Current Projects

In collaboration with the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich

The project is a collaboration between the Chair of Prof. Dr. Christoph B. Graber and PD Dr. Roger Fayet (Institute of Art History at UZH and Director of the Swiss Institute for Art Research) overarching the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Concomitant to the course “Art Law and Culture” of Prof. Graber (MA), teams composed of students of law and of art history will work together on realising a virtual exhibition. Their task will consist in finding works of art raising questions that are relevant from both a legal and an art history perspective and that illustrate paradoxes arising from interactions between art and law. These works will be analysed by the student teams from the two perspecitves; the works and the respective analyses will be made available in a digital and permanent exhibition space. “Art irritates Law, Law irritates Art”, the central theme of the course, will thus receive a new meaning through the interdisciplinary collaboration between students at the University of Zurich.

The way that we experience life is unquestionably different online than offline. When first developed, the Internet was believed to be a place free of regulation. However, this is clearly not the case, with private parties (often cooperating with governments) shaping digital technologies that delineate what we can or cannot do online, which can affect our communicative freedom and privacy in cyberspace.
At the same time, there are valid business interests such as the protection of intellectual property or the freedom to conduct business.

This project aims to determine how sociolegal theory could be used to deal with the collision of public and private interests and values in the online context from a constitutional perspective.

Due to Christoph Graber’s move to the University of Zurich in February 2015, the acronym i-call received a new meaning.
It now stands for Information ● Communication ● Art ● Law Lab.

The papers listed cover a broad range of topics related to information, communication and art law. They are the result of research conducted in the main focus areas of the chair, including legal sociology and media law.
Given the sociolegal orientation of the chair and a very broad understanding of media law, a primary focus of research is on legal implications of current societal and technological developments - such as global networks and digitalisation. Do digital technologies have regulatory effects? How should the relationship between law and technology be conceived in the Internet age? From a legal perspective, these questions often arise at the intersection of Constitutional Freedoms, Intellectual Property, Trade Liberalisation, Cultural Diversity and Data Protection.

Assuming that today's legal challenges are best met by reconsidering the very foundations of legal thinking, i-call Working Papers are eager to demonstrate how sociolegal theory could be used to achieve this goal.