Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
The disruptive nature of commercial drone technology presents transformational benefits and serious risks to the internal market’s safety, privacy, and sustainability. The accelerated rate of digitalisation; innovations in drone performance; and increasing expansion of technological consciousness, makes drones a problematic target for liability and regulation. In the European Union (EU), harmonised drone regulations and private law principles are evolving a transnational response to the serious risks posed by drones. Generally, EU private law rules on tort, private international law, and fundamental rights are applicable to drone-related violations. Specifically, EU Common Rules in the Field of Civil Aviation, Unmanned Aircraft Systems Regulation and Rules for the Operation of Unmanned Aircraft are evolving a risk-based approach to limit and mitigate drone risks. Notwithstanding these complementary regulatory interventions, non-compliance remains a practical option. Concurrently, literature reveals non-normative rules of technology management being presented as sophisticated tools to limit, mitigate or entirely prevent severe threats from disruptive technologies. Non-normative rules are considered sophisticated because they are able to effectively balance liability and regulation by steering innovation towards ‘precluding the practical option of non-compliance’. Therefore, this thesis evaluates whether the rules that currently apply to commercial drones in the EU are sufficiently sophisticated in their regulatory approach to incorporate insights from non-normative technology management. The evaluation extrapolates a legal typology for the regulatory and liability regime applicable to commercial drones in the EU and assesses the impact of these regimes on value chain actors. Finally, the thesis concludes that the EU harmonised rules applicable to commercial drones are evolving but not yet sufficiently sophisticated in their regulatory approach because they rarely incorporate insights from non-normative technology management.

Okuboyejo, Saheed, Drone Law 2.0: The Evolving Legal Typology for Commercial Drones in European Private Law (January 7, 2022).

First posted 2022-03-10 15:00:58