'A civilization of the mind': Sovereignty, Internet jurisdiction, and ethical governance.

摘要

The treatment of Internet jurisdiction ordinarily looks to how the laws of a local jurisdiction apply to the Internet. Less examined is the underlying jurisprudence that may create the basis for legitimate Internet jurisdiction in light of the ambiguity that the Internet creates for establishing sovereignty. This thesis thus takes recent decisions of the Quebec courts that apply the province's Charter of the French Language to the Internet as a point of departure for an in-depth analysis of the nature of sovereignty as an increasingly indeterminate principle of law in the emerging discipline known as Internet Law. Ultimately, the chaos that the Internet initially provoked may be resolved by the return to ethical principles based on the theoretical approach of legal pluralism and the philosophical treatment of ethical responsibility as proposed by Emmanuel Levinas' "humanism of the other".