Legal Scholarship on Data Protection: Future Challenges and Directions

Abstract

This essay – written in honour of the Belgian legal scholar, Yves Poullet – describes some of the future challenges facing legal scholarship in the data protection field and recommends prioritising particular issues, approaches and methodologies to meet these challenges. The essay argues that the ongoing rapid growth of law, policy and scholarship on data protection makes it increasingly difficult for individual researchers to maintain an up-to-date overview of the field, and it pressures them to specialise. With this specialisation comes a risk of data protection scholarship fracturing into silos of discourse that rarely speak with each other. Added to this come a variety of other risks, such as ongoing ‘Western’ bias in the scholarship and continuing ignorance of the history, heritage and actual practice of data protection law. The essay urges data protection scholars to embrace an open, cross-jurisdictional approach that not only leverages off insights drawn from other disciplines but also attempts to connect with other fields of legal study. The essay also recommends greater exploration of the historical dimensions of data protection law, the jurisdictional quandaries such law poses and the ways in which it is actually applied ‘on the ground’.