Promise or Peril? Towards an international data protection regime

The Society's 114th Annual Meeting—and first Virtual Annual Meeting—took place June 25–26, 2020. The 2020 Annual Meeting theme, "The Promise of International Law," was an opportunity to reflect on the successes and failures of international law, while reaffirming our commitment to achieving its promise of a more just and peaceful world.

All sessions in this track sponsored by Dechert LLP - Organized by the International Law and Technology Interest Group

This session tackles one of the most pressing issues in transnational legal practice today: data protection and privacy rights. The EU’s enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018, has transformed markets around the globe as governments, multinational companies and civil society organizations with transnational activities have focused organizational resources on bringing their international practices and their accompanying data processing into compliance with the GDPR’s extensive regulatory framework. Other countries, including China, Brazil and India have followed suit with their own data protection regimes, all of which incorporate elements of extra-territorial jurisdiction similar to those within the GDPR. In addition, the International Standards Organization has recently issued a data privacy information management standard, ISO/IEC 27701.The global trend towards personal data protection is well underway. In the United States several states (notably California, with its recent CCPA), have moved forward with data protection laws, yet Congress struggles to draft federal privacy legislation, grappling with core questions of proper scope and effective enforcement. These developments suggest a number of corollary questions: is an international data protection regime evolving? If not, should one be developed? What role do comparative and international law norms, including human rights, play in shaping existing and potential data protection and privacy regimes? This session will explore these and other questions to map the state of play with respect to data protection and privacy regulation from a transnational perspective.

FEATURING
Lisl Brunner, AT&T
Arturo J. Carrillo, George Washington University School of Law
Margaret Hu, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Odia Kagan, Fox Rothschild LLP
Andrea Matwyshyn, Penn State Law (Moderator)

(Speaker organizations are shown as of June 2020)