Digital innovation is transforming our societies. It redefines transactions, consumption, value production, communication, governance, and legal processes. At ACT, we aim to explore the opportunities and challenges digital technologies provide in reshaping private law and private legal relationships, as well as their role in enhancing access to justice and effective remedies. As these technologies advance, they pose a challenge to traditional concepts in private law, and thus have an impact on all areas of private law, ranging from contract and consumer law to company law, labour law, family law, and civil procedure. We aim to explore the intersection of technology and private law, mainly focusing on the protection of fundamental rights and maintaining public values in an increasingly digital landscape.

Through interdisciplinary research, we tackle pressing issues like ensuring digital fairness in private relationships and dispute resolution systems, amidst digitalisation's promises of efficiency and accessibility. Our focus is on the power dynamics, inequalities and conflicting interests between different actors in the data-economy. We investigate, in particular, how private law-making, adjudication and remedies contribute to shaping legal norms, rights, and practices in the digital context. This connects to other focus areas within ACT, such as ‘Just Labour Relations’ and ‘Private Law and Sustainability’.

Research questions include how collective private litigation shapes data protection and privacy law, allowing effective judicial protection and counter-balancing digital corporations’ economic and normative powers; how the platform economy aggravates power imbalances reflected in contractual rights and liabilities; and what people-centered approaches to digital justice can contribute in matters of debt collection and divorce.