The research has as its objective the theme of the relationships between trust and law in the IT Society, and it articulates into five areas and trough thirteen research lines:
(A) IN THE LEGAL THEORY AREA: (i) Conceptual research, to develop a unitary concept of trust, to be used in the legal and legal philosophical investigations; (ii) Logical research, to obtain a precise logical characterisation of the results of the conceptual research; (iii) Functional research, to develop a theory of the relationships between trust and the law; (iv) Legal-institutional research, to identify the presuppositions of a well-grounded trust in the institutions.
(B) IN THE ECONOMIC AREA: (v) Research of on-line trust, to study the trust of the consumer towards the web site of the distribution company; (vi) Research of off-line trust, to evaluate the trust of the consumer towards specific sale points and the relative contact personnel.
(C) IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AREA: (vii) to propose a general cognitive model of trust; (viii) Psychological-legal research, to identify the psychological links between trust and law; (ix) Psychological-IT research, to set the conditions for the reliance in the artefact and the machine, trust in the interaction and cooperation “mediated” through computer and network, and the balance between control and intervention.
(D) IN THE LEGAL AREA: (x) Legal research, to compose into a unitary framework the institutes and the forms in which the legal protection of trust is achieved, both in private and public law, and to determine the legal-economic conditions needed for the contracting party, especially the consumer, can trust in the conclusion of a “good contract” and in the effective guarantee of its rights; (xi) Legal-IT research, to study the ways in which the law contributes to trust in the technological infrastructures and in the interactions that take place within them, with a specific attention for the on-line identification of subjects, the evaluation of their reliability, the data protection, security, commercial transactions, the resolution of disputes, software agents, the access to source code. This will permit to suggest specific combinations of legal, technological, institutional and organisational measures, which allow for the best possible development of on-line economy and communication, through the interaction between the law and the mechanisms for the creation and guarantee of trust.
(E) IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AREA: (xii) System research, to reinterpret the legal notion of trust in computer science and engineering terms, in order to translate the legal and social requirements in models and abstractions for the planning of distributed systems; (xiii) Applicative research, to point out the projecting requirements and methodologies able to ensure that the user or the counterpart of a software system can trust its functioning, in the search, and in the negotiation and data mining on line. As results of the research, scientific papers will be produced for each of the proposed research areas; as well as collections of laws, jurisprudence and doctrine that will be organised into an online available database; on-line publication of a community-site; realisation of prototypes of software architectures and applications; drawing of guide-lines and of a model of “good contract”.
