Network responsibility

• Department of Law

This session features a discussion with Rónán Condon (DCU) on his monograph.

Network Responsibility: European Private Law and the Society of Networks reconstructs the interaction between modernity’s societal knowledge base and tort law. The basic argument is that this interaction is dynamic and contingent, and that tort law has developed an internal representation of its environment in the form of normative models of liability: these are individual responsibility and organisational liability respectively. In the early 21st century, the third modernity is a risk and networked society - but tort law and theory has no distinct and explicit model of network responsibility.

This book elaborates a third model of liability - namely network liability, which is constructed 'bottom up' from European Union law, and applied to governance by networks. When taken together, individual responsibility, organisational liability, and network liability, a new concept of, and framework for, tortious liability is developed, namely network responsibility.

Rónán Condon is an Assistant Professor in Law at DCU. He researches in the fields of private law, European law, and transnational legal theory. He is particularly interested in tort law and theory, and systems’ theory approaches to law. His first monograph, Network Responsibility: European Tort Law and the Society of Networks (Cambridge University Press in 2022) examines these themes.