The Dehumanisation of Law: Digital Reflections
Abstract
This paper claims that the applied legal frameworks, particularly in relation to our online existences, have gradually professed the withering of the human rights grammar. The observed trend does not necessarily confer intent; yet it neither marks coincidental development. The general tendency finds other global discourses on the rise (i.e. intellectual property and security risk), and systemic preoccupations with various forms of proceduralism undercutting the historically and structurally preceding spilling over of human rights across law. The needs of the market set targets for the regulation of the Internet with a seeming exclusivity over matters of social conduct. If we are to discuss how contractual tools, the likes of Terms of Service and EULAs, lock authoritatively the development of citizenship within privatised regimes, we need to review those mechanisms that made possible for values and principles, which otherwise define the liberal constitutional democracy, to be so aggressively resisted and denied of their role in legal practice. The paper looks critically into the genealogy of Internet laws, which made almost reasonable to ostracise the human being from human laws.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
EJLT is an open access journal, aiming to disseminate academic work and perspectives as widely as possible to the benefit of the author and the author’s readers. It is the assumption of the EJLT that authors who publish in the journal wish their work to be available as freely and as widely as possible through the open access publishing channel.
Authors who publish with EJLT will retain copyright and moral rights in the underlying work but will grant all users the rights to copy, store and print for non-commercial use copies of their work. Commercial mirroring may also be carried out with the consent of the journal. The work must remain as published – without redaction or editing – and must clearly state the identity of the author and the originating EJLT url of the article. Any commercial use of the author’s work - apart from mirroring - requires the permission of the author and any aspects of the article which are the property of EJLT (e.g. typographical format) requires permission from EJLT.
Authors can sometimes become no longer contactable (through, for example, death or retirement). If this occurs, any rights in the work will pass to the European Journal of Law and Technology which will continue to make the work available in as wide a manner as possible to achieve the aims of open access and ensuring that an author's work continues to be available. An author - or their estate - can recover these rights from EJLT by providing contact information.
The European Journal of Law and Technology holds rights in format, publication and dissemination.
EJLT, as a non-commercial organisation - which receives donations to allow it to continue publishing – must retain information on reader access to journal articles. This means that we will not give permission to mirror the journal unless we can be provided with full details as to reader access to each and every journal article. We prefer and encourage deep linking rather than mirroring. Encouragement is thus given for all users – commercial and non-commercial – to provide indexes and links to articles in the EJLT where the index or link points to the location of the article on the EJLT server, rather than to stored copies on other servers.
Please contact the European Journal of Law and Technology if you are in any doubt as to what this statement of use covers.