States retreats to some amalgam of isolationism and opportunism, China is dominating the developing world technologically. China built more than 70% of the 4G network in Africa, Amnesty International's Sikula Oniala said, and now is working on 5G. Chinese-made TVs are flooding the market, Oniala said, but to work, they must be connected to the internet via their Chinese software, raising specters of surveillance and control.

Starlink deployment over
Rhode Island, February 2025.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Authoritarian impulses in Africa are ever more complemented by Chinese technology and strategies. Governments control the gateways for internet access; last year, protests were met with internet shutdowns in Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Mauritius and Equatorial Guinea, VOA reported. Amid the civil war in Sudan, both sides have used internet shutdowns strategically, cutting off information about unfriendly protests, permitting access when it undermines the enemy, and charging usurious rates for access to vital information, according to Hussam Mahjoub, co-founder of Sudan Bukra, an independent television channel.

While Starlink seems to promise liberation from government gateways, authorities in countries such as Sudan refuse to license the service and are pressuring the company to limit roaming access for accounts opened abroad, such as in neighboring Kenya, Mahjoub said. Worse, Tor Project Executive Director Isabela Fernandes warned, beware the gift bearer. The Bolsonaro regime in Brazil used Starlink data to track down and kill indigenous activists, she said.

Correspondingly, public access to information (ATI, freedom of information, or FOI) law is on the wane. In Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, mass surveillance is chilling human rights activism. And governments—even Kenya, the ATI law of which, on paper at least, I praised—are following Chinese examples in ATI law, Oniala said, reducing transparency purportedly in the name of national security.

Data Protection in Africa

Even with the best of intentions, African governments hardly can be expected to stand up to tech giants such as Meta, with turnovers that dwarf nations' GDPs, Open Technology Fund Fellow Tomiwa Ilori said. Speaking to African countries' efforts to establish meaningful enforcement of data protection laws, Ilori analogized: "You only get to kill snakes because they don't move together." In other words, African countries must coordinate their efforts. Franco Giandana Gigena, an Argentine lawyer and policy analyst for Access Now, described a similar dynamic in Latin American countries' inability to resist incentives from the U.S. government and American corporations to look the other way on data protection enforcement.

In the vein of collective action, the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection came into force in 2023, upon accession by Mauritania. However, the convention, adopted in 2014, already is dated. Ilori suggested it would benefit from optional protocols on extraterritorial application and stronger enforcement, and overall, African people need more education about their rights.

At that, there might be cultural impediments to EU-style data protection. Thobekile Matimbe, a senior project manager for the Nigeria-based Paradigm Initiative, said that the convention perspective on privacy, while inspired by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is more communitarian than individualist. Curiously, the African perspective, which prizes the integrity of the family, for example, over self-determination or the right to dissent, marks the same ground from which the human right of data protection emerged in the European tradition. The problem, Matimbe explained, is that authoritarians invoke the communitarian perspective to subordinate personal freedoms to the purported imperative of national security. That rationalization has seen surveillance deployed in Malawi, for one example, targeting human rights advocates, critics of government, and journalists, Matimbe said.

Disinformation Regulation

The classical dichotomy between true and false no longer works to balance free expression and disinformation regulation, according to Lutz Güllner, head of the European Economic and Trade Office in Taiwan. As Ukrainian journalist and Public Interest Journalism Lab CEO Nataliya Gumenyuk put it, debunking just isn't working anymore.

The problem, Güllner said, is that disinformation can have truth at its core, but the dis arises in the spin. That's why, he said, the EU's new Digital Services Act (DSA) aims not at content, but at manner of presentation: imposing on Big Tech a responsibility to police platforms for manipulative amplification of speech or suppression of others' speech (for example, planting an item of disinformation in a flood of mundane but accurate news). That isn't to say that the DSA strikes the right balance. Dionysia Peppa, a Greek lawyer and senior policy analyst for Beirut-based SMEX, said that the DSA rule on takedown of illegal content does not define "illegal," devolving authority to member states. In a time of right-leaning elections in Europe, states might disagree sharply over politically charged questions, such as when policy criticism of Israel becomes illegal hate speech.

In a similar vein, Liliana Vitu, chair of the Audiovisual Council of Moldova, talked about the challenges of combatting Russian propaganda in mass media. Banning "primitive propaganda" in "news" and talk shows was easy, she said. The devil lay in entertainment. For example, Russia-originating programs might consistently portray European characters as gay, effeminate, or weak, playing to stereotypes, she explained, while Russian characters appear masculine and strong.

Ukrainian journalists Nataliya Gumenyuk and Angelina Kariakina
talk about The Reckoning Project, which trains conflict journalists
in the preservation of evidence to prosecute war crimes.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

As mere debunking doesn't work, Gumenyuk described research from The Reckoning Project seeking to figure out how journalists should combat disinformation. Viewers suffer from "compassion fatigue" at all the suffering in the world, she said. So when confronted with fact-based news accounts, such as the appearance of a drowned Syrian boy on a Bodrum beach, or the torture and murder of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, viewers resisted and complained that journalists are out to manipulate them emotionally. The same viewers, though, proved receptive to people's firsthand accounts in documentaries. Gumenyuk described her astonishment at one study subject's testimony that he trusted the documentary more than the news because journalists were not telling the story. He seemed utterly unaware that the documentary form is a product of journalism and no more or less capable of conveying viewpoint than a news story.

The Reckoning Project, which Gumenyuk co-founded, occupies a compelling position at the junction of journalism and law. Gumenyuk said she tired of seeing reports collected by journalists excluded from war-crime investigations and prosecutions because the journalists did not understand rules of evidence. The Reckoning Project brings together journalists and lawyers to accomplish their complementary missions in seeking truth and justice. Gumenyuk gave as an example the questions a journalist might ask of a witness of atrocities, such as those committed by Russian forces against civilians in Bucha. Ordinarily, a journalist might ask, "How did the Russian soldiers kill this man?" But a leading question yields exclusion of the response as evidence in a legal proceeding. So journalists are trained to ask instead, "Tell me what happened that day."

Apropos of lawyering skills and picking up on the point that tech and its ill-intentioned users evolve faster than law and regulators, Armenian attorney and former head of the Armenian Data Protection Authority Gevorg Hayrapetyan played my tune when he told an audience:

One of the most important disciplines in law is philosophy of law, what law is and what it ought to be. One of the most important steps in developing human rights is recognizing the right.

Data protection, after all, was not a thing until someone thought of it. Maybe that's why it's not a thing in the United States. If we strip black-letter law of theory and policy and dumb down the American law school curriculum to comprise a glorified bar course and skills-training program, then we're headed in the right direction. Right? Asking for a friend.

Time to Save the World

Even were we all so inclined, is there time yet to save the world? Probably not. Law and regulation can't keep up, Güllner said, so the answer has to come from education, to develop people's sensory reflexes to detect disinformation. That will take a generation. "Ask my Ukrainian colleagues," he said. "We don't have that long."

Vitu described complex Moldovan legislation with multi-factor tests to determine whether disinformation conveys falsity and threatens national security. But that took years to develop with civil society stakeholders at the table to protect free expression; propaganda meanwhile grew yet more sophisticated. "Moscow never sleeps," she lamented. 

And Raša Nedeljkov, with the Serbian Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, summed up the anxiety wracking the world:

A beacon of light for us was U.S. democracy. Now look what is happening.

Maybe that's the silver lining, journalist Tess Bacalla of the Asia Democracy Network suggested: The rest of the world, especially the European Union, will have to step up.

Comparative law research reaches prisoner rights; women's rights; tech patents; internet, drug reg

Law Offices of James L. Arrasmith CC BY-NC 4.0

In fall 2024, I had the privilege of teaching Comparative Law for the sixth time.

For my time and energies, the course is the best one to teach, because it offers the best opportunity for a lifelong learner. Law teaching usually requires mastering a broad and deep range of content so that one can guide students capably through it. Not so in Comparative Law, in which the teacher cannot possibly know the substantive content of all of the legal systems of the world. Rather, the course is about arming students with the tools of comparative methodology, and then savoring the opportunity to learn from them, what they find in their own research.

This year was not lacking in the savory. As I have in the past, I am proud and pleased to share a collection of abstracts representing the yeoman work of my students in the fall semester. You will see that the students devised some wonderfully innovative theses. The subject matter that researchers tackled spanned prisoner legal rights, marijuana and gambling regulation, black women's representation in the legal profession, women's rights in Afghanistan and in Dutch sex work, semiconductor patents, and regulation of online misinformation.

Alayna Wageman, Prisoners Are Human Too: A Comparative Analysis of Prisoners' Right to Legal Assistance in Chile and the United States. Both Chile and the United States guarantee, through their constitutions, the right to legal counsel for individuals who cannot afford a lawyer during criminal prosecutions. However, prisoners lack resources to access legal assistance when their basic human rights are violated while incarcerated. This project seeks to show how the extreme traumatization of citizens in the United States from the years of slavery and the extreme traumatization of citizens in Chile from the years of dictatorship continue to impact the treatment of prisoners today. This paper begins with an overview of the history of slavery in the United States, specifically in Massachusetts, and an overview of the history of dictatorship in Chile. Next, the paper will explain the laws that define the right to legal assistance for prisoners in Chile and Massachusetts. Finally, the paper compares two programs designed to improve prisoners' access to legal resources: the Prisoners' Legal Services (PLS) of Massachusetts in the United States and the Penitentiary Defense Program (Programa de Defensa Penal Pública Penitenciaria) in Chile. This analysis demonstrates how the influence of the historical extreme traumatization of societies continues to impact the treatment of prisoners in both countries, with focus on the limitation of access to legal assistance in prisons. The paper concludes by acknowledging the efforts of the PLS and the Penitentiary Defense Program, which are working to further protect the rights of prisoners.

Bryce Mayo, Comparing the Impact of Sports Gambling Advertising: A Legal Exploration of the United States and Australia. The recent legalization of sports gambling has taken the United States by storm, and as a result, an influx of advertising has taken over every commercial break. Sports fans, avid and casual viewers alike, cannot help but notice sportsbooks like BetMGM, FanDuel, and DraftKings attempt to entice an already invested community into raising the stakes of a game or match. These companies use tactics such as celebrity endorsements, sign-up promotions, and "can't lose bets" on your first wager. This paper compares how the United States and Australia have approached the regulation of sports gambling advertising since its legalization in 2018 and 1983, respectively. Although both countries follow the common law system, the legalization of sports gambling came about in drastically different ways. The United States struck down a longstanding congressional act, while Australia codified sports gambling, even making the first sportsbooks state owned and operated. Recently, Australia has issued licenses to private or publicly owned sportsbooks and their advertising regulations have changed as a result; whereas in the United States, private and publicly owned sportsbooks are the primary recipients of licenses, yet the regulations mirror that of Australia in 1983. Legalizing sports gambling in the United States is in its infancy, and growing pains are inevitable. It appears to be the wild west, quite reminiscent of tobacco advertising in years past. The United States can learn from Australia's experience and seek a balance between maintaining a profitable market and minimizing the creation of degenerate gamblers.

Carson Powell, Quality Over Quantity: A Comparative Analysis of Marijuana Quality Control Regulations Between the Netherlands and the United States. This paper compares the law and regulations of the United States and the Netherlands, on the regulations that are used to ensure the quality of marijuana sold legally. First, the paper focus will be on the Dutch marijuana policy, and its past, current and future regulation protecting the quality of the marijuana sold in "coffee shops." Next, the focus will shift to the United States and specifically Colorado regulations when testing the quality of marijuana. The paper views policies implemented to ensure quality and safety within the production, testing, distribution and the sale of cannabis/marijuana products. Finally, the paper compares Netherlands regulations on marijuana quality assurance and with Colorado laws and regulations that establish the safety of state citizens. The paper compares the laws and regulations, how they relate to each other, and the social results. The paper concludes with recommendations based on the comparisons drawn from the two parties, and whether each can become more effective and efficient with its own processes.

Kennia Joseph, A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Racial Equality for Black and Nigerian Women in the Legal Profession. This paper compares the laws in the United States and Nigeria that address gender and racial equality and their effect on black and Nigerian women in the workforce, specifically in the legal profession. One of the key issues in ensuring gender equality in employment lies in enforcing existing laws and policies. The comparison between Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the overturned affirmative action practices thereunder, Article 11 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the failed Nigerian Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill of 2016 highlight underrepresentation in the legal field. Despite developing systems to support and encourage race and gender equality, black women from different cultures, and political, societal, and economic climates share experiences in the same profession with similar laws, initiatives, and policies.

Nick Saathoff, A Comparison Between Patents on Semiconductors in Germany and the United States. Patent law in Germany and the United States protects those who invent or discover patentable processes. Ideologies between the two countries differ in the field. In the United States, a patent is mainly a monetary protection. In Germany, in addition to monetary protection, there is an honor and prestige associated with inventing. This paper discusses patent law in each country specific to the field of semiconductors. Semiconductors are one of the most technologically significant patentable items in the world today. The paper initially provides an overview of patent law in each country and what role semiconductors play. This paper identifies similarities and differences between patent protections, patent quality, and patent strategies in the United States and Germany. In doing so, the paper discusses key requirements of obtaining a patent. The paper discusses one requirement at a time, discussing the interpretation in the United States and the interpretation in Germany. The paper then notes patent statutes in each country specific to the semiconductor industry. Additionally, the paper will discuss nuances in each country’s patent laws in the semiconductor industry.

Rebecca Stump, A Comparative Look at Sex Work in the United States and the Netherlands. Sex work, historically, has been a controversial occupation for a variety of reasons, including religious beliefs, women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and the extent to which the state should regulate an individual's choices over their own bodies. During this period, sex work has been considered a shameful profession, one which must be criminalized to deter human trafficking or coercion. However, as understanding and advocacy for bodily autonomy and freedom to self, and countries such as the Netherlands reform and change their sex work laws, there are movements for change to law in the United States. The aim is for a discussion, through comparison of the legal systems of Nevada and the Netherlands and the main avenues for reform, partial decriminalization and full decriminalization or legalization, the social and legal implications of legalization of sex work to further investigate reform in the United States. Within research regarding sex work, there are critical biases that must be acknowledged prior to engaging in discussion. First, and foremost, is the moral and ethical considerations of sex work. Sex work is not merely seen as an occupation free from moral implication, but an occupation for which every person may offer their individual consideration as to the ethical value of the work. To engage in substantive discussion, morality must be stripped away. Instead, one must be willing to engage in discussion solely on the legal ability of an individual to make a choice regarding the services they offer using their person, and the role of the state in legislating that decision. To that point, a discussion regarding the legality of sex work is necessarily a discussion of the extent to which the state should regulate labor. There exist various viewpoints as to the question of federalism and the role of the state to regulate. This bias must also be considered.

Sean Pillai, Afghan Women's Human Rights: A Legal Analysis of Constitutional Governance vs. the Taliban Rule. Afghanistan’s history of political turbulence and violent turmoil have repeatedly challenged the legal and social status of women. Afghanistan attempted to rebuild as a democratic nation and included rights to protect women. Under the 2004 constitution, women gained significant legal rights, such as access to education, safety and freedom of movement and employment opportunities, marking a stark contrast to the Taliban's earlier reign (1996-2001). However, the progress made was curtailed with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021 and the Taliban return to power. This analysis will address the shift in legal protections and the impact on societal roles for women contrasting the two eras: the 2004 constitutional government and the Taliban regime 2021 to present. By comparing the legal frameworks and implementation of women's rights in key domains such as women's access to education, safety and freedom of movement, and women's access to employment, this paper seeks to provide an understanding of the impact the two legal systems have on women.

Shiloh Worthington, The Digital Services Act vs. Section 230: The Western Hemisphere's Battle Against Misinformation. The European Union and the United States have both recognized the disparate effects of rampant and unchecked misinformation spreading across the internet. However, each has a distinct approach to combatting this epidemic of troublesome content. The EU battle against misinformation is best exemplified by the recently passed Digital Services Act (DSA), which places the primary responsibility of stopping the spread on the platforms themselves. Meanwhile, in the United States, the struggle to fight misinformation is at odds with the First Amendment rights of the platforms. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act offers platforms total immunity for their misinformation content-removal practices, no matter how it conflicts with individual freedom of expression. Further conflict arises as the EU's DSA attempts to force American-based platforms with European audiences to comply with its content-removal practices under misinformation-related pretenses, even if doing so would remove American citizens' content otherwise protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Watch for these students on upcoming bar pass lists in a state near you!

Flags from Flagpedia, except Afghanistan Taliban from Wikimedia Commons, all public domain.