G. Comande

Padova Charter on personal injury and damage under civil-tort law Medico-legal guidelines on methods of ascertainment and criteria of evaluation

Compensation for personal damage, defined as any pecuniary or non-pecuniary loss causally related to a personal injury under civil-tort law, is strictly based on the local jurisdiction and therefore varies significantly across the world. This manuscript presents the first “International Guidelines on Medico-Legal Methods of Ascertainment and Criteria of Evaluation of Personal Injury and Damage under Civil-Tort Law”. This consensus document, which includes a step-by-step illustrated explanation of flow charts articulated in eight sequential steps and a comprehensive description of the ascertainment methodology and the criteria of evaluation, has been developed by an International Working Group composed of juridical and medico-legal experts and adopted as Guidelines by the International Academy of Legal Medicine (IALM).

An Investigation on Legal Regulations for Robot Deployment in Urban Areas: A Focus on Italian Law

This paper investigates the administrative, criminal and civil aspects of Italian law in order to find out whether and how current legal regulations impact on robot deployment in urban environments. The paper is based on a case study. The objects of this study are two autonomous mobile robots designed to carry out urban hygiene services in pedestrian areas. The paper points out a major problem in Italian law — the lack of legal qualification for autonomous mobile robots operating on public roads. On the contrary, at present, no relevant implications are identified with regard to Italian criminal and civil law. As a matter of fact, although autonomous, the robots that are at the center of this study can still be considered as properties and, therefore, are excluded from any personal liability in case of damage to people or things.

Sensitive-By-Distance: Quasi-Health Data in the Algorithmic Era

ABSTRACT This article offers a new perspective on the boundaries between health and non-health data in the age of ‘Quantified-Self’ apps: the ‘data-sensitiveness-by-computational-distance’ approach-or, more simply, the ‘sensitive-by-distance’ approach. This approach takes into account two variables: the intrinsic sensitiveness (a static variable) of personal data and the computational distance (a dynamic variable) between some kinds of personal data and pure health (or sensitive) data, which depends upon computational capacity. From an objective perspective, computational capacity depends on the level of development of data retrieval technologies at a certain moment, the availability of ‘accessory data’, and the applicable legal restraints on processing data. From a subjective perspective, computational capacity depends on the specific data mining efforts (or the ability to invest in them) taken by a given data controller: economic resources, human resources, and the use of accessory data. A direct consequence of the expansion of augmented humanity in collecting and inferring personal data is the increasing loss of health data processing ‘legibility’ for data subjects. In order to address this issue, we propose exploiting the existing legal tools in the General Data Protection Regulation to empower data subjects (the right to data access, the right to know the logic involved in automated decision-making, data portability, etc.).

Regulatory Challenges of Data Mining Practices: The Case of the Never-ending Lifecycles of ‘Health Data’

Health data are the most special of the ‘special categories’ of data under Art. 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ). The same Art. 9 GDPR prohibits, with broad exceptions, the processing of ‘data concerning health’. Our thesis is that, through data mining technologies, health data have progressively undergone a process of distancing from the healthcare sphere as far as the generation, the processing and the uses are concerned. The case study aims thus to test the endurance of the ‘special category’ of health data in the face of data mining technologies and the never-ending lifecycles of health data they feed. At a more general level of analysis, the case of health data shows that data mining techniques challenge core data protection notions, such as the distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive personal data, requiring a shift in terms of systemic perspectives that the GDPR only partly addresses.

International Juridical Overview on Personal Injury Compensation

In the last decades there has been increasing attention given to non-pecuniary component of damages. In a rich society it is possible to grant more legal rights, because there are more resources to dedicate to their protection. If the theory that the richer the society the wider the scope of compensation for non-pecuniary losses has some truth in it, it can certainly be found historically in the evolution of the assessment in case of ascertainable illnesses. This chapter explores the Anglo-American, the French and the Italian experiences in non-economic damages compensation, against the idea that non-pecuniary damages compensation is somehow a societal response to emerging legally protected interests. As far as compensation for non-economic harms in other instances, further research and analysis are required, although the growing societal explanation seems to be in line with an expanding attention to the mental state of the victims.

Regulating Algorithms’ Regulation? First Ethico-Legal Principles, Problems, and Opportunities of Algorithms

Algorithms are regularly used for mining data, offering unexplored patterns and deep non-causal analyses in what we term the “classifying society”. In the classifying society individuals are no longer targetable as individuals but are instead selectively addressed for the way in which some clusters of data that they (one or more of their devices) share with a given model fit in to the analytical model itself. This way the classifying society might bypass data protection as we know it. Thus, we argue for a change of paradigm: to consider and regulate anonymities—not only identities—in data protection. This requires a combined regulatory approach that blends together (1) the reinterpretation of existing legal rules in light of the central role of privacy in the classifying society; (2) the promotion of disruptive technologies for disruptive new business models enabling more market control by data subjects over their own data; and, eventually, (3) new rules aiming, among other things, to provide to data generated by individuals some form of property protection similar to that enjoyed by the generation of data and models by businesses (e.g. trade secrets). The blend would be completed by (4) the timely insertion of ethical principles in the very generation of the algorithms sustaining the classifying society.

Compensation for Personal Injury in a Comparative Perspective: The Need to Bridge Legal and Medicolegal Knowledge

This chapter gives an transnational overview on the different judicial and legislative models adopted for personal injury and damage compensation. An alleged constant increase in awards and the difficulties linked to the subjectivity of the assessment and quantification of nonmaterial damages raise the need for a more harmonized model capable of providing justice and equal treatment across the world. By means of a comparative analysis, the chapter explores the lasting debate that surrounds economic and noneconomic damages for personal injury and the diverse techniques used for awarding intangible losses. It further proposes an in-depth analysis of selected common law (e.g., England, Scotland, the USA) and civil law systems (e.g., France, Germany, Italy) highlighting the pros and cons of each and prospecting a solution for increasing horizontal and vertical equality without necessarily impeding an inevitable variability of awards among different jurisdictions.

International Guidelines on the Methods of Ascertainment of Personal Injury and Damage Under Civil-Tort Law

Compensation for personal damage, defined as any pecuniary or non-pecuniary loss causally related to a personal injury under civil-tort law, is strictly based on the local jurisdiction and therefore varies significantly across the world. This manuscript presents the first “International Guidelines on Medico-Legal Methods of Ascertainment and Criteria of Evaluation of Personal Injury and Damage under Civil-Tort Law”. This consensus document, which includes a step-by-step illustrated explanation of flow charts articulated in eight sequential steps and a comprehensive description of the ascertainment methodology and the criteria of evaluation, has been developed by an International Working Group composed of juridical and medicolegal experts and adopted as Guidelines by the International Academy of Legal Medicine (IALM). This chapter represents a slightly modified version of an article published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine.

Children as Victims under Italian Law

In Italy, the most frequent causes of damage to those under the age of majority arise out of the special characteristics and limitations which are a feature of youth, and can therefore be partially distinguished from those applicable to people in general. Broadly speaking, we can identify six areas of interest.