
Professor Pompeu Casanovas
In this staff seminar, Professor Pompeu Casanovas will present a paper titled, ‘Meta-rule of law: Legal foundations for the web of data’.
Abstract
We live in an increasingly connected world. (Open) Linked Data is the term coined by Tim Berners-Lee to refer how structured data and metadata can be used to connect people and digital objects on the web. In fact, semantic web languages (XML, RDF, OWL…) and the so-called Big-Data and the Internet of Things are challenging the way we perceive our identity, our social relations, and their institutional bonds. We are experiencing a deep cultural change. How is the law coping with this? Are our current legal instruments enough to define and regulate rights and norms that are already expressed mainly through computational means? And what about the legal theories inherited from the 20th century? Are they still able to set the general framework for representing how the law might work on the web of data?
Professor Casanovas will introduce the notion of ‘meta-rule of law’ to refer to the protections of the rule of law as they (i) might be applied through semantic and algorithmic languages, (ii) might bridge the civil and public domains into regulatory spaces.
The Presenter
Pompeu Casanovas has been recently appointed Research Professor at La Trobe University (2017), and Key Researcher of the Australian government-funded Data to Decisions CRC Project. He is Director of Advanced Research and Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Law at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB Faculty of Law), and founder and Head of the UAB Institute of Law and Technology (IDT-UAB). He has been Principal Investigator in over 50 national, European, and international projects. He has published over 10 books and more than 200 articles in the areas of legal philosophy, legal sociology, intellectual history, and Artificial Intelligence & Law. His recent publications develop legal ontologies to implement Semantic Web technologies, including models of governance to implement security, privacy and data protection on the Web.
Seminar
Date: 9 August 2017
Time: 11.45pm to 1pm. Light refreshments will be served from 11.45am – 12noon.
Venue: La Trobe Law School Moot Court, Social Sciences Building (Room 232), Melbourne Campus, La Trobe University
Cost: Free
RVSP: Please register via Eventbrite. For catering purposes, registration by Thursday 3 August would be appreciated.