LAPA Seminar with Jennifer Daskal - Speech Across Borders

Program in Law and Public Affairs logo
Date & Time Nov 04 2019 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Speaker(s)
Jennifer Daskal, Professor, American University Washington College of Law
Audience Open to the Public

LAPA’s seminar format encourages attendees to familiarize themselves with the paper in advance. The author will open the session by summarizing the main themes in the paper and presenting some topics for discussion. Moderated Q&A follows.

Copies of the seminar paper are typically available about 10 days before the event, during regular business hours  at the LAPA Offices on the 3rd floor of Wallace Hall.

From Professor Daskal: As both governments and tech companies seek to regulate speech online, these efforts raise critical and contested questions about how far those regulations can and should extend. Is it enough to take down or delink material in a geographically segmented way? Or can and should tech companies be ordered to take down or delink unsavory content across their entire platforms—no matter who is posting the material or where the unwanted content is viewed? How do we deal with conflicting speech norms across borders? And how do we protect against the most censor-prone nation effectively setting global speech rules? These questions were recently addressed in two high-profile judgments from the European Court of Justice and were the subject of ongoing litigation that pitted Canadian and U.S. courts against one another. Meanwhile, a new form of geographically-segmented speech regulation is emerging—pursuant to which speech is limited based on who is speaking and from where, as opposed to what is being said. This Article examines the ways in which norms regarding speech, privacy, and a range of other rights conflict across borders, the power of private sector players in adjudicating and resolving these conflicts, the ways in which governments are seeking to harness this power on a global scale, and the broader implications for individual rights. It off ers a nuanced approach that identifies the multiple competing interests at stake—recognizing both the ways in which global takedowns or delinkings can, at times, be a critical means of protecting key interests, and the risk of over-censorship and forced uniformity that can result.

Jennifer Daskal is an Associate Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches and writes in the fields of criminal, national security, and constitutional law. From 2009-2011, she was counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice. Prior to joining DOJ, Daskal was senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and clerked for the Honorable Jed S. Rakoff. She also spent two years as a national security law fellow and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center. From 2016-2017, she was an Open Society Institute Fellow working on issues related to privacy and law enforcement access to data across borders.

Daskal is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard Law School, and Cambridge University, where she was a Marshall Scholar. Recent publications include Borders and Bits (Vanderbilt Law Review 2018); Law Enforcement Access to Data Across Borders: The Evolving Security and Rights Issues (Journal of National Security Law and Policy 2016); The Un-Territoriality of Data (Yale Law Journal 2015); Pre-Crime Restraints: The Explosion of Targeted, Non-Custodial Prevention (Cornell Law Review 2014); and The Geography of the Battlefield: A Framework for Detention and Targeting Outside the ‘Hot’ Conflict Zone (University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2013). Daskal has published op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald Tribune and has appeared on BBC, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and NPR, among other media outlets. She is Executive Editor of and regular contributor to the Just Security blog.

https://lapa.princeton.edu/content/jennifer-daskal-american-university-washington-college-law

More information: Contact Judi Rivkin, jrivkin@princeton.edu

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