Shaping Digital Human Rights: The Global Impact of Legal Diffusion

• In Event: Information Technology and Politics; Formal Theory; and American Political Thought Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Under what conditions does legal diffusion lead to changes in behavior? Across a variety of disciplines, scholars have examined the phenomenon of officials borrowing law. Congressional bills are ripe with instances of wholesale copying, governments borrow the text of prior trade agreements to create efficiencies, and officials adopt bilateral investment agreement models to attract capital. More recently, governments have copied laws from the European Union and adopted text from the General Data Protection Regulation into domestic legal codes. Some scholars have argued that this allows the EU to set the global agenda for the regulation of the internet and advance privacy as an important protection for the digital age. Is legal diffusion another method to positively impact the protection of human rights? I advance a liberal theory of legal diffusion to argue that the relationship between the state promoting law and legal adopters is critical to understanding enforcement patterns. Governments with closer domestic institutional alignment to the EU are more likely to enforce the rules adopted. The European Union impacts whether governments enforce privacy rights through a system of conditionality. Pressure from the EU has important consequences for domestic enforcement patterns by more closely aligning domestic institutions. The conclusions from the study of legal diffusion have important implications for activists seeking to promote legal models as a means of protecting human rights, suggesting that behavioral change after the adoption of foreign law is conditional on the alignment of domestic institutions.

Author

• Rachel A Hulvey, University of Pennsylvania