New frontiers of italian tort law

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

The course has the purpose to provide an analysis of Italian Private Law, focused on the Tort Law, which is a pivotal yet controversial part of our legal system. The course aims at sketching the basic features and the general principles of Italian Tort Law, having regard to the EU and Common Law developments, in a comparative light as well. The main goal is to set a framework for reflection and analysis about the current state of Tort Law and its recent frontiers. Class lessons are designed to afford the fundamentals while, at the same time, identifying the complexities of modern Tort Law to give grounding and perspective to the Italian approach and to assess the most important trends and the new issues.

Given that the New Technologies are having nowadays a ground-breaking importance and an increasingly economic impact due to the number of sectors where they play a leading role [Big data in general, e-commerce and social network, fintech, public administration, agricultural production, medicine, sport, Internet of Things (iot), Autonomous Vehicles (AV), robotics in general…)], in the special section will be addressed issues related to Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on protecting the identity, dignity and health of the human being in the context of non-contractual liability.

GENERAL PART TABLE OF CONTENTS:

– The architecture of the law of torts. General principles (functions of civil liability; legally “relevant” and protected interests; negligence and strict liability; causation theories and causation rules)
– Damages for non-economic losses and personal injury
– Professional liability (with reference to “Health Care and medical Malpractice Reform”)
– Wrongful death damages
– Damages for wrongful birth and wrongful life
– Punitive damages
– Analysis of leading cases

SPECIAL PART TABLE OF CONTENTS:

– Analysis of the main risk related to the New Technologies, whose actions are not exactly predictable in advance and may create undesirable results leading to injury and damage. Thus, the better performance of New Technologies will depend very much on legal certainty for companies and users, such as the allocation of liability resulting from the damage associated with the use of AI and iot. The legal responses for these new questions must be through the different combinations of subjective and strict liability, mandatory insurance, limitation of liability and supplementary compensation through public-law-funds.
– Analysis of practical cases and solutions.