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Comment by treewhistle | Hacker News Reader

You can read an English translation of the demand letter here:

https://www.occrp.org/en/16-other/other-articles/8876-englis...

Thanks for that. Some of those points are actually reasonable, and a journalist should be comfortably within rights to respond that sources need to be kept secret, and comment why/how/why not subjects were alerted to the publication (perhaps given a chance to comment).

Hopefully this'll go to court and set a precedent that more in line with the spirit of the gdpr.

I am not quite certain how much a precedent matters here.

Of the western world we have the US, UK, and Canada that employ common law where precedent really matters.

In most of the EU the system of civil law is used, where the judiciary is expected to be much more literal and to not perform much interpretation or reference to previous interpretations.

Aaaand then we have the Scandinavian systems which are somehow both.

Civil law has a concept similar to the common law world's respect for prior judicial rulings, but weaker. It's called jurisprudence constante (a French phrase). The impact of a single ruling on future rulings is not huge, but a series of rulings all in accord will be treated as strongly persuasive.

It's still secondary to the statute and not 100% binding, but nevertheless it is a real part of the system.

Also, both the US and Canada have a civil law jurisdiction: Louisiana and Quebec, respectively.

Both do make some use of common law as well, but private law (governing relations between non-state parties) is even now predominantly civil law in both places.

If the original actors in this case were non-state parties, I expect that civil law would be applicable to a hypothetical Quebec version of this dispute. In Louisiana, same thing if the relevant law was at the state level rather than federal. (In Quebec, even federal laws are interpreted using civil law principles when covering private law topics.)

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