Throughout history, technological development has significantly affected the development of law, and vice versa. As digitalization progresses, and as societies become ever more dependent on information networks, the necessity of studying the relationships, links, interactions and conflicts between law and ICT is more and more apparent. Within the legal sciences, legal informatics is a wide and diverse field of study dedicated to these matters. Research on procedural law, instead, studies the norms that govern court proceedings and other processes and procedures designed for execution and enforcement of rights and obligations determined by substantive law. As a researcher, I am intrigued by these two fields of legal research, and their intersection in particular.
I work at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lapland as University Lecturer. I am currently responsible for teaching of legal informatics, but I have experience in teaching procedural law, as well. My dissertation, published in 2019, concerned electronic evidence in criminal procedure. I have also examined, e.g., questions related to exclusion of evidence, online fraud, and the burden of explanation in criminal cases. My current research interests include the effects of technology on legal processes, data protection and data security issues related to new technologies, as well as freedom of expression in the online environment.
Photo: Marko Junttila