The research project ‘Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law’ (DiVE) aims to unlock the legal potential of the notion of ‘digital vulnerability’ in Europe, by investigating how national and European principles, rules and policies on digitalization can be aligned, reimagined and shaped for the protection of digitally vulnerable persons.
In recent years, vulnerability has emerged in legal discourse, in dialogue with other disciplines, as a useful concept to capture the fluid and multilayered nature of the human condition and to question the adequacy of some foundational legal and policy norms. Yet, despite the potential of the notion of vulnerability as a key tool to overcome the limits of legal formalism and paternalism and to foster substantive equality, the legal status and effects of the notion are still quite unclear. In particular, the notion of people’s vulnerability has only seldom been applied to the specific forms of exposure to harm that might arise from interaction with digital technologies.
In our current and pervasively digitalized world, we believe it is increasingly important to analyze how digital technologies impact preexisting forms of vulnerability or create new ones, and to understand how the law can prevent or address unequal experiences of technology.
In recent years, vulnerability has emerged in legal discourse, in dialogue with other disciplines, as a useful concept to capture the fluid and multilayered nature of the human condition and to question the adequacy of some foundational legal and policy norms. Yet, despite the potential of the notion of vulnerability as a key tool to overcome the limits of legal formalism and paternalism and to foster substantive equality, the legal status and effects of the notion are still quite unclear. In particular, the notion of people’s vulnerability has only seldom been applied to the specific forms of exposure to harm that might arise from interaction with digital technologies.
In our current and pervasively digitalized world, we believe it is increasingly important to analyze how digital technologies impact preexisting forms of vulnerability or create new ones, and to understand how the law can prevent or address unequal experiences of technology.
This is what we plan to do with our project.
THE NOTION OF DIGITAL VULNERABILITYThe project aims to investigate the notion of digital vulnerability by exploring how this notion stands vis-à-vis traditional paradigms of protection of weaker parties (such as rules on incapacity, consumer protection, data protection, anti-discrimination, equality before the law) and to what extent it might properly capture risks and harms stemming from digital technologies.
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NATIONAL AND EUROPEANS RULESWe also aim to test to what extent current existing national and European rules adequately deal with personal conditions in which digital technology might prove particularly disruptive and challenging for the persons involved, and to assess how national and European legal principles, rules and policies could be aligned, reimagined and shaped in order to properly translate the notion of digital vulnerability into justiciable issues, that is, into claims for special legal protection.
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The research project involves five Italian universities (Trieste, Ferrara, Politecnico Marche, Molise, Roma Tor Vergata) and is funded by the Italian Ministry for University and Research for the period 2022-2025 under the programme PRIN – Progetto di ricerca di rilevante interesse nazionale 2020.
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