Judicial Protection of Fundamental Rights on the Internet: A Road Towards Digital Constitutionalism? by Oreste Pollicino

Abstract

Pollicino’s exploration takes us through a jurisprudential journey across the Atlantic and back to Europe, through the channel of the fundamental rights that are more affected by the internet. These are the freedom of expression, privacy and data protection. Focusing on the USA, the EU and the Council of Europe’s case law, Pollicino raises and addresses questions that have constellated legal scholarship on the internet and fundamental rights: what are the variations in the understandings of ‘digital fundamental rights’ across different jurisdictions? What has been the role of courts in protecting essential legal entitlements on the internet? The book, therefore, ventures into fundamental rights pluralism in the digital, borderless age of the internet. In so doing, Pollicino has tackled one of the main challenges of digital constitutionalism, being that courts are increasingly vested with legal questions on fundamental rights protection in the digital environment. These novel, emerging issues require judicial bodies to test the limits of fundamental rights and the law, both originally created to apply in the physical reality and now expanding to the world of bits.