Papakonstantinou, Vagelis, Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law (January 06, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4865297 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4865297

“The turn of the 1980s was a milestone period in the development of data privacy laws, that was only paralleled by the turn of the 2020s. The former saw the introduction of Convention 108 by the Council of Europe in 1981 and, four months earlier, the OECD’s Guidelines “governing the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data”. Apart from the above two international instruments within only a few years’ period France, Germany and the United Kingdom all introduced personal data protection legislation within their respective jurisdictions. the same milestone period for the development of data privacy laws has been witnessed around the turn of the 2020s: In the EU the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Law Enforcement Directive came into effect in 2018; the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 was modernised also in 2018. In the USA, California’s Consumer Privacy Act was introduced in 2018; China introduced its own relevant legislation in 2021; Brazil and India acquired their first relevant law in 2020 and 2021 respectively. In Europe, a GDPR mimesis phenomenon was noted. Forty years after its firm establishment, data privacy law is reaching its maturity point and international renown. In view of the above, can there perhaps be talk of a new legal field? Have data privacy laws over the past forty years formulated a separate field of law? Or are we simply dealing with important but solitary, standalone pieces of legislation? If a new legal field has indeed been formed, how will it be called? “Data protection law”, “privacy law” or a combination of the two? However, perhaps more pertinently, do these distinctions matter at all? What is a “field of law” within Roman and Common Law legal systems and what is the significance of its continued existence? What are the criteria for its designation? Does this distinction bring any concrete and practical benefits to law today? If yes, and if legal field status was actually acknowledged to data privacy law, what would these be? The analysis that follows aims at addressing these questions.”