M. Maroni

I am an Assistant Professor of Law and Digital Democracy in the Department of Public Law.

Before joining Maastricht, I obtained my PhD cum laude in Constitutional Law at the University of Helsinki. In the course of my PhD studies, I worked at the Erik Castrén Institute and the Legal Tech Lab, where I am still an affiliated fellow.

My research focuses on constitutionalism and Internet infrastructure/governance and corporate power.  I am particularly interested in the role of law in regulating digital technologies and the transformative impact of technology on contemporary societal and constitutional arrangements.

My work combines social theory of law, sociology of constitutions, legal analysis with Science and Technology Studies and materialism to study forms of concentration of power, inequalities and exclusions caused by internet technologies.     

I am currently revising my PhD dissertation, The Right to Access the Internet: A Critical Analysis of the Constitutionalisation of the Internet, for publication as a monograph in the Routledge socio-legal series. The book elaborates the first conceptualisation of the right to access as principle for the organisation of the Internet.  It provides a historical account of the development of Internet regulations and a legal analysis of the practices and regulation of different private corporations (ICANN, ISPs, digital media platforms). The book articulates a critical and empirically driven analysis of the extant liberal understanding of digital constitutionalism.

I have published papers and chapters on freedom of expression, EU law/ECJ, platform governance, algorithmic content moderation with a particular focus on recommender systems and media pluralism. These publications also point to coproduction dynamics between law and corporate power.

I have worked in several international projects funded by the Academy of Finland, including (POP): Public or Private? – A Study of the Philosophical Foundations of European Privacy Regulation (led by Suvi Sankari); AlgoT – Potential and Boundaries of Algorithmic Transparency (led by Ida Koivisto); Transparency in the EU: From Reaction to Manifesto? (led by Päivi Leino-Sandberg); Reconfiguring Privacy – A Study of the Political Foundations of Privacy Regulation (led by Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo)

 I held visiting positions at the Centre for Law and Society, Cardiff University; the Centre for Media Pluralism and the Faculty of law, European University Institute; the Faculty of Economics (Department of Management and Law), Tor Vergata University of Rome; the Faculty of Law, Lund University; and the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati.

Prior to academia, I worked as a legislative assistant at the Italian Senate, in such areas as EU law, basic income, the right to access the Internet, migration, and social rights.