Internet Governance Lab Faculty Fellow Professor Jennifer Daskal, Associate Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, will present our next Roundtable event on her forthcoming article "Borders and Bits" on Wednesday, January 24 from 2:30pm-4:00pm in SIS Room 300.

Our personal data is everywhere and anywhere, moving across national borders in ways that defy normal expectations of how things and people travel from Point A to Point B. Yet, whereas data transits the globe without any intrinsic ties to territory, the governments that seek to access or regulate this data operate with territorial-based limits.

In her talk, Professor Daskal will discuss the inherent tension between how governments and data operate, the jurisdictional conflicts that have emerged, and the power that has been delegated to multinational corporations that manage data across borders. Specifically, she will examine this issue through the lens of the highly contested and often conflicting approaches to the jurisdictional reach of law enforcement over data - the so-called right to be forgotten - and a range of other privacy regulations.

Professor Daskal addresses the flaws of old jurisdictional rules onto the new medium of data. She shines a spotlight on the unilateral rulemaking by powerful states and the powerful multinational companies that manage our data, which in turn puts private, multinational companies increasingly in control of whose rules govern and thus the substance of both privacy and speech rights on a global basis.

Professor Daskal's forthcoming article "Borders and Bits" will be published by the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2018.