The roots of some legal fields go back to the Roman Age or even further. Compared to these, ‘digital law’ is still in its infant days. The rapid development of digital technologies and the increasing complexities of digital practices in a digitised society have led to an ever-increasing number of legal questions. Moreover, the sheer amount of norms and regulations in digital law, the respective case law and the scholarly literature keep growing and growing. Universities started founding new legal departments to serve as their link to the digital revolution. The Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the University of Vienna, founded in 2017, is one example, and it is not by accident that it is the youngest within the long-standing tradition of Vienna’s Faculty of Law.
Together with the rise of digital law as a legal discipline and the establishment of institutional structures, new academic networks and scientific infrastructures within the legal research community are being built. One of the initiatives trying to foster and encourage academic dialogue among scholars of digital law is the research network Young Digital Law.
Young Digital Law has been created as an open research network and is directed at researchers on all career levels before being a full professor (from the pre-doctoral stage until completion of a ‘Habilitation’). Young Digital Law has set out to foster ‘collaborative legal scholarship that does not view future technologies and law in isolation from the social conditions that shape them. […] disciplines should no longer be seen as dividing lines, but as a contact zone for intradisciplinary communication. The Young Digital Law wants to lay the foundations of a new self-understanding for the exchange at these contact zones for researchers of the coming generation of scholars.’[1]
The inaugural conference of the research network Young Digital Law, YDL2021, was hosted by University of Göttingen in July 2021. YDL2022, the second conference of its kind, was organized by the Center for Law and Legal Education in Digital Transformation at the University of Hamburg (ZeRdiT) in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI). 16 presentations by 22 speakers from two continents and eight countries discussed this year’s topic ‘Opacity or Transparency ‑ What is it about and what should be the role of law in addressing the dichotomy that is shaping modern societies?’ together with participants onsite in Hamburg and online. Core questions addressed at YDL2022 included the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of implementing transparency, the challenges posed by AI in legally relevant decision-making, as well as prominent issues in private, privacy, public, medical and finance law.
Digital law does not only cross (assumed) borders between different legal fields, such as the ones mentioned above, but it also relies intensely on the expertise from non-legal scholarly domains, such as computer sciences, social sciences or the humanities.
Therefore, the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law and the Research Platform Governance of Digital Practices have joined forces in the competition for becoming the host of next year’s conference (YDL2023) ‑ and we are proud to announce that our application has been successful: The 3rd conference of the research network Young Digital Law will take place from July 5th to 7th 2023 in Vienna.
We are looking forward to seeing you at YDL2023!
Find the official announcement of the 3rd conference of the open research network Young Digital Law 2023 here.
Watch out for the call for contributions to come soon.
[1] See https://www.jura.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung/institute-forschungsstellen-und-zentren/digitalisierung-und-recht/einzelprojekte-alt/tagung.html accessed 1st of September 2022.
