Event Report  |  01/12/2024

Conference “Comparative Data Law”

Legal issues relating to the development of global data law were discussed at the "Comparative Data Law" conference on December 7 and 8, 2023. The Research Center for Legal Issues of Digitalization (FREDI) at the University of Passau, the Institute for Media and Information Law (Department of Private Law) at the University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition  jointly hosted and organized the conference at the Haus der Bayerischen Wirtschaft in Munich. Moritz Hennemann (Uni Freiburg) and Josef Drexl were responsible for the content.

Comparative Data Law, conference impression
Comparative Data Law, conference impression. Photo: Moritz Hennemann
Participants of the conference “Comparative Data Law”
Participants of the conference “Comparative Data Law”. Photo: Delia Zirilli

Academics from all over the world discussed international data regulation on various continents and critically explored future options for action. The thematically diverse program was dedicated to central data law issues and opened with a keynote speech by Michal Gal (University of Haifa) on “The Effects of Legal Data Regimes on the Global Data Race”.


In the following four sections of the conference, data trust models, questions of data localization and data sharing as well as suitable international regulatory forums were presented and controversially discussed. The question of how to deal with the phenomenon of so-called data colonialism was also the subject of presentations and discussions.


At the end of the event, Josef Drexl presented the Institute’s project group “Data Governance in Emerging Economies to Promote the Sustainable Development Goals”, which includes several researchers from the Institute. Numerous poster presentations, in which scientists presented current research projects and discussed them with interested conference participants, completed the event.