“Inbots” is a Horizon2020 Coordination and Support Action, which aims at proposing an European regulatory framework applicable to Robotics. Bertolini coordinates Work Package 5, to identify and analyze the needs and gaps of the existing regulatory framework within Europe applicable to Robots and promote the legal reform necessary for favoring the proliferation of a robust European Robotic Industry. The matters addressed range from liability and insurance, to standardization and certification, product safety, and intellectual property.
“Reliable” is a Scientific Independence of young Researchers project. It focuses on legal and ethical issues arising from the development and diffusion of bionic limbs and exoskeletons and other forms of biorobotic applications. The projects analyses the relationship between human beings and technology in the bioethical and technoethical debate, as well as the alternative liability models applicable to such applications in order to balance fundamental rights, product safety, victim compensation, and innovation.
“Europe Regulates Robotics” is a Jean Monnet Module which funds teaching activities in the field of Law and robotics, with a particular focus on European policymaking and a multidisciplinary approach that involves engineers, economists, management experts, philosophers, ethicists.
The project, funded by the EU, aims to increase the knowledge of judges, lawyers, and other legal practitioners about EU and International Law on the fundamental rights of migrants, and strengthen networks and exchanges of views between national trainers, judges, lawyers, and other relevant legal practitioners within and between the target countries.
The DREAM research area of the Dirpolis Institute coordinates an develops research activities in the field of immigration and asylum. The main research topics are: immigration and integration policies; international protection procedures; fundamental rights of migrants; reception of migrants; unaccompanied minors; citizenship and mobility within the European Union. Specific collaborations have been set up with institutions and organizations, at national and supranational levels, in order to develop studies and analysis. Interdisciplinary approaches and comparative perspectives are promoted.
MARS is a Jean Monnet Module (2019-2022) that aims at spreading the knowledge of EU Law on the protection of migrant children and promoting its correct implementation, moving from the international conventions (such as, in particular, the Convention on the Rights of the Child). The topic is directly connected with the enforcement of European Union Law and the respect of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
Funded by the EU (CERV-2022) and conducted by a multidisciplinary research team consisting of lawyers, sociologists, and experts in media and the history of anti-Semitism, the project is aimed at refining strategies to counter anti-Semitic hate speech, and in particular to improve how criminalization choices and approaches of criminal justice actors concerning anti-Semitic behavior are processed and then communicated, namely by journalists. The SSSA unit is responsible for carrying out an analysis of several media-relevant cases of anti-Semitism, verifying both the response provided by the criminal justice system and the reaction that the community – especially the mass media – had to it. As a result of this analysis, the research focuses on the concept of hidden anti-Semitism, on the role that alternative sanctions to punishment can play in combating discriminatory phenomena and, more generally, on the formulation of guidelines addressed to both legal practitioners and journalists so that the legal contrast activity is conveyed more accurately and effectively.
The project carries out an interdisciplinary investigation into two different methodological approaches to criminal law, namely the casuistry (casuistic) and the rule-based approach. In particular, the project aims to diachronically examine these approaches, their mutual influences and their theoretical and practical implications through the contribution of different research groups. The SSSA unit has the task of identifying and examining the recurrences of the casuistic approach in the jurisprudence of contemporary supranational courts, with specific reference to the ICC, the ECtHRs and the CJEU. This analysis is placed within the conceptual horizon of inter-legality and aims to highlight the centrality of the case in the development of modern criminal law.
The Jean Monnet Module ENACTING, funded by the European Union, aims to spread knowledge of a crucial component of European constitutional law, i.e., the place and functions of the founding values, through a number of teaching activities and events, including a workshop and a final conference. The JM Module is based on a background hypothesis: Article 2 values may serve different purposes, ranging from constitutional crises in some Member States to the law of European political parties and political foundations and to European criminal law. Still, a unitary, consistent consideration of their implications is needed.
Training activities organized within the Module are intended for students, representatives of national institutions, and civil society at large. Recordings of many of these seminars are freely available on the YouTube channel of STALS.
The project, funded by the European Union within the Next Generation EU programme, aims to highlight the multiple meanings of identity and identity-related arguments in public Law. The project moves along the line of tension between identity democracy and the constitutions of pluralist democracies, enhancing the different implications of this notion, both exclusionary and inclusive. At the same time, the project considers the use of identity-based arguments in processes of constitutional retrogression or democratic backsliding in the last fifteen years: distinctive readings of history and religious traditions play a key role in shaping identitarian arguments.
The project combines a theoretical dimension, one of internal law and a comparative one. It is based on the cooperation of four units located, respectively, at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the University of Foggia, the University of Siena, and the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna. Cooperation between these units aims to focus on the importance of the notion of identity for public law as a whole, with in-depth analyses of constitutional law, comparative public law, canon law, and ecclesiastical law perspectives. The project also benefits from interdisciplinary contributions thanks to the presence of a political science scholar in the research unit of the University of Siena.
The kick-off meeting was held on 6 December 2023. The first thematic workshop is currently being organised and will be held in Foggia on 28-29 May 2024.
The research analyzes tort and insurance law focusing on their interactions with other areas and issues (insurance, risk management and regulation, precautionary principle, etc.). The research aims to understand better how insurance markets and products react to social changes, and tort law evolution as well, and to study possible new risks insurability and institutional answers. More specifically, it focuses on issues such as medical malpractice and risk management; liability insurance; damages; insurance and disability; information in insurance contract law.
The main goal of the project is to study what kind (or kinds) of notions of science and scientific assumptions stem from rules and judicial decisions. The goal is to obtain a wide framework to be used by lawyers and students to better understand the consequences of the scientific culture in the practice of law.
EXPRESS2 is a project that addresses the growing demand for a new, more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable social contract in the EU. To achieve this, the project will work to create a more appealing and legitimate EU social contract draft that will be submitted to inhabitants, Member States, and EU institutions that will have the possibility to participate and decide upon the conditions, rights, and obligations to be binding. The goal is to strengthen the EU agreement by association by promoting social dialogue, civic engagement, and integration.
The project will also focus on identifying and analyzing disruptive elements of the social contract, such as insecurity, populism, climate change, mistrust in institutions, gender discrimination, digitalization, and pandemics. The analysis of these stressors includes both individualized and cross-sectional approaches to cover the plausible relation of multiple disruptors, their concatenation, or the “trigger” effect of a disruptive phenomenon on another. By understanding these disruptive elements and their effects on the social contract, the project will propose concrete measures to ironclad the social contract and provide relevant information to protect it from actual and potential disruptions; thus, the academic scholars involved conceive social contracts as incomplete theorized agreements and living documents.
SSSA will lead a WP dealing with populism as a factor of erosion of the EU social contract.
In collaboration with Transparency International Italia, the research project aims at monitoring the performances of anti-corruption system and the promotion of legality in enterprise environment within the Business Integrity Forum.
In collaboration with Consob, the project’s objective is to draft a Green Paper on the matter of the digitalization of financial intermediation processes. The project also benefits from the partnership of ESMA (European Securities and Market Authority) and IOSCO (International Organization of Securities Commissions).
The project, led in collaboration with Consob and other Universities, deals with the legal recognition and assessment of new forms of financial services provisions, such as equity crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, and automated financial advising (roboadvice).
The project deals with an interdisciplinary analysis (technical, legal and ethical) of the effects of advanced automation on the transport sector. Other sectors, such as healthcare, banking and finance, may be included in the research in the future.
The research project intends to investigate the innovative ways that, on the regional territory, have established themselves for the management, care or regeneration of public goods or private goods of public use within a collaboration between local authorities and reality of the “third sector” entrepreneurial realities, without neglecting the attention that some municipal authorities have reserved for “Informal groups”. The purpose of the project is to deepen the theoretical aspects of the c.d. the right of the shared administration for the management of the common assets, which represents the area of intersection between the classical administrative law, the law of the Third sector bodies, civil law and constitutional law and the census of “best practices” spread throughout the territory.
“Tessere” is the aggregation of research initiatives on the legal regulation of the Third sector and the implementation, in practice, of the principle of horizontal subsidiarity as defined by the Italian Constitution and the sources of European Union law. The ongoing projects aim to create publications, of national and international relevance, regarding the main legal issues concerning the Third sector, social entrepreneurship and the management of common goods. From a methodological point of view, the research area cultivates the ambition to contribute to the development of the scientific debate around a Third sector law, recomposing the current disciplinary fragmentation. The area has been collaborating for some time with other national research networks, and has produced some research products that have established themselves in the national scientific and institutional debate.
Property law, deeply tied to sovereignty, territoriality, and national socio-economic systems, is often seen as the most national of private law institutions. However, various factors are now shifting this, leading to a more globalized property model with shared traits but distinct from traditional national ones. This project explores the theoretical and practical challenges of this shift, examining examples like the supranational “propertization” of new wealth objects, and the rise of hybrid (EU), cosmopolitan (ECtHR, international arbitration), and private ordering-based property models.
In the past two decades EU copyright has been subject to momentous legislative and judicial reforms. Several of these interventions have been criticized for their weak empirical justifications, negative impact on the copyright balance, and questionable favoritism towards specific categories of stakeholders. Leveraging the cooperation with an EU-wide network of copyright research centers, this project aims at contributing to the EU copyright law reform debate with a wide array of activities, from ad hoc policy interventions to tenders, consultancy and more holistic systematic studies.
After the revolution brought by digital and bio- technologies at the turn of the 21st century, today new innovations are again stretching the boundaries of IP law, asking for a full revision of its principles and foundations. Focusing on industry 4.0, IoT, robotics and AI, this project explores the most compelling questions related to the adaptability of “old” IP rules to such new technologies and analyzes the need for reforms, with a particular emphasis on the balance between incentive to innovation, competition and access, and between IP and conflicting public interests and users’ fundamental rights.
reCreating Europe is an H2020 project funded by the European Commission and led by Caterina Sganga. It is conducted by a consortium featuring highly renowned research centers (Scuola Sant’Anna, IViR University of Amsterdam, CREATe University of Glasgow, Maynooth University, LIBER – European Association of Research Libraries, HIIG – Von Humboldt Center for Internet and Society Berlin, University of Copenhagen, University of Trento, University of Tartu, University of Szeged).
The project looks at the impact of technologies on cultural practices and the production and use of intellectual property, and at the challenges faced by policy makers in creating an effective system of sustainable norms for digital copyright. With its multi-disciplinary innovative approach, bringing together researchers, practitioners and stakeholders, and joining different methodologies within the framework of participatory research strategies, reCreating Europe aims at delivering ground-breaking contributions towards a clear understanding of what makes a regulatory framework that promotes a diverse production of cultural and creative goods and services, and optimizes inclusive access and consumption.
The project explores normative developments in the relationship between human rights and armed conflict and disaster situations, mainly through research and teaching activities.
The project’s main objective is to examine how Legal Preparedness can enhance policies and activities to prevent and address public health crises. It is guided by the intention to support pursuing the health-related goals stemming from Next Generation EU (e.g., the EU4Health program) and the Italian PNRR (Mission 6 ‘Health’). The project adheres to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG 3 on health and wellbeing, SDG 16 on inclusive institutions).
The project objective is to experiment work-placement processes for people with physical and mental disabilities. The role of the Sant’Anna School Unit is to support and monitor – also through comparison with national and international experiences – the use of the ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) for the assessment of individuals and companies involved in the project.
The project is premised on the assumption that the current doctrinal view of law as a system-related concept fails to describe the overwhelming interweaving among different legalities sourced by state, regional, or global orders and regimes. It envisages Inter-legality as a state of fact, calling upon interpreters and judges to work on a new fabric of legal problems. A number of leading scholars, from Private Law to Constitutional and International Law gathered in a three-year funded project, that led to the publication of a Cambridge University Press book titled “The Challenge of Inter-Legality” (2019), edited by Jan Klabbers and Gianluigi Palombella, in collaboration with renowned researchers from several countries.
The research aims at discovering and explaining those material and legal interconnections that make environmental issues an extraordinary case in point of the new frontiers of law in the XXI century. Closely related to climate change and the moral and legal issues of intergenerational justice, the analysis of environmental regulation across borders and the role of Courts and litigation offers a unique opportunity both to tackle the dangerous trends of the environmental future and to revise legal arrangements as a complex compact of diverse and interrelated regimes.
A legal philosophical approach to the question of rights between the global and the national dimensions. What makes human rights a credible normative obligation? What are the relations between the rights enshrined in regional or supranational conventions and domestic Constitutions? What is the interplay between democratic rule and individual rights?
These are the main questions in an ‘age of rights’ when sovereignty barriers are fading while States’ action remains the most appropriate premise for rights protection.
The research inquiries upon the concept’s theoretical and historical meaning and significance, its diverse incarnations, its change in time, and institutional variation. The rule of law is assessed as a central notion to regional, universal, and national charters, and in relation to domestic and international contexts. Consideration is made of a number of border-line domains, especially among European Member States, but also elsewhere, displaying an alleged crisis of such a canon of legal civilization and of the features of its socio-political circumstances.
