In this volume celebrating 50 years of information technology at the Department of Law, Stockholm University, it is fitting for two reasons to examine the interplay between information technology and academic freedom during this ground-breaking period for. First, without academic freedom, the legal academy would never have in general developed much beyond traditional Roman law subjects such as the law of obligations, and definitely not to include something as cutting-edge as information technology already in the 1970’s. The second is that information technology has changed the faces of both teaching and research, and thus the premises for academic freedom, both facilitating and obstructing its exercise by legal scholars. Two specific challenges raised to academic freedom will be addressed at the end, one with respect to teaching, the copyright to teaching materials and the other with respect to research, the protections of extramural utterances, both as facilitated by digitalization and social media.

This article begins by briefly exploring the history of academic freedom, university research and teaching, as well as its modern legal protections, then goes over to the impact of information technology on academic freedom in four legal systems, the US, UK, Germany and Sweden. The need for the law regarding academic freedom to keep up with the technological-advances made in the past half century is not only self-evident, but also integral to future academic endeavors.

This article traces the Swedish journey with respect to the treatment of discrimination issues. The current Swedish parliamentary understanding of protection against unlawful discrimination as a fundamental human right, can be seen as beginning in a period of no regulation, going over to a soft law approach (on both international and national levels) and then to a progressively hard law approach. This journey can be seen as having been completed by the Swedish parliament but arguably not yet whole-heartedly by the Swedish courts. This change in treatment was brought about mainly due to external forces, namely EU membership and the Europeanization of discrimination protections. Coming to the current Swedish parliamentary perception, that protection against unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex, transgender identity and expression, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation or age, is a fundamental human right, has been neither a self-evident, nor a linear, path in Swedish discrimination law. The point at which this parliamentary perception is given the same effect by the Swedish courts can be seen as the end of this journey.

The article describes how the Swedish legislation has evolved on international crimes starting with the Penal Law Reform of 1948 and the subsequent amendments following Swedish accession to the Geneva Conventions with an extended scope in 1954. It continues with mentioning the separate law on Genocide 1964 and the limitation to serious violations in 1986. Finally, it explains the transition from an open-ended penal regulation to an exhaustive list, and the introduction of a provision on crimes against humanity 2014.This article is part of a volume on investigation and prosecution in Scandinavia of international crimes.

Twelve trials in Sweden have related to crimes in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Syria and Iraq. The first part of the present article gives an overview of and background to these cases. A more detailed account of the legal issues at hand are presented in a thematic manner in other contributions of this volume. For various reasons additional cases have not reached the trial stage. Some are still under investigation, others have been investigated but have been dismissed for lack of evidence and others again have been transferred to other countries. The second part of the article discusses the relevant participants and actors involved in Sweden’s investigation and prosecution of international crimes.This article is part of a volume on investigation and prosecution in Scandinavia of international crimes

A war crime may be defined as a serious violation of a rule of international humanitarian law (IHL) which brings about individual criminal liability. To establish whether an act constitutes a war crime it is thus necessary to establish that IHL applied to and regulated the act. Hence, it must also be established that an international or non-international armed conflict existed at the time and place where the act occurred, and that the act had sufficient nexus to the armed conflict. The present article focuses on the classification of conflict and the nexus between the act and the conflict in Swedish legislation and case law in the light of international law.This article is part of a volume on investigation and prosecution in Scandinavia of international crimes.

The new European Union (EU) Regulation on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (hereinafter “General Data Protection Regulation or “GDPR”) aims to strengthen individual rights for the protection of personal data by, inter alia, facilitating private enforcement actions. To this end, the GDPR clarifies the data subject’s right to a direct and independent private enforcement action directly against the controller or processer. As the infringement of personal data rights increasingly takes on cross border dimensions, the GDPR sets out rules on jurisdiction allowing the data subject to bring a private enforcement action in the Member State where the offending controller or processor has its establishment, or alternatively in the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence.

The aim of this article is to analyze the jurisdictional options available to a data subject to bring a private enforcement action to enforce his/her data protection rights before the GDPR, under the Member States’ general rules on jurisdiction in private international law, and after the GDPR, under the GDPR’s own rules on jurisdiction. In addition, the article analyzes whether the new rules on jurisdiction in the GDPR supplement or supplant the Member States’ general rules on jurisdiction. The article discusses and analyzes the areas where the application and interpretation of the rules are unclear, and proposes interpretations that best serve the objectives of the GDPR to strengthen the rights of data subjects by facilitating private enforcement actions without jeopardizing the principle of legal certainty deemed necessary for the free movement of data within the EU.

What would international law look like in a world without states — or with states being non-dominant? How would it be formed and who would be its protagonists? And would that world be a better place? To think about international law without states might seem like a ludicrous idea. After all, inter-national is often interpreted to mean “inter-state”, and for many people, any law without the state seems impossible to think. However, the state has been around for only a few hundred years, and yet there have been norms between political communities — whether we call that international “law” or not – for much longer. International law without the state could mean de facto anarchy and even perennial war. But it could also mean inter-communal law between communities that are not states, if we assume that people without states would spontaneously form political communities, albeit of a different nature. Or it could be mainly transnational law, formed between apolitical bodies, like corporations. Or, perhaps, a bit of all of that.