Call For Expressions of Interest: Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law (DiVE)

 

 

CALL FOR INTEREST

 

 

 

 

Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law

(DiVE)

 

 

 

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 under domestic and European laws are is 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 ‘Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law’ (DiVE), financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research from June 2022 to May 2025. The 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.

Throughout the project, three international conferences will be organized.

·      A first conference will be held in April/May 2023 in Ferrara, to inquiry the very boundaries of the notion of digital vulnerability.

·      A second conference will be held in April 2024 in Rome, to examine how digital vulnerability matters in access to, identity construction and protection of health in the digital sphere.

·      A third conference will be held in March 2025 in Trieste, to scrutinize the impact of digital vulnerability on contractual and tortious remedies.

 

 

 

We are particularly interested in identifying the factual conditions in which digital technology – from the web to social media, from platforms to Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Ledger Technologies – might prove disruptive and challenging for people, and in assessing under what conditions, how and to what extent the notion of digital vulnerability might be translated into claims for special legal protection.

The conferences will be held in person and in English. A few speakers will be invited; the majority of contributors will be selected through calls for papers. In line with the scope of each conference, proposals might explore how digital technologies exacerbate pre-existing vulnerabilities or create new ones, and how the notion of digital vulnerability could be translated in legal terms. Our main field of the research is domestic and European private law, but proposals can come from a variety of disciplines (including political science, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, economics) and can be theoretical or empirical, descriptive or prescriptive, quantitative or qualitative, mono-jurisdictional, comparative or pan-European, or combine methods of analysis. Contributions dealing with areas other than Europe might be accepted as well, on a case-by-case basis.

Proposals for contribution will be evaluated by the project’s scientific committee, which is currently under construction. Besides members of the DiVE team, confirmed members of the Scientific Committee currently include Danielle K. Citron (University of Virginia), Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz (European University Institute), Frank Pasquale (Brooklyn Law School), Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell (University Carlos III of Madrid), Giovanni Sartor (European University Institute), Reiner Schulze (University of Münster), Gunther Teubner (Frankfurt University), Yingqin Zheng (University of London). The organizers of each conference will bear the cost of accommodation and meals for the participants whose proposals have been accepted. Selected conference papers will be published following successful peer review.

Each conference will be preceded by an autonomous call for papers; the call for papers for the Ferrara conference in May 2023 will be distributed soon.

Please feel free to share and spread the word about this call for interest. The project will soon have its own website, but for the time being, should you have any doubt or question or suggestion, please feel free to contact the Project Officer Giacomo Capuzzo at digital.vulnerability@gmail.com.

 

The DiVE Team

 

Claudia Amodio

(Ferrara University)

Amalia Diurni

(Rome Tor Vergata University),

 

 

 

 

 

Camilla Crea

(Sannio University)

Marta Infantino

(Trieste University)

Loredana Tullio

(Molise University)

 

 

Alberto de Franceschi

(Ferrara University)

Luca Perriello

(Marche Polytechnic University)

Funk and Mullen on The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U. S. Legal Practice @kellenfunk @lincolnmullen

Kellen R. Funk, Princeton University (Students), and Lincoln A. Mullen, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, are publishing The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice in the American Historical Review (February 2018). Here is the abstract.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

LSU Digital Scholarship Lab Hosts Talk and Workshop on Social Justice and Social Justice and Digital Humanities October 24 and 25

LSU’s Digital Scholarship Lab invites you to attend the upcoming digital humanities events by guest speaker Angel Nieves, who will offer a talk and a workshop about his work on race, social justice, and digital humanities.

Talk 

“Intersectional Cartographies: Social Justice,
Digital Humanities Practices, and 3D Visual Heritage in Soweto, Johannesburg” 
When: Monday, 10/24, 11am-12:15pm
Where: Hill Memorial Library 

Nieves’s talk will address the question: Can digital reconstructions of difficult histories be used to harness the tools of restorative social justice in a preservation-based practice that combines both tangible and intangible heritage? Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Digital humanities may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories. The layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, the endangered nature of those archives across South Africa – in particular, those related to the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976.   

 Digital Pedagogy Workshop 

“Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods” 
When: Tuesday, 10/25, 10am-12pm
Where: Middleton Library, Room 295 (Dean’s Conference Room) 

Nieves’s workshop will show how – through an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and CRT (Critical Race Theory) framework – both race and social justice can be central to digital humanities teaching, pedagogy, and practice. The workshop will pay special attention to queer theory, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, WOC/Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and disability studies as they currently help to reshape digital humanities teaching and methods across our university/college classrooms. 

Angel David Nieves is an Associate Professor at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y. and is Director of the American Studies and Cinema & Media Studies Programs there. He is also Co-Director of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) which is recognized as a DH leader among small-liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. He is also a Research Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.