Digital Rule of Law

In this seminar, I will explore why the concept of the rule of law needs a new theory. For years, it has been critiqued by law and development scholars for being a tool to justify plunder by the west, as an instrument for legal hegemony masked in the form of state building projects, and as a mechanism of legal transplantation which pays little attention to the plural nature of legal systems across the world. The Secretary General of the United Nations has called for a new vision for the rule of law which focuses on developing a people centric approach to how it is conceptualised as well as institutionalised. With the increasing digitalisation of public services in areas such as health, finance and education, new concerns have emerged for the rule of law including around privacy, surveillance, and the corporate capture of public institutions.

Siddharth Peter de Souza is an Assistant Professor in AI & Society at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. His work explores how data is governed globally in contested and plural settings. He is the founder of Justice Adda, a law and design social venture in India where he works on matters related to access to justice, and legal empowerment. Siddharth has worked as a digital policy consultant with United Nations Development Programme and the International Development Law Organization and was previously a post-doctoral researcher at the Global Data Justice Project at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society.

Moderator: Marianne von Blomberg (Global Academic Fellow (incoming), The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law; Fellow, University of Cologne)

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=105658.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at  / 3917 4727.