Welcome to the latest issue of the ELJT, an issue which – as editor – I find particularly pleasing. When we agreed to undertake the transition of JILT to EJLT our aim was to reduce the ‘International’ elements and focus on the ‘European’. This, we felt, would be a useful step since so many of our fellow journals in the field of technology and law are working within an ‘international’ framework. This is certainly understandable since technology and law are international. However, we felt that there was also a need to produce a journal which would better tie together the community of European researchers and enable them to communicate about issues from a European perspective.
We have seen the success of this approach as the journal has developed over the past two or three years – a particularly European flavour to the origin of our authors (Basu excepted) and to the emphasis of the papers. This flavour is certainly obvious in this issue with papers from authors with very different backgrounds and jurisdictions looking to: the nature of privacy and its technical and social contexts (Koops and Sluijs, Basu, Martin and de Andrade, Borghi, Montagnani, Maggiolino and Nuccio); the problem of data protection in a world which has moved on from the 1970s and its original conception of what was the ‘problem of protection of data’ (Derclaye, Rantou); cloud computing where the location of data is hidden from the user (De Filippi and McCarthy, De Filippi and Belli, Mantelero); and the problematic of contract in a digital consumer environment (Gupta).
Also, as an editor with a background – many years ago – in technical issues of law and technology, I am particularly keen to see that we have a paper by Suquet looking to the development of tools for users which utilise technology to try to overcome the very real problems non-lawyers have in trying to handle the procedural complexities of resolving disputes. I hope the EJLT will be able to continue to publish papers of this kind in future – there are certainly many European funded projects working in the these fields whose outputs are never seen by legal audiences.
Philip Leith
Editor