Call for abstracts

About the topic

The age of digitalisation has altered how governments interact with all relevant parties in the legal paradigm. These can be citizens, organisations, and companies subject to laws, but also before that stage in the design of law or the way governments (or other authorities) make decisions. As new rights and responsibilities arise in this context, this special issue aims to capture the observable shifts in rights and responsibilities in the relationship between entities exercising authority and the persons, organisations and companies subjected to that authority. Examples are the communicative setting, where, in certain cases, contact between the government and subjects occurs through private platforms such as WhatsApp or the large amounts of data currently being managed, shared, and stored by and between governments or governmental agencies (also with the use of services of private companies). These changing circumstances call into question the current framework of rights and responsibilities traditionally designed without a digital government in mind.

The guest editors welcome any creative idea in relation to the main topic, which has been deliberately designed in such a way as to search for an assessment of perceivable changes that are the result of digitalisation and to search for situations where new rights and responsibilities arise. The topic can be approached from multiple angles, and the authors are free to do so in any way of their liking.

Below is a brief selection of possible topics that could serve as inspiration (but not as a limitation). The applicants' different legal and multidisciplinary expertise can help analyse these.

• The changed subjectivity of actors in their relationships with government through digitalisation, e.g. in the identification of the subject through new technologies or new (forms of) communication; a guiding question could be in what way subjectivity has changed because of digitalisation and/or new forms of technologies.
• New forms of algorithmic/digitalised governance by governmental institutions; a guiding question could be: What new forms of algorithmic/digitalised governance have emerged as the result of new technologies, and how do governmental institutions use them?
• What are the changes in the interaction between public and private parties and dependency of the public sphere on the private sphere in digital governance structures, but also in communicative settings?
• What are the changes to the traditional interpretation of (procedural) fundamental rights due to the changes in digitalisation; a guiding question could be: How does digitalisation impact procedural fairness in governmental decision-making?
• The emergence of new rights and responsibilities governing the relationship between state and subject.

About Erasmus Law Review

Erasmus Law Review is an open-access online journal that fosters independent critical scholarship relevant to the discipline of law. Prospective articles are submitted to double-blind peer review (two reviews per article), and the outcome of these reviews determines their final publication. Accepted articles are published online at www.erasmuslawreview.nl and on the publisher's website at www.elevenjournals.com.

Formalities

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue, please send in an abstract of a maximum of 500 words (ex. bibliography) with a clearly defined research question that deals with the topic of ‘changing relationships between government and subject in the digital age: new rights and responsibilities’ to vandervlugt@law.eur.nl. Please make sure your proposal reaches us before 16 December 2024. Selected authors will be notified within 1 week after the deadline, after a blind selection process. The contributions are intended to be submitted for peer review in June 2025. Before that, the guest editors intend to organise a (hybrid) conference at the end of May to discuss the first drafts of the selected papers among the peers contributing to the special issue to stimulate debate between the authors and give and receive feedback. The special issue will be published in March 2026. Final papers will have a word count between 5000 and 10000 words, including footnotes.