The EU has built an innovative legal framework for the digital environment that leads to a ius civilis digitalis, a law for the digital society via the regulation of private relationships. The new digital legal framework exceeds sectorial regulation in its scope, aims and tools. The digital laws aim at addressing concerns that were traditionally the domain of public law such as the protection of fundamental rights, democracy, and mental health to mention some. However, unlike constitutional law, regulation does not only signal states but also companies (and among them, especially big tech) as the ones creating risks and bearing responsibility for preventing them in order to achieve the said goals.

Legislation acknowledges the preponderance of private relationships in the construction of the digital space. It is, thus, not surprising that the regulation of the digital society comes through market regulation and private law rules. The new digital laws have a clear goal of market regulation, not only via the Digital Markets Act, but also through the other digital legal instruments (ex. DSA, DGA, DA, AI Act, not to forget the GDPR), which are recurrently justified in Art 114 TFEU (alone or in addition to it). Among many innovations, three stand out. First, the incorporation of non-economic aims, which instrumentalises market regulation for the protection of constitutional rights. Second, the partition and sub-categorisation of the supply (business) side of the market, with the expansion of the logic of the weaker party protection to reach small and medium-sized businesses. Third, the abandonment of the commercial or non-commercial purpose of transactions as determinants in the application of protection. That enlargement derives from the societal aspirations of the regulations and the resurgence of the power imbalance language.

On a more granular level, the building of the digital society through market regulation resorts to transactional private rules. However, by incorporating non-economic interests and redefining the parties of the transactional relationship, the new digital laws deviate from the bits and pieces of EU private law. The digital laws – the EU regulations – cannot be treated as a sectorial regulation anymore nor can private (or is it again civil?) law be directly ‘top-upped’ with EU digital law.

The purpose of the Workshop is to put the interaction between EU digital regulations and the EU private law acquis into the limelight, thereby focusing on the analysis de lege lata, addressing the impact of the EU digital legal framework on EU and national private (civil) law.

The two-day Workshop will take place in a face-to-face format at IE University, Segovia campus, Spain, with the following agenda: