By Agustina Del Campo, Nicolás Zara, y Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte

This paper discusses the risk-based approach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) of the European Union. By embracing open-ended standards instead of rules and by imposing broad risk-identification and mitigation obligations on private parties, the DSA pushes forward a form of managerial co-regulation that is a paradigmatic shift in platform regulation, that has already influenced other regulatory proposals around the globe. This paper argues that the move is consequential from the perspective of the role of human rights in Internet governance. We posit that the approach pose unique problems when seen from the popular three-prong test used by apex courts around the world to assess restrictions on freedom of expression. Furthermore, we argue that it pushes rights out of the center stage of Internet governance and may create a logic of "symbolic compliance" where governance role of rights is further diminished. Finally, this paper identifies opportunities to address or mitigate the challenges identified, especially in an enforcement stage that remains quite open to these kinds of efforts.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and Electronic Commerce, vol. 16, No. 2 (2025)

CELE Research Paper No. 64, 26p.

By Loren Daniel Glass and Charles Francis Williams.

Over the course of the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States, the state usurped the traditional authority of the church in regulating sexual expression and behavior. In the same century philosophers of classical liberalism identified that state function as a threat to individual liberty. Since then, liberalism has provided the framework for debates over obscenity around the globe. But liberalism has recently been under siege, on the one side from postmodern thinkers skeptical about its andro- and ethnocentric assumptions, and on the other side from religious thinkers doubtful of the moral integrity of the Enlightenment project writ large. The principal challenge for those who conduct academic work in this realm is to formulate new models of research and analysis appropriate to understanding and evaluating speech in the present-day public sphere. Toward those ends, Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism contains a selection of essays and interventions by prominent authors and artists in a variety of disciplines and media. These writings, taken as a whole, put recent developments into historical and global contexts and chart possible futures for a debate that promises to persist well into the new millennium.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011. 181p.

By Chris Thornhill.

This is a book that is concerned with democracy. It aims to contribute to the defence of democracy, and to achieve this goal it aims to contribute to the broad understanding of democracy – that is, to enhance comprehension of the historical processes through which democracy developed, of its social foundations and of the expectations that people who live in democratic societies can reasonably entertain.

Cambridge. (2018) 598 pages.