Learning Outcomes
Within the framework of the course, students will be able to:
- Demonstrate critical understanding of the connections between law and digital technologies.
- Understand contemporary ethical and legal issues arising from the widespread use of information technology and communications technologies.
- Possess analytical skills for modern regulatory models in digital technology.
- Have advanced knowledge of the evolving landscape of digital constitutionalism and the current challenges in the rule of law, democracy, and rights.
- Demonstrate critical understanding of the necessity and utilization of regulatory frameworks regarding the uses of emerging digital technologies in risk management environments.
- Exhibit an increased critical awareness of the evolutionary dynamics in the cognitive fields of cyber-security, privacy protection, artificial intelligence, and how they create new social, cultural, political, economic, and ethical issues in modern societies.
- Understand the challenges of digital justice, potential issues from the bureaucratization of justice, and ethical dimensions arising from them.
- Possess advanced state-of-the-art specialized scientific knowledge in the subjects of the course, serving as a foundation for original thinking and research activities.
Syllabus
- Challenging stereotypes about the relationship between law and digital technology: The intricate interaction of digital technology with the economy, politics, society, and culture. The “demystification” of techno-scientific dynamics: Philosophy of Technology, Critical Social Theory, and “Science and Technology Studies” (STS).
- Regulation models of digital technology: The contribution of legal theory. The U.S. model of digital regulation. Risk-based regulation: Towards a unified regulatory model for digital technology?
- The EU’s “soft law” of digitization: Regulatory scope and interaction: The ethics of information (Technoethics). Self-regulation and institutional ethical rules. “Law & Technology”: The role of law in the information age and the principles of digital constitutionalism and humanism.
- The evolution of balancing/harmonization of privacy with the collection and use of personal data for economic, political, scientific, and social purposes in the EU: Directive 1995/46/EC on Data Protection, Law 2472/1997, and the role of the Hellenic Data Protection Authority. Legislative innovation or bureaucratic slip? General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (2016/679), risk management, and the recognition of self-regulation. “Dignified” compromise or a synthesis of rationalities?
- Data governance between the EU, the state, and the market: Creating European common data spaces: The EU strategy for developing a data economy that respects rights and freedoms. Proposal for a Regulation on the European Health Data Space (COM(2022) 197 final).
- Artificial intelligence: The economic, political, social, and cultural dynamics of artificial intelligence: The new creations of algorithms and platforms. Anthropomorphism and “leveraging” in legal liability categories. Proposal for a Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) COM (2021) 206 final of 21 April 2021- 2021/0106 (COD).
- Challenges to the rule of law, democracy, rights, and digital constitutionalism: Digital governance (Directives 2016/2102 & 2019/1024 and Law 4727/2020 for the Digital Governance Code). The dynamics of algorithmic governance: transparency and accountability. Digital surveillance and identification by public and/or private authorities.
- The challenge of digital justice: A preliminary theoretical question: technological modernization or re-codification of the law? Defining the problem: the bureaucratization of justice and the multiple roles of judges. The ethical dimension of digitizing justice (Council of Europe, European ethical Charter on the use of Artificial Intelligence in judicial systems and their environment, 2018).
- The digitization of markets and labor: The economic freedom of traders on platforms (Regulation 2019/1150). The protection of the online consumer (Directive 2019/2161). The digital reorganization of production (Telework & Digital Work Card Law 4808/2021, algorithmic management), and the rights of digital workers (Proposal for a directive on improving working conditions in platform work COM (2021) 762 final).
- Analysis of technological and social risks within the framework of political and legislative processes.
- Utilization and creation of regulatory frameworks for the uses of emerging digital technologies in a risk management environment.
- Study of the risk-regulation relationship and focus on its individual types. Analysis of alternative methods of risk management (technological, legislative, economic, etc.)
- Identification of regulatory failures and highlighting issues of performance, effectiveness, ethics, and social legitimacy in technological governance.
- S. Braman & P. Jaeger (eds.) (2015), Privacy on the ground, MIT Press
- J. Cohen (2012), Configuring the networked self: law code and the play of everyday practice, Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
- J. van den Hoven and J. Weckert (eds.) (2008), Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, Cambridge University Press
- M. Albrow, N. Luhmann (2014), A Sociological Theory of Law», Routledge, London 2014