Whilst advances in biotechnology and information technology have undoubtedly resulted in better quality of life for mankind, they can also bring about global problems. The legal response to the challenges caused by the rapid progress of technological change has been slow and the question of how international human rights should be protected and promoted with respect to science and technology remains unexplored. The contributors to this book explore the political discourse and power relatio...

In the context of the continuous advance of information technologies and biomedicine, and of the creation of economic blocs, this work analyzes the role that data protection plays in the integration of markets. It puts special emphasis on financial and insurance services. Further, it identifies the differences in the data protection systems of EU member states and examines the development of common standards and principles of data protection that could help build a data protection model fo...

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity-and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation-and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control. IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and Ti...

This book explores what the American Civil Liberties Union calls the "third era" in cyberspace, in which filters "fundamentally alter the architectural structure of the Internet, with significant implications for free speech." Although courts and nongovernmental organizations increasingly insist upon constitutional and other legal guarantees of a freewheeling Internet, multi-national corporations compete to produce tools and strategies for making it more predictable. When Google attempted ...

"Transgender Rights packs a surprising amount of information into a small space. Offering spare, tightly executed essays, this slim volume nonetheless succeeds in creating a spectacular, well-researched compendium of the transgender movement." -Law Library JournalOver the past three decades, the transgender movement has gained visibility and achieved significant victories. Discrimination has been prohibited in several states, dozens of municipalities, and more than two hun...

Over the last few years, financial statement scandals, cases of fraud and corruption, data protection violations, and other legal violations have led to numerous liability cases, damages claims, and losses of reputation. As a reaction to these developments, several regulations have been issued: Corporate Governance, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, IFRS, Basel II and III, Solvency II and BilMoG, to name just a few. In this book, compliance is understood as the process, mapped not only in an interna...

The introduction of the Human Rights Act has led to an explosion in books on human rights, yet no sustained examination of their history and philosophy exists in the burgeoning literature. At the same time, while human rights have triumphed on the world stage as the ideology of postmodernity, our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous, less enlightened one. This book fills the historical and theoretical gap and explores the powerful promises and disturbing para...

The principle of proportionality, which has become the standard test for adjudicating human and constitutional rights disputes in jurisdictions worldwide has had few critics. Proportionality is generally taken for granted or enthusiastically promoted or accepted with minor qualifications. A Critique of Proportionality and Balancing presents a frontal challenge to this orthodoxy. It provides a comprehensive critique of the proportionality principle, and particularly of its most characterist...

Featuring specially commissioned chapters from experts in the field of media and communications law, this book provides an authoritative survey of media law from a comparative perspective.The handbook does not simply offer a synopsis of the state of affairs in media law jurisprudence, rather it provides a better understanding of the forces that generate media rules, norms, and standards against the background of major transformations in the way information is mediated as a result o...

A provocative, timely assessment of the state of free speech in AmericaWith his best seller The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times veteran David K. Shipler cemented his place among our most trenchant social commentators. Now he turns his incisive reporting to a critical American ideal: freedom of speech. Anchored in personal stories—sometimes shocking, sometimes absurd, sometimes dishearteningly familiar—Shipler’s invest...

This book starts with an exercise, proposing a theoretical reflection on the technological path that, over time, has transformed the ways we produce, consume and manage intellectual content subject to copyright protection. This lays the groundwork for a further analysis of the main legal aspects of the new European Directive, its improvements, its tendencies and its points of controversy, with special and more concrete attention to how it proposes to address the issues of competition, tran...

As constitutional law globalizes, the quest for a common grammar or 'generic constitutional law' becomes more pressing. Proportionality is one of the most prominent and controversial components of the modern, global constitutional discourse. In view of the alarming tension between the triumphant success of proportionality and the severity of the criticism directed towards it, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the critics of proportionality and demonstrates that their objections agai...