Abstract
Recent technological advances in autonomous vehicles have brought their introduction to commercial markets into the near future. However, before they hit the sales lots, various governments and inter-governmental governing structures have taken interest in laying down a regulatory framework prior to their introduction into the markets. One regulatory institution looking at this issue is the European Union. In a 2016 report, by the Policy Department of the European Parliament, it was noted that there is a lack of harmonization in liability rules within the European Union. This problem was also addressed in a press release in 2017. The goal of this essay is to provide a sketch of the problems related to liability and its legal framework as found within the European Union and to examine one solution (among others) currently under examination by officials in the EU, that is the possibility of legal personhood for autonomous vehicles. I will first concur the current regulatory field is lacking, and then contrast the advantages and disadvantages of such a scheme. To do this, I will first provide a brief overview of the liability regimes in the European Union. Secondly, I will explore the sort of legal personhood and offer a critique of a current EU document concerning this issue. Finally, I will pose some difficulties that sort of legal personhood has when placed into the regulatory schemes.
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Notes
- 1.
Or perhaps international organization, though it seems to have more legislative power than typical international organizations.
- 2.
Or some describe it as having shared or pooled sovereignty.
- 3.
England Ireland, Malta, Cyprus.
- 4.
France, Germany, Spain etc.
- 5.
Here the national types represent three “families” of legal systems.
- 6.
While incorporated into European Union law with the Treaty of Lisbon, it is important to note that it is a legal document of the Council of Europe which is broader than the European Union.
- 7.
That is to say negligence is not a factor in the establishment of a tort.
- 8.
To see the difference, van Damn notes that in the French system the injured party is at fault if they, for example were trying to commit suicide. Whereas in the English system, the injured party often needs to establish the driver’s negligence [1, p. 409].
- 9.
For example there is popular disdain for the notion of corporate personhood recently brought to the forefront of our attention with cases like the United States’ Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC.
- 10.
One man sustains many persons.
- 11.
“A person is an individuated substance of a rational nature.” I think that it is important to mention here that this definition was designed specifically to account for non-human entities, viz. God and angels, in addition to humans entities [7]. Further justification of this definition would require realistic metaphysics, which is far outside of the scope of this essay and so will not be addressed.
- 12.
cf. Les Six Livres de la République.
- 13.
Further examples of this can be found in the European Court of Human Rights also implicitly maintains this distinction cf. S&P v Poland or in some cases humans who are brain dead and artificially maintained on life support [12, p. 148].
- 14.
This is opposed to a will theory of rights, which presupposed that the person is able to make claims upon other persons.
- 15.
As an aside, it would arguably fulfill the requirement of articles 1 and 8 of the Vienna Convention of the Rules of Traffic that all moving vehicles on roads must have a driver operating them.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Science Centre of Poland (BEETHOVEN, UMO-2014/15/G/HS1/04514).
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Musielewicz, M.P. (2019). Who Should You Sue When No-One Is Behind the Wheel? Difficulties in Establishing New Norms for Autonomous Vehicles in the European Union. In: Aldinhas Ferreira, M., Silva Sequeira, J., Singh Virk, G., Tokhi, M., E. Kadar, E. (eds) Robotics and Well-Being. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12524-0_7
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