Category Archives: Defamation and Privacy
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, ‘“I miss my name”: Why Election Workers Turn to Defamation Law to Defend Democracy’
ABSTRACT Defamation law was one of the only effective ways to hold actors who undermined the 2020 and 2022 elections in the United States accountable. Defamation lawsuits were utilized by election workers to push back against election deniers. While criminal law largely failed to hold election deniers accountable, this aspect of tort law which has […]
Gunawan, Hartzog, Richards, Choffnes and Wilson, ‘Dark Patterns as Disloyal Design’
ABSTRACT Lawmakers have started to regulate ‘dark patterns’, understood to be design practices meant to influence technology users’ decisions through manipulative or deceptive means. Most agree that dark patterns are undesirable, but open questions remain as to which design choices should be subjected to scrutiny, much less the best way to regulate them. In this […]
Matthew Bodie, ‘Liability, Property, and Inalienability Rules in Employee Data Regulation’
ABSTRACT The regulation of employee data presents a complex legal challenge at the intersection of privacy, property, and liability rules. Current frameworks primarily rely on liability rules, where employers are permitted to collect and use employee data as long as they provide compensation for any resulting harm. However, this approach fails to account for the […]
Tzanou and Siapka, ‘Re-imagining Data Protection: Femtech and Gendered Risks in the GDPR’
ABSTRACT The chapter investigates the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from a gender perspective to question whether the Regulation does/ should explicitly recognise gender and, if so, how. It makes three distinct contributions: First, it argues that gender matters within the GDPR. Using femtech as a case study at the intersection of data protection […]
Jeevan Hariharan, ‘Has English privacy law gone too far? Police investigations and the media’s ability to report on serious wrongdoing’
ABSTRACT The judicial recognition that a person generally has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a police investigation about them has led prominent media figures to argue that English law unacceptably stifles important journalism, including into issues like sexual misconduct. This article highlights that a proper assessment of the media’s concerns requires focus to shift […]
Ursula Cheer, ‘Impact of gender in defamation claims in the United Kingdom and New Zealand’
ABSTRACT This article presents first results of an empirical investigation into the impact of gender in reported defamation claims in the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand (NZ) (2014-2024). The study employed quantitative methodology to identify #MeToo claims. Overall it did not reveal a flood of such cases. There was a small number of media […]
de Almeida Leite and Ramos Leite, ‘Platform liability, free speech, and market fairness: transatlantic legal responses to commercial defamation and digital competition’
ABSTRACT This paper presents a comparative legal analysis of commercial defamation and unfair competition in the digital age, focusing on the divergent regulatory approaches of the United States and the European Union. While US law emphasizes freedom of expression and market-driven litigation, the EU favors consumer protection and proactive platform accountability. Through key case studies […]
Tong and Horton, ‘Judicial discourses about journalism in journalism-related judgments in the United Kingdom (UK) since Reynolds’
ABSTRACT In the 1999 case of Reynolds v Times Newspapers, a qualified privilege defence was developed to libel action. However, section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013 abolished the defence and replaced it with a new defence of ‘publication on a matter of public interest’. This paper combines n-gram and qualitative approaches to analysing discourses […]
Jurcys, Minssen, Fenwick and Corrales Compagnucci, ‘The Future of Privacy Law? A Comment on Solove/Hartzog’s “Kafka in the Age of AI and the Futility of Privacy as Control in an Age of AI”’
ABSTRACT This Comment engages with Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog’s thought-provoking claim that ‘privacy as control’ is increasingly ‘futile’ in an era of ubiquitous AI. We share their concern about the profound power imbalances and structural opacity that characterize today’s data-driven systems, and we recognize the urgency of rethinking traditional privacy frameworks in light of […]
‘Clicks and Consent Across Borders: Briskin v Shopify and the Global Reach of Privacy Rights’
Can a technology company based in Canada be sued in California for allegedly violating Californian privacy laws? In Briskin v Shopify, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said yes. The April 2025 ruling opens the door for stronger enforcement of privacy rights in a global digital marketplace and ultimately reframes data protection as not just […]