Digital New Deal: The Quest for a Natural Law in a Digital Society

Digital New Deal analyses the origins of law and its relationship to language and economics and identifies 12 symptoms that point to an authoritarian involution of our democracies.

It refuses to indulge in pro-forma techno-optimism. Neither does it pessimistically predict inescapable doom. A bright future is still possible, if we correctly understand the digital equivalents of categories such as identity, persona, home, document, signature, freedom and the close relationship between our fundamental rights and their digital equivalents.

Riccardo Genghini’s research on a natural law for a digital society has been influenced in particular by Galgano, Popper, Sebeok, Rawls, Ong, Irti, Searle and Ferraris. As professor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milano, his lessons (2007- 2017) on commercial law focussed on comparing the law merchant of the Middle Ages with the commercial practices of IT companies as Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

First with CEN, now with ETSI, he steers the European standardisation on PKI and trust services since 1999.